Kwan Jin Yao analyzes the perceived deficiencies in the government’s engagement with youth. In this piece, he provides an overview of the trends that have facilitated youth civic and political engagement in Singapore, and the ideological bases that underlie this government-ground divide. He ends off on a hopeful note — with concrete ways that this divide can be bridged.

COVID-19 has brought challenges to organizing large-scale events, not least diplomatic ones. In this article, Jina Lim explores the consequences of one such cancelled event through the ‘why’s and ‘how’s of organizing an alternative, and what it means for Singapore’s role in regional defence diplomacy.

(Anil with his father, many years ago) Photo Credit: Anil Hurkadli On November 4, 2008, I voted alongside my father for the first and last time. It was an unusually warm day in Minnesota, and we joined a growing line of voters waiting to cast their ballots at a small church. I was thrilled and […]

Photo Credit: Philip Jones Headed to the polls in Newport News, Virginia. VOTE!

For the past month, I’ve been doing two types of volunteering: (1) Deep canvassing through a national women-led organization, and (2) election protection hotline shifts. Deep canvassing has been focused on calling undecided, older women voters in the Midwest, sharing vulnerable stories, eliciting shared values, and slowly coming around to making the case for a […]

Photo Credit: Ana Larrea-Albert Here’s a picture of us voting as a family for the very first time!!! Our son Louie turned 18 in September and was able to cast his very first vote for president in this incredibly consequential election. We voted last Tuesday at the library in Wellington, Florida, and the process was […]

Photo Credit: Tiffany Ho I used to joke, nothing prepared me for my first ballot like those Scantrons in grade school. Since I came of age, I have voted absentee in my home state of California due to my itinerant lifestyle. When work called me semi-permanently to Virginia this month; however, I realized my vote […]

Photo Credit: Allison Agsten I grew up in a very rural area and often watched my parents fill in their absentee ballots at home since there were no polling places nearby. Though at this point I’ve lived in LA for more than half of my life, I still haven’t gotten over the thrill of actually […]

Journalists have increasingly blurred the lines between the influence they are accorded as trusted informers and the “influencer”-like power their professionally linked social media platforms provide them. As a digital organizer fighting to protect our democratic institutions on a daily basis, I’ve encountered this problem time and time again.   The Washington Post’s Dave Weigel recently tweeted […]

National polls ran by some of the most renowned national newspapers in México, show that the level of acceptance of the president Andrés Manuel López Obrador is one of the highest in the country’s history. Nevertheless, a highly polarized public opinion about federal government intervention is observable. Considering some research made by the author, it […]

Despite the U.S. being one of the world’s wealthiest countries, child poverty is a dire problem – and during COVID, it’s only getting worse. That’s why the Biden campaign recently took the bold step of proposing the most pro-child policy reform in recent American history. Even before COVID-19, child poverty was much higher in the […]

Contact tracing in the US is at a critical inflection point. In the early days when COVID-19 first arrived in the US, when federal resources should have been mobilized to bolster our defenses against the virus, the response to the emerging pandemic became a political fight, rather than a public health campaign. The Trump Administration’s […]