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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 […]

  Along the porous border between Syria and Turkey lies the notorious city of Gaziantep — a city making waves in the media as a regional capitol for spooks and spicy kebabs. Called “Antep” for short (formerly known as Ayintab, the sister city to Aleppo in Syria), Gaziantep is also — surprisingly for some — […]

BY TRACEY LAM AND JONATHAN HUI “If you say ‘Asian,’ what pops into your head? They think we’re all supposed to be doctors, you know? Or they think we come from a good, rich family. But we don’t.”[i] These words are from Pass or Fail in Cambodia Town, a documentary about the true stories of […]

Most Australians today accept that the mining boom of the mid-to late 2000s, which reshaped the country, is largely over. But an overlooked segment of history is that the end of the stunning run in bulk commodity prices came as a rapid and unexpected shock to most of the nation. Despite predictions of weaker Chinese […]

In the past two years, the pace of economic growth in Africa has been decelerating while the political space for democratic contestation has been shrinking. Combined, they can be considered to be major drivers behind the intensifying levels of social unrest throughout the continent. While weaker economic expansion can be principally attributed to global headwinds […]

BY PAUL-ADRIEN HYPPOLITE AND NINA ROUSSILLE The 12 July 2015 Euro Area summit ended with a last minute agreement that avoided an imminent Greek exit from the Eurozone (“Grexit”).[i] Even before engaging talks about the third bailout program in 2015, the Greek government had accepted several prior bailouts with accompanying conditions negotiated with their European […]