Global

No Parties, No Banners

The Spanish experiment with direct democracy.

  • Gianpaolo Baiocchi
  • Ernesto Ganuza

Blunt Instrument

Sanctions don’t promote democratic change.

  • Natasha Bahrami
  • Trita Parsi

Too Much Credit

Response to Flynt and Hillary Leverett.

  • Ali Ansari

Agenda-Driven Reviews

A response to Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett.

  • Trita Parsi

The Soft Side of Regime Change

On Trita Parsi’s A Single Roll of the Dice.

  • Flynt Leverett
  • Hillary Mann Leverett

Digital Culture Wars

Contemporary American politics privileges policing and punishment, while marginalizing the arts and the commons.

  • Frank Pasquale

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Outing Iran

Publishing news of discrimination against homosexuals in Iran.

  • David William Turner

Poetry Fights Back

Modern Pashtun poetry is a poetry of resistance.

  • Shaheen Buneri

A Shared Fate

Europeans might accept supranational democracy in theory, but cannot see it as part of their lives.

  • Jan-Werner Müller

The Plague

Farmers and settlers clash in South Hebron.

  • David Shulman

Containing Outrage

How police power tames the Occupy movement.

  • Alasdair Roberts

We Are All Khaled Said

An Interview with the Administrators of the Facebook Page that Fueled the Egyptian Revolution

  • Anver M. Emon
  • Ellen Lust
  • Audrey Macklin

The Promise of Ethical Consumption

An Ideas Matter event held at MIT on November 3, 2011

  • Dara O’Rourke
  • Scott Nova
  • Richard Locke
  • Jens Hainmueller

Citizen Consumer

A small percentage of consumers have already moved a portion of the market toward more sustainable practices. But the larger promise of ethical consumption remains unmet.

  • Dara O’Rourke
with responses from
  • Scott Nova
  • Juliet B. Schor
  • Lisa Ann Richey & Stefano Ponte
  • Scott E. Hartley
  • Margaret Levi
  • Auret van Heerden
  • Andrew Szasz
  • Richard M. Locke

Return to Haiti

A year and a half after the earthquake.

  • Colin Dayan

Politics by Other Means

The Egyptian uprising has been rightly celebrated as a momentous event.

  • Mona El-Ghobashy

Regime Change Doesn’t Work

History shows that forcing rulers from power rarely works. Even apparently successful regime changes often leads to bitter civil war.

  • Alexander B. Downes
with responses from
  • Greg Grandin
  • Neta C. Crawford
  • James D. Fearon
  • Mary Kaldor
  • John Tirman
  • Tod Lindberg
  • Joanne Landy

Video: The Responsibility of Intellectuals, Redux

Video of an Ideas Matter event held at MIT on September 22, 2011

  • Noam Chomsky
  • Joshua Cohen

End of the Road

News of Osama bin Laden’s killing by U.S. special forces has sunk in. News of al Qaeda’s demise has not.

  • Fawaz A. Gerges

Freedom Is a Way of Life

The Arab Summer in Tunisia

  • Josh Martin

Who Represents the Poor?

The limits of the NGO movement in global development.

  • Pranab Bardhan

A Beautiful Place

I was fifteen when we left Palestine in the summer of 2000, just a few months before the al Aqsa Intifada.

  • Ahmed Moor

How to Write About Africa

At the offices of Kwani—a literary agitator without peer. 

  • Anna Clark

Europeans Against Multiculturalism

Political Attacks Misread History, Target Muslims, and May Win Votes

  • John R. Bowen
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