Governance

Juliette Kayyem argues that the Biden administration should lay out transparent plans to safeguard the electoral process no matter who is ultimately sworn in.

Juliette Kayyem argues that although the emergency social-safety provisions helped those most in need, the use of Title 42 was a brutal and unforgiving policy that essentially ended asylum in the United States.

In the past decade, myriad studies have explored the effects of nonviolent resistance (NR) on outcomes including revolutionary success (short-term and long-term) and democratization, and how nonviolent mobilization can play a similar role to violence in affecting social change in some settings. This special issue seeks to advance scholars' and policymakers' understanding of the role of nonviolence by tackling some key assumptions in existing work that are complicated by historical and contemporary realities of deepening polarization worldwide. This issue addresses four key areas within conflict and peace research that limit scholars' and policymakers' ability to make sense of NR: (a) the fragmented nature of civil resistance campaigns in terms of supporters and demands; (b) the increasing prevalence of authoritarian or anti-egalitarian nonviolent campaigns; and (c) the complicated nature of revolutionary success. Cutting across all three of these substantive areas is another key area, which is: (d) the United States as an increasingly salient site of conflict and contention.

Juliette Kayyem writes the Boston Marathon's most enduring legacy is the democratization of "stop the bleed," which—like the Heimlich maneuver and CPR before it—gives regular people the ability to save lives with a modest amount of training. We can and should be outraged that so many civilians face the kinds of injuries—whether from IEDs or, more often, from mass shooters—that produce sudden blood loss. But being prepared for such events is better than the alternative.

Meghan Garrity details the history of mass expulsions since the centennial of the signing of the Lausanne Convention—a treaty codifying the compulsory “population exchange” between Greece and Turkey. An estimated 1.5 million people were forcibly expelled from their homes: over one million Greek Orthodox Christians from the Ottoman Empire and 500,000 Muslims from Greece.

Stephen Walt provides A realist POV on the war in Ukraine, competition with China, COVID, and more in the second part of an interview with Foreign Policy Editor-in-Chief Ravi Agrawal.

International Security Program Fellow Megan M. Turnbull, an international affairs professor at the University of Georgia, discussed the conditions leading to election violence in Nigeria during a virtual seminar hosted by the International Security Program on November 10, 2022.

North America has survived a tumultuous three decades since the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement. What characterizes our shared region today? What sort of region can advance our shared interests and well-being over the next generation? This volume from the Wilson Center and Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center offers an agenda for how the region’s leaders can forge inclusive and effective strategies that ensure North America’s next decades build upon past successes—while addressing serious shortcomings.

The authors argue that emergencies and disasters know no borders, and responses demand cooperation. Highlighting examples of successful cooperation— as well as a few notable failures—they call for a comprehensive North American Emergency Management Compact to address growing challenges that result from a changing climate and interwoven connections.

As the best documented major crisis in history, in substantial part because Kennedy secretly taped the deliberations in which he and his closest advisers were weighing choices they knew could lead to a catastrophic war, the Cuban missile crisis has become the canonical case study in nuclear statecraft. Over the decades since, key lessons from the crisis have been adapted and applied by the successors of Kennedy and Khrushchev to inform fateful choices.