Reports & Papers

Kyriakos Mitsotakis (Harvard BA ’89), president of the Greek opposition party Nea Dimokratia (New Democracy,) laid out his vision for a tough but achievable strategy to revitalize the Greek economy and strengthen the nation’s ties to the European Union in an October 13 seminar.

An article from former Kuwait Foundation Visiting Scholar Robert Springborg that served as an overview and introduction for his fall 2016 study group Globalization and its Discontents in the Middle East and North Africa. The article was published in the summer 2016 issue of Middle East Policy.

This paper distills core lessons about how researchers (scientists, engineers, planners, etc.) interested in promoting sustainable development can increase the likelihood of producing usable knowledge. We draw the lessons from both practical experience in diverse contexts around the world, and from scholarly advances in understanding the relationships between science and society.

During the spring 2015 semester, Professor Michael C. Hudson assembled eight leading Middle East scholars under the auspices of the Middle East Initiative at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs to participate in a study group titled Rethinking the Arab State: the Collapse of Legitimacy in Arab Politics. Over the course of the semester these experts used a variety of interdisciplinary approaches to  analyze the crisis of legitimacy of the Arab state in the wake of the 2011 uprisings.

How and to what degree digital technologies are transforming politics was the unifying theme of a discussion by Tony Saich, Tarek Masoud, and Archon Fung at their Harvard Kennedy School IDEASpHERE session “A Revolution in Politics? Social Media in China, Egypt, and the U.S.”

When Olafur Eliasson and Frederik Ottesen first developed Little Sun – a small solar-powered lamp costing $5 – they had no idea that in addition to providing light, their product also had the potential to raise student performance levels 40 percent by allowing students to study longer and later into the night. Speaking at Harvard Kennedy School’s “IDEASpHERE,” Calestous Juma, the Belfer Center’s director of the Science, Technology, and Globalization Project, cited Little Sun as an example of a small technological advancement that has had an outsized impact on social welfare.

As Africa's position in the world continues to grow and evolve in 2014, the Brookings Africa Growth Initiative continues its tradition of asking its experts and colleagues to identify what they consider to be the key issues for Africa in the coming year.