Democracy and Institutions

Leadership is replacing Africa rising as the new meme for Africa.  Fellowships, conferences and think tanks are all geared at building a new generation of African leaders armed with smartphones and tablets.   By simple definition, a leader directs or guides a group of people for a certain purpose. However, the contemporary leader is the thought […]

BY RYAN COHEN Playing on the fears that President Obama decried in his public address earlier this month, Donald Trump proposed that the United States bar Muslims from entry, including re-entry of Muslim U.S. citizens traveling abroad. It’s easy to deride this proposal as intolerant, unconstitutional, and abhorrent, as many have done. What’s more difficult—and […]

Post-GE2015, talk has primarily focused on the euphoric victory of the People’s Action Party (PAP) and analysis of its success factors. Not much analysis, however, has been published from the voter perspective. A common dilemma for the typical voter is having to choose between their needs and their wants: the candidate most able to serve […]

    As public awareness has risen about the dismal state of sexual assault prevention and response on college campuses, American universities have scrambled to improve their policies and programming. As administrators at a university in Iraqi Kurdistan with an American-style educational system, we decided to be proactive and create a sexual misconduct policy laying […]

This morning at Harvard Law School we woke up to a hate crime. The hallways of Harvard Law School are lined with portraits of every tenured professor in the history of the university. As a first-year law student, the first time that I walked down those hallways I was painfully aware of the white men […]

BY ANDREA BLINKHORN AND DANIEL TOSTADO Washington, D.C. – As the asylum interview dragged into its second hour, Sandrine became very sleepy. In my office in D.C. sat two sisters, Sandrine and Camille, ages 15 and 17. During political unrest, government militias killed their parents, and so over the course of 18 months, they fled […]

Chang-rae Lee is the author of Native Speaker, winner of the Hemingway Foundation/PEN/Hemingway Award for first fiction; A Gesture Life; Aloft; and The Surrendered, winner of the Dayton Peace Prize and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Selected by the New Yorker as one of the “20 Writers for the 21st Century,” Lee is professor […]

This is an open letter signed by French, Francophone and Francophile members of the Harvard community. This page will be updated with more signatures: if you’d like to add your name to the list, please contact Hugo Zylberberg. The dust of the explosions has hardly settled in Paris and it is still hard to put […]

Seeking the highest office in the land, then-governor Ronald Reagan launched his candidacy for the Presidency by declaring that the United States of America “will become that shining city on a hill”, by “uphold(ing) the principles of self-reliance, self-discipline, morality and, above all, responsible liberty.” Earlier this year Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong spoke of […]

BY BENJAMIN GILLIES It is not often Canadian federal politics makes international headlines, but youthful and charismatic Liberal party leader Justin Trudeau caused a minor global stir last week when he ousted Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s governing Conservatives. Likely, however, nobody was more surprised to wake up last Tuesday morning to a Liberal majority government […]

BY LAUREN LEATHERBY Last night, GOP presidential candidates took to the stage for the third Republican presidential debate of the 2016 election season. This debate was the first Republican debate since the Democratic candidates made their first appearance on the debate stage just over two weeks ago, on Oct. 13. Moderators and candidates in both […]

BY LUCY BOYD “That’s how we’ve been crafting our questions, so that Senator X will respond to what Governor Y said about him or a policy he proposed and try to encourage them to actually debate Lincoln-Douglas style as much as possible.” – Jake Tapper, moderator, before second GOP debate on September 16, 2015. The […]