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By Ishani Mehta, MPP’14, News Editor Last month, I had the opportunity to attend an invigorating talk by Harvard alumnus Horacio Rodríguez Larreta who serves as the dynamic Chief of Cabinet in the Buenos Aires City Government in Argentina.  The talk, titled “The Challenge of Transforming Buenos Aires”, drew insights from Larreta’s public service career […]

Rami George Khouri is a Palestinian-Jordanian and U.S. citizen whose family resides in Beirut, Amman, and Nazareth. He is director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut. His journalistic work includes writing books and an internationally syndicated column, and he also serves as editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily […]

Abstract: The Arabian Gulf region has the most prodigious energy reserves in the world. However, the region’s massive industrialization and expanding demography are also increasing energy consumption at unsustainable rates, leading to natural gas deficits across the region. This article argues that the pressures of economic development and industrial diversification are steadily eroding the comparative […]

By The Citizen Staff Two explosions at the Boston Marathon finish line on Monday thrust the city into the international spotlight this week; as media outlets from around the world flooded in to report the story, dignitaries – including President Barack Obama – offered condolences, and a carjacking early Friday morning led to a day-long […]

By Nathan Finney and Billy Pope, MC/MPA’13 As my hands were burning from the hot dishwater and my eyes filled with tears listening to a nation’s leader console his people, I was also laughing out loud at a more base, yet more real form of healing. Over curt words of profanity and good-natured inter-service rivalry, […]

The development challenges for contemporary democratic states of Africa are enormous. This somewhat sweeping phrase takes for granted the question of whether those countries claiming to be democratic are so in organisation and practice. For instance, only Mauritius was categorised as full democracy out of 44 sub-Saharan African countries evaluated in Democracy Index, 2010; 8 […]

Though people tend to see themselves as objective interpreters of the world, they are often active self-deceivers. Self-deception is a psychological process whereby one selectively chooses knowledge that confirms a positive self bias. Affecting people on an individual and group level, self-deception can have destructive consequences. It is thus important to understand self-deception’s role in […]

Abstract: The Arab Spring provides a rare opportunity to examine the roles of natural resources and state structure in the face of popular discontent. While the Gulf monarchies have all weathered the events of 2011, the diverging fates of the two oil-producing republics in North Africa—Algeria and Libya—suggest that neither factor alone can account for […]

By The Citizen Staff Capping more than seven months of research, meetings and phone calls; the Kennedy School second year Masters of Public Policy (MPP) students turned in their culminating project last week. The Policy Analysis Exercise (more commonly known as the PAE) is an extensive research project for an organization or government agency that […]

Esraa Abdelfattah, already a leading activist prior to 2011, played a major role in the January 2011 Egyptian revolution. She has been a political activist since 2008, when she created the April 6 Strike Group on Facebook, which grew to 70,000 members and resulted in her arrest. She is currently vice-chairman of the Egyptian Democratic […]

Yoel Guzansky, the former Iran coordinator at Israel’s NationalSecurity Council, is a research fellow at the Institute for NationalSecurity Studies at Tel Aviv University and a doctoral candidate ininternational relations at Haifa University.     Benedetta Berti is a fellow at the Institute for National Security Studies, a lecturer at Tel Aviv University, a member […]

  Jon B. Alterman is director of the Middle East Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). Prior to joining CSIS in 2002, he served as a member of the policy planning staff at the U.S. Department of State and as a special assistant to the assistant secretary of state for Near […]