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BY ANSHUL PACHOURI The year 2016 marks an important milestone in India’s innovation story. First, India’s rank in the global innovation index improved quite significantly from 81st position in 2015 to 66th position in 2016. Second, the country also launched its flagship program Atal Innovation Mission (AIM) to advance its national innovation ecosystem under the […]

BY NIKOLAS OTT AND HUGO ZYLBERBERG Practical yet effective digital data regulations are an enormous policy challenge. Both in the United States and in Europe, businesses, privacy-advocacy groups, and government all have competing interests, and they are struggling to find a workable solution. Meanwhile, machines are tracking their users in an ever-increasing number of ways. […]

By David Duesing, MPP 2018 On Monday, September 12, the JFK Jr. Forum received the Academy Award-winning director, screenwriter and producer Oliver Stone in a conversation moderated by a man similarly distinguished within his field, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author Ron Suskind. Stone, the screenplay writer of works such as Scarface and director of myriad […]

In this personal essay, Janiece Mackey discusses how she navigated the complexities of race within the educational context. Now, having progressed from student to teacher, she promotes civic engagement and intersectional empowerment among underserved youth. Janiece’s story  serves as a precursory example of the Black student and educator experience, discussed in depth in our 2016 feature of “The Politics of […]

BY JOE LEE For decades, Times Square was severely congested, prone to pedestrian accidents, and lacking spaces to rest. In 2008, New York City sought to tackle these problems by mapping the diversity and number of human activities that occurred there. It traced walking patterns to identify “pedestrians’ desire lines” in relation to sidewalks and […]

Five years ago, Tunisians – after weeks of anti-government protests following the self-immolation of fruit vendor Mohamed Bouazizi – succeeded in ousting dictator Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali. In the months that followed, similar unrest would spread across much of the Arab world, in what came to be known as the “Arab Spring.” Since then, Tunisia […]

By Wei Luo, MPP 2017 On Saturday September 10, students and staff joined with community partners for HKS Serves, the Kennedy School’s signature day of service. The Citizen followed a group of volunteers to the nearby Cambridge Community Center, a non-profit providing after school and summer youth programming. Valentino Robinson, the Center’s Community Affairs Director, […]

BY LAUREN VIEHBACHER In the span of three days this past March, bombs ripped through daily life in Istanbul and Brussels. Police flooded Istiklal Street in Istanbul, a famous pedestrian stretch usually humming with shoppers. Helicopters circled overhead, citizens scattered in terror, and yellow tape fluttered across the street. Five people were killed and close […]

Eviatar Matania, the head of Israel’s National Cyber Bureau, spoke at Harvard’s Belfer Center on the unique properties of the cyber domain, and how governments can bolster their defenses in cyberspace. Cyberattacks are nothing new. But they are becoming more sophisticated, and more frequent. This year alone, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians were left in […]

BY BENJAMIN GOH In 2015, Business Insider magazine predicted ten million self-driving vehicles will be on US roads in the next five years.[i] While many people are eagerly awaiting the ability to read, eat, or check email as their cars themselves do the driving, this raises a whole host of critical questions. Who is at fault if […]

BY EDWARD CUIPA On 16 December 2015, the US Federal Reserve announced the first increase in the federal funds rate in almost a decade, hiking the target benchmark rate range by 0.25 percentage points to 0.25–0.50 percentage points.[i] The move impacts economic growth because the federal funds rate sets the rate at which banks can […]

BY MALINI BOSE At the World Bank Spring Meetings this year, Raghuram Rajan, the head of India’s central bank christened India a “one-eyed king in the land of the blind” when asked to comment on the rapidly-growing Indian economy in the context of flagging global growth. The country’s growth-focused government did not approve—Finance Minister Arun […]