Bernd Reiter is a political scientist and professor at Texas Tech University. He formerly served as the Director of the Institute for The Study of Latin American and the Caribbean (ISLAC) and professor of political science for the School of Interdisciplinary Global Studies at the University of South Florida. His research focuses on democracy, race and decolonization. Reiter is a decolonization scholar and has collaborated with such authors as Arturo Escobar (anthropologist), Sandra Harding, Raewyn Connell, Catherine Walsh, Gustavo Esteva, Walter Mignolo, and Aram Ziai. He has also made contributions to Critical Whiteness Studies. In 2017, he gave a TEDx talk on The Crisis of Liberal Democracy and the Path Ahead .