Advocacy and Social Movements

Interview with Jay (Jihad) Abdo. Photo credits to Fadia Afashe. On 24 October 2020 Syrian-American Hollywood actor Jay (Jihad) Abdo cast his vote for the first time ever in a presidential election. He and his wife Fadia Afashe, a lawyer and visual artist, were never allowed to participate in free elections before or even have […]

The morning of Saturday, April 3rd, reports of an alleged national security threat targeted at the reigning Jordanian monarch, King Abdullah II, by his younger half-brother, Prince Hamzah, were headlining news sources across the world. Recently, Prince Hamzah has been publicly critical of King Abdullah II’s rule during the COVID-19 public health crisis.  In a […]

Lubana Al Quntar is a rare talent that, if given the proper support, has the power to uplift her entire nation, putting Syria, and the Arab World, on the map of classical opera globally. Yet, in Assad’s Syria talents like hers are systematically eliminated.

The Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA) in Manhattan is known for its vast collections of contemporary art, not the workers who keep it running. However, as its galleries shut down, MoMA’s labor organizing has gone on display. Thanks to the advocacy of its five unions, when MoMA shut its doors during Covid-19, […]

All fifty states in the U.S and over thirty countries around the world have participated in the protests initiated by the murder of George Floyd, a Black man killed by a white police officer in Minneapolis. As coverage of the protests continued through the first week, the conversation unsurprisingly moved away from the police’s disproportionate […]

Former Minister Mauricio Cardenas responded to the questions formulated by LAPJ Editor-in-Chief Cesar Pabon on 25 January 2020. What follows is a lightly edited transcript. LAPJ: What are your views on the current state of the emerging protests that have spread across most Latin American countries? The protests exhibit a combination of both shared and […]

This piece was published in the 29th print volume of the Asian American Policy Review. For the first time in decades, the movement had dealt a concrete, visible blow to China…The Tibet movement’s grassroots muscle and ability to generate negative publicity for its foes, posed a real threat to these companies’ brand, and influenced their decision-making. […]

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 […]

As an Australian currently living in the US, it was Friday morning by the time I woke up to news of the attacks that had occurred in Christchurch, New Zealand two weeks ago. News from our region feels rare here, and the deep tragedy of the event so close to my home struck me. Since […]

In this week’s podcast, we discuss the attempted resignation of Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif and the growing protests in Algeria against President Bouteflika’s proposed fifth term. In Iran, Zarif announced his resignation in a February 25th Instagram post, but President Rouhani insists that Zarif keep his job after widespread support for the Foreign Minister’s […]

Behavioral science techniques that engage non-activists are the next frontier in voter turnout BY ROBERT REYNOLDS AND DEV CHANDRA A few days before last November’s midterm election, a Texan named Martina received a text message asking her to remind three friends to vote. Martina isn’t an activist. Rather, she was targeted precisely because predictive data […]

Raed Fares was killed on November 23rd, but his work as a citizen journalist and activist lives on in the people he taught and empowered. Contributing writer Oula Alrifai, a Damascus-native and activist herself, remembers Raed.