In September 2015, a mob attacked and killed a 52-year-old Muslim man, Mohammad Akhlaq, pulling him out of his home in a village near Delhi, India, on suspicions of eating beef. Not only did Prime Minister Narendra Modi remain silent following the attack, but some politicians of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) defended the […]

Large investment projects are a source of economic and social development for countries. They increase the national income, are a source of employment, stimulate the local economies where they are located, and generate tax revenues for government. However, investment projects can also generate negative impacts on the environment, in the local communities, or in patrimonial […]

Congress is polarized. So polarized, in fact, that one would have to go all the way back to the Reconstruction era to find a similar level of discord. But perhaps more surprising is that while Congress has become more polarized, the American public has not: its dispersion of views has remained generally stable for decades. […]

A proposal to provide free public access to legal information through a federally managed web portal. You cannot Google the law—the United States has essentially privatized access to much of written law. This privatization has created an infamous industry that drives up legal costs and prevents many citizens from accessing important legal information. We need […]

How can Democratic campaigns get large numbers of their voters to mobilize their friends to vote? The short answer: no one knows. To date, the only definite insight is that peer-to-peer voter turnout does not scale through mobile phone apps. Despite numerous “relational organizing” technologies receiving millions in funding and mountains of the press in […]

In 1993, women represented only 1% of all UN uniformed personnel deployed in peacekeeping missions. In 2017, women peacekeepers remained at 4%, far from the UN target of 15%. The role of women in peacekeeping operations (PKOs)—not only as a matter of principle, but as a necessary condition for their success—has only become widely accepted […]

Alfonso Cuaron’s most recent film is named after one of Mexico City’s upper-class neighborhoods, Roma. For those who live abroad but call Mexico City home, watching the film is like taking a nostalgic trip to our past, uncovering buried memories. For me, it was a specific memory of when I lived in the neighborhood of […]

Bogota is 13 times denser than New York City.[1] Colombian cities are 100 percent denser than the global average and 126 percent denser than cities in Latin America.[2] Until now, the consensus has been that the largest determinants of density are population and income. An increase in population increases demand around an economic hub, increasing […]

A new administration is at the vanguard of African leadership, prioritizing national development in a new model of partnership and possibility Sierra Leone has adopted a new strategy that is reforming its troubled past, piece by piece. Less than a year into his term, President Julius Maada Bio is leading his country in a novel […]

The sexual harassment I experienced during my summer internship in Tunisia As first-year students around me at the Harvard Kennedy School lock down summer internships, I reflect on my own internship experience from last summer with mixed feelings. On my way to Tunisia from Boston last June, I had a one-day layover in Istanbul. I […]

Most statisticians will only ever light up the Twittersphere in their wildest dreams. But for census staff at the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), those dreams became a nightmarish reality as the country’s first digital census bombed spectacularly, earning its own hashtag, #censusfail. Every five years, Australians sit down on a designated ‘census night’ and […]

A Q&A with Esperanza Guevara of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights In March 2018, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, whose department administers the decennial United States census, announced he would include a question on the 2020 Census asking, for the first time since 1950: “Is this person a citizen of the United States?” The question […]