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The Legal Information Service: Expanding Access to the Law
04.30.19
A proposal to provide free public access to legal information through a federally managed web portal. BY JONATHAN SCLARSIC You cannot Google the law—the United States has essentially privatized access to much of written law. This privatization has created an infamous industry that drives up legal costs and prevents many citizens from accessing important legal […]
Can behavioral science get you to mobilize your friends to vote?
04.26.19
How can Democratic campaigns get large numbers of their voters to mobilize their friends to vote? The short answer: no one knows. To date, the only definite insight is that peer-to-peer voter turnout does not scale through mobile phone apps. Despite numerous “relational organizing” technologies receiving millions in funding and mountains of the press in […]
Women in Peacekeeping: Moving from Numbers to Leadership
04.25.19
BY ESTHER BRITO In 1993, women represented only 1% of all UN uniformed personnel deployed in peacekeeping missions. In 2017, women peacekeepers remained at 4%, far from the UN target of 15%. The role of women in peacekeeping operations (PKOs)—not only as a matter of principle, but as a necessary condition for their success—has only […]
Female Resiliency in Roma: A Tale of Two Women
04.23.19
BY DANIELA PHILIPSON GARCIA Alfonso Cuaron’s most recent film is named after one of Mexico City’s upper-class neighborhoods, Roma. For those who live abroad but call Mexico City home, watching the film is like taking a nostalgic trip to our past, uncovering buried memories. For me, it was a specific memory of when I lived […]
Invisible Walls: The Hyper-Density of Colombian Cities and What It Means to You, by Simon Gaviria
04.22.19
This article appears in the Spring 2019 edition of the Latin America Policy Journal released in April 2019. You can order the edition here. Bogota is 13 times denser than New York City.[1] Colombian cities are 100 percent denser than the global average and 126 percent denser than cities in Latin America.[2] Until now, the consensus […]
What Sierra Leone’s Renaissance Teaches Us About the New 21st Century State
04.22.19
A new administration is at the vanguard of African leadership, prioritizing national development in a new model of partnership and possibility BY JENNIFER KAMARA Sierra Leone has adopted a new strategy that is reforming its troubled past, piece by piece. Less than a year into his term, President Julius Maada Bio is leading his country […]
One summer as a yellow b*tch
04.19.19
The sexual harassment I experienced during my summer internship in Tunisia As first-year students around me at the Harvard Kennedy School lock down summer internships, I reflect on my own internship experience from last summer with mixed feelings. On my way to Tunisia from Boston last June, I had a one-day layover in Istanbul. I […]
Lessons for the US from Austalia’s #censusfail
04.18.19
BY ISABELLA BORSHOFF Most statisticians will only ever light up the Twittersphere in their wildest dreams. But for census staff at the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), those dreams became a nightmarish reality as the country’s first digital census bombed spectacularly, earning its own hashtag, #censusfail. Every five years, Australians sit down on a designated […]
How the Citizenship Question Makes Vulnerable Populations Less Likely to be Counted
04.18.19
A Q&A with Esperanza Guevara of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights In March 2018, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, whose department administers the decennial United States census, announced he would include a question on the 2020 Census asking, for the first time since 1950: “Is this person a citizen of the United States?” The question […]
The Benefits of the Census Bureau: A Research Perspective
04.17.19
BY NICK BUFFIE The U.S. Census Bureau is facing a series of challenges this time around – insufficient funding, a new online component, and an administration that is unwelcoming to diversity. In particular, the Trump Administration and Republicans in Congress have become the newest members of the mole brigade – politicians determined to avoid seeing […]
Latin American Cities in the Fourth Industrial Revolution: The Potential and Social Risks of Smart-Cities Technologies, by Beatriz Botero Arcila
04.17.19
This article appears in the Spring 2019 edition of the Latin America Policy Journal released in April 2019. You can order the edition here. Abstract In the wake of the implementation of smart-city technologies in Latin American cities, this article reviews both their potential for making municipal administration and local service delivery more efficient and […]
The 2020 Census: Facing a ‘perfect storm?’
04.17.19
BY TERRI ANN LOWENTHAL Every U.S. census faces challenges and controversies; counting a mobile, growing, and increasingly diverse “nation of immigrants” — not to mention a displaced Native population and enslaved peoples at various points in our history — was always destined to be a complex, imperfect effort. Fortunately, the census has gotten more accurate […]