Democracy

BY AROHI SHARMA At 5:52 PM Eastern Time on Thursday, November 3, I put down the phone with the Los Angeles County Registrar’s Office, devastated. After spending more than forty minutes waiting for someone to answer my call, I was told that the registrar’s office had not received my vote-by-mail application. I mailed my application […]

BY YAEL STERN AND GAL LIN “Will you answer a survey we are conducting to understand people’s values?” the surveyor asked the young Iranian man on the other end of the phone line. “Sure,” he answered. The young man answered the surveyor’s questions pleasantly and openly, even joking occasionally. They reached question twenty: How similar […]

Abstract This article advocates for the daily reaffirmation of democracy and protection of human rights in Latin America by politicians and civil society alike. Through the remembrance of the Chilean transition to democracy, the article highlights the tremendous costs that Chileans assumed to move Chile towards a consolidated democracy and the many years it has […]

  BY CHANTE LANTOS-SWETT On Monday, March 7, at 11:30 a.m., more than 3,000 students from schools all across the Boston Public School District stood up from their desks and joined their peers in front of the State House to protest a proposed $50 million cut to the 2016-2017 school year budget. Armed with protest […]

BY JASMINE CHIA, YAN MIN AUNG, AND KARENG BRANG SHAWNG Myanmar has suffered one of the world’s longest running civil wars, one rooted in ethnic conflict. The fighting continues to the present day: the Arakan Army is still launching insurgent attacks in Rakhine state, a state on Myanmar’s western coast, and the Kachin Independence Army, […]

In Fall 2015, JMEPP Co-Editor-in-Chief Kevin Moss interviewed Amb. Francis Riccardione, the former U.S. Ambassador to Turkey and Atlantic Council Vice President and Director of the Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East. Below is an excerpt from the interview on the role of Turkey in serving as a model for democracy in the region. For the full interview, please listen […]

Commentary All the heads of state or government who participated in the last three Summits of the Americas were democratically elected. This situation was unprecedented in the hemisphere; the past twenty-five years have become the most prolonged period of democracy in the Western hemisphere since independence. Democracy begins with free and fair elections. However, there […]

Abstract Democracy is deepening across much of Latin America, especially in Mexico and Brazil, the two major countries. In a region once plagued by bloody coups and military interventionism, free and fair elections are now the norm. Significant economic and social advances, including a sharp decline in poverty levels and even in inequality in some […]

Commentary When my administration began in 2002, many analysts said that Colombia was a failed state. Every year, the country faced thirty-thousand homicides and almost three-thousand kidnappings, and more than three-hundred municipalities lacked the presence of their mayors due threats made against their lives. Investment rates were low, unemployment was climbing, and poverty levels were […]

BY CLAIRE LEHMANN The political divide between conservatives and liberals is growing increasingly bitter. Each side thinks that the other is evil. At the same time, a new currency is emerging within the eco-chambers of social media. It is the currency of outrage, and it is eroding our ability to listen to one another. Those […]

Note: This post assesses President Obama’s State of the Union Address in 4 policy ares: K-12 Education, Higher Education, LGBTQ and Military Affairs. It is a follow up to KSR’s SOTU coverage here and here. POLICY AREA: K-12 EDUCATION BY ADRIENNE MURPHY As an education reform enthusiast, I was excited to hear the President kick […]

A Note of Explanation: For the first time, the Kennedy School Review has tapped into the policy expertise of students across the Harvard Kennedy School of Government to collect their perspectives on President Obama’s 2014 State of the Union Address.  For two days, HKS students are providing their analysis on a broad range of policy […]