Abstract Democracy is deepening across much of Latin America, especially in Mexico and Brazil, the two major countries. In a region once plagued by bloody coups and military interventionism, free and fair elections are now the norm. Significant economic and social advances, including a sharp decline in poverty levels and even in inequality in some […]

Commentary When my administration began in 2002, many analysts said that Colombia was a failed state. Every year, the country faced thirty-thousand homicides and almost three-thousand kidnappings, and more than three-hundred municipalities lacked the presence of their mayors due threats made against their lives. Investment rates were low, unemployment was climbing, and poverty levels were […]

Commentary Mexico’s future is full of potential. The past decade brought important changes. A fortified democracy saw the first peaceful rotation of government in generations. Today, freedoms of press, assembly, and speech are hardly an issue of debate; indeed, Mexico’s civil society is thriving as never before. Business reforms liberated the private sector from its […]

APJ caught up with President John D. Mahama on the occasion of his speech at the Institute of Politics at the Harvard Kennedy School.  President Mahama discussed the leading causes behind Ghana’s economic challenges which, at their height early this year, saw inflation rates rise above 15 percent and a depreciation of nearly 40 percent […]

Introduction Using interviews with sexual minorities as well as discussions with community organizers and leaders, this article reports on human rights issues faced by sexual minorities in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania in key areas, including discrimination, harassment, physical safety, family relationships, access to health and education, and protection by authorities. Sexual minorities in Dar es […]

Abstract Starting in late 2011, “LGBT rights” became a prominent and contentious part of the international development agenda. While most of the resulting attention has been directed to questions of aid conditionality, this essay instead aims to preliminarily map the range of policies set out by twelve of the largest development agencies on “LGBT” or […]

After years of tensions over Iran’s nuclear program, the United States and Iran have held the highest-level talks since the 1979 Revolution to negotiate the status of Iran’s nuclear program and have set a November 24 deadline to come to a deal. The Harvard Journal of Middle Eastern Politics and Policy’s Lauren Leatherby asks Dr. […]

The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University hosted a talk by Harvard Kennedy School Professor Tarek Masoud on Monday, November 9. The lecture, entitled “When God Speaks, Does Anyone Listen?” was based on a study Dr. Masoud conducted on one of his recent trips to Egypt. Dr. Masoud began the presentation by […]

BY MITCHELL ALVA Will history judge the 2014 midterm elections a Congressional wave year? The election certainly felt like a repeat of 2006 and 2010. After all, in all three elections, the party of an unpopular sitting President suffered significant losses in both the House of Representatives and the Senate with one chamber of Congress […]

Tunisia’s parliamentary elections, held on October 26, resulted in Nidaa Tounes garnering 39.71% of the vote and Ennahda receiving 31.79%, robbing the Islamists of their leading seat. Nidaa Tounes’s victory has been widely hailed in the media as a victory of secularism over Islamism. This discourse fits neatly into Western conceptions of modernization and secularization […]

BY WILLIAM DENN At a friend’s wedding a couple weeks ago, I exchanged introductions with a woman seated next to me. Upon learning that I was an active duty soldier, she said, “Thank you for your service.” She was sincere, but awkwardly confessed that she didn’t quite know what to say when meeting soldiers who […]

“The Turtle’s Rage,” directed by Pary al-Qalqili, is a raw, intimate look into one man’s anguish over the loss of his homeland. That man is Pary’s exiled father, who recounts for his filmmaker daughter what it means to be Palestinian, to be in constant conflict with Israel, and what the realities of return look like […]