This is the third episode of our audio interview series. In this episode, Kai speaks to former UN General Secretary Ban Ki-moon.  Mr. Ban speaks on his take on climate adaptation, Paris Agreement, the plight of Myanmar, and the human right abuses in North Korea as well as his personal experience working as a civil servant during […]

HKS has become home to most of us, but let us not forget our actual families In early October, I received a text from my mom in Thailand: “Ong won’t be with us much longer.” Ong was my cousin. She was in her early-40s, a breast-cancer survivor. The cancer was back and had spread through […]

Mexico’s Andres Manuel López Obrador was a populist candidate. Will he become a populist president?

A team of law students from the Singapore Management University’s School of Law propose enacting laws in Singapore that mandate the disclosure of radicalised individuals to the authorities, given the increased threat of terrorism posed by self-radicalised individuals, whilst taking into account legal and social policy considerations.

BY MICHAEL AUSLEN Indiana is hardly the poster child for voting rights. In 2005, it became the first state in the country to pass a strict photo identification (ID) requirement for voting—a measure criticized as an unfair barrier to participation for poor and minority communities.[1] When the US Supreme Court refused to throw out the […]

BY KOREY TE HIRA Every two years, thousands of Americans run for office promising to “clean up Washington” and usher in a new kind of politics.  Why then do we see these same promises being made every election cycle? Looking to nature, we find the answer. Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution through natural selection describes […]

BY DINA MONTEMARANO If you’ve been following the US midterm elections, you’ve likely heard the media buzz about how many women are running for elected office this year. They’re calling it “The Year of the Woman.” A record number of female candidates are running for office. 256 women won House and Senate primaries. Sixteen are […]

BY ELLY ROSTOUM For much of the twenty-first century, Chinese foreign direct investment (FDI) has rapidly expanded, stretching Beijing’s influence across the globe. The influx of Chinese money around the world has imbued many countries with closer relations with Beijing, to the concern of the United States. Investment from both Beijing and Washington is not […]

Continuing with our audio interview series, Kai Dittmann interviewed Sigmar Gabriel who is a member of the German Bundestag. Currently, he serves as a John F. Kennedy Memorial Policy Fellow at CES. In this short interview, he talks about the German state election and Angela Merkel’s potential step down from her party. Gabriel has held several leading posts […]

BY TOBY VOGHT The British barrister Sir William Gallow famously coined the phrase “innocent until proven guilty” in the early nineteenth century.  The presumption of innocence quickly hopped the Atlantic and has been critical to the American pursuit of a more perfect judiciary. But the highly contentious nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh generated debate about […]

Regardless of ethnicity, religion, or sex, homelessness is a persistent issue. The gloomy and humiliating truth for our federal government is that some reports estimate there are five vacant properties for every homeless person. Whether it be the Hoovervilles from the 1930s, Khayelitsha slums in Cape Town, South Africa, or the Dharavi shanty towns in […]

A startup boom is contributing to economic growth in India. But the government doesn’t have a full picture of the impact of entrepreneurship on job creation. More detailed data collection would enable the government to better understand and support startups, writes Aditi Banerjee.