Kennedy School Review

BY DAVE COUGHRAN  On 20 October 2011, Mahmoud Jibril, the interim Prime Minister of the Libyan National Transitional Council, publicly announced the death of former Libyan dictator Muammar el-Qaddafi. Qaddafi’s overthrow was the culmination of months of intense effort from Libyan revolutionary militias, the United States, and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The victory […]

BY ETHAN WAGNER “We must make our choice,” warned the American jurist Louis Brandeis nearly a century ago, writing on the state of American society. “We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few—but we can’t have both.”[i] A few years later, as Brandeis joined the U.S. Supreme […]

BY ANYA MALKOV In May 2012, eleven students of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University visited El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, as part of a Leadership Service Seminar program sponsored by the Center for Public Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School and the offices of the Academic Dean and […]

BY LAUREN PAER In September 2012, the U.S. Federal Reserve announced the third round of quantitative easing (QE3) since the onset of the financial crisis. Quantitative easing refers to the Federal Reserve’s policy of digitally printing dollars to buy long-term bonds and mortgage-backed securities (MBS) to drive interest rates down. In contrast to previous rounds […]

BY VIVEK CHILUKURI When President Obama announced an ambitious plan to reduce gun violence, he surrounded himself with children. By invoking their safety as his chief aim, the president imbued his efforts with our deeply felt and universal impulse to protect the young. When it comes to protecting their futures, however, Washington has shown no […]

BY MARK DIAZ TRUMAN I heard about the Connecticut shooting early in the day, but the full effect of it didn’t hit me until I got home late on Friday night. It was too much to process, too close to the Oregon shooting on Tuesday that left two dead and one wounded at a Happy […]

BY ALISON LAPORTE-OSHIRO How the Obama Administration handled the Bengazi attack in September—and whether it provided sufficient security—were fiercely debated issues during the Presidential election. Three months later, the election is over but the controversy smolders on. The current target is U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice, who is believed to be one […]

BY SHLOKA NATH Driving from Rae Bareli to Amethi, two districts in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh (UP), you will be hard pressed to find evidence of India’s strident economic progress. Everywhere you turn, roads are terrible, electricity is sparse and poverty and destitution run deep. With more than 200 million people, UP […]

BY ALEX REMINGTON In the English-speaking world, I have seen it written, the two most widely quoted sources are the King James Bible and the collected works of William Shakespeare, two Elizabethan corpora that together helped crystallize English into its present form. In the past four hundred years, no other works have had anything close […]

BY AHMED MOOR It was “one of these compressed moments, where an entire story is told in a headline,” says Harvard Kennedy School Professor Richard Parker. “The story narrative is so simple—and so powerful—that there is no way that Romney can easily escape.” To hear more of Professor Parker’s discussion of Romney’s “47%” comment, listen […]

BY CASEY SCHUTTE The law does not trust them to vote. It forbids them from watching certain movies in the theater or signing up for a credit card on their own. Consuming alcohol is certainly off limits, as is smoking cigarettes. Society proscribes certain activities for these people because, the thinking goes, they lack the […]

BY SEAN KATES The millennium could have started better for Americans. We saw the nation voluntarily enter two wars costly in terms both monetary and human. An ineffective government response exacerbated one environmental disaster, while private cupidity and stupidity caused another. Promises of universal home ownership crashed down around us, aided by slick financial creations […]