Human Rights

A Rock and a Hard Place

The neglect and abuse of Pakistan’s tribal areas.

  • Umar Farooq

Race and Dignity

Freedom Can’t Be Left to Chance

  • Melvin Rogers

The Failure of Refugee Camps

Refugee camps, intended to be temporary, host people for an average of 12 years.

  • Elizabeth Cullen Dunn

The Logic of Effective Altruism

A minimally acceptable ethical life requires using a substantial part of one’s spare resources to make the world a better place.

  • Peter Singer
with responses from
  • Emma Saunders-Hastings
  • Daron Acemoglu
  • Rob Reich
  • Angus Deaton
  • Paul Brest
  • Jennifer Rubenstein
  • Iason Gabriel
  • Larissa MacFarquhar
  • András Miklós
  • Leila Janah
  • Catherine Tumber

Open Letter to Gayle Smith, Nominee for USAID Administrator

At USAID there’s one simple thing you can commit to: no famine.

  • Alex de Waal

The Law Behind Torture

Justifying the necessity defense in Israel and the United States.

  • Itamar Mann

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Tell Narendra Modi: Human Development is More than GDP

  • Martha C. Nussbaum

Daniel Dennett and Steven Pinker: Can We Become a More Peaceful Species?

A recording of their debate at the Unlearning Violence conference.

  • John Berger

From Democrats to Terrorists

The notion that elimination of the Muslim Brotherhood would produce a liberal democratic order was wishful thinking.

  • Mohammad Fadel

The Syria Dilemma: A Critical Dialogue

On December 2, 2013, the Center for Middle East Studies at University of Denver co-hosted a debate on Syria with Columbia University's Committee on Global Thought. 

  • Boston Review

Exhuming Equality: The Forensics of Human Rights

All around the world, we are digging up the dead.

  • Adam Rosenblatt

Ayatollah Khamenei and the Destruction of Israel

Including translations of Khamenei’s speeches from 1990 to the present.

  • Akbar Ganji

Jordan’s Second-Class Citizens

Jordanian mothers with non-Jordanian husbands cannot pass along citizenship to their children. The results are devastating, but a growing campaign is committed to change.

  • Elizabeth Whitman

Syria’s Red Line

The chemical weapons ban should have been made universal years ago.

  • Jeanne Guillemin

Empire’s Wasteland

The cause of Camus’s native countrymen moved him, yet he yearned helplessly toward the European culture that had formed him.

  • Vivian Gornick

Slavery, Emancipation, and the Relationship of Freedom and Equality

Two Objections to Slavery

  • Elizabeth Anderson

Slavery, Emancipation, and Equality

Wesson Lecture Discussion

  • Elizabeth Anderson
  • Joshua Cohen
  • David Hollinger

Arresting Robert Mugabe

An interview with activist Peter Tatchell.

  • Tinashe Mushakavanhu

The Book

When two scientists discover a book looted by the Nazis, they seek out the rightful heir and in the process explore the reparations process of early postwar days.

  • Karin Andert
  • Niko Kohls

Direct Expression

An interview with the dissident poet and essayist Kirill Medvedev about a new Russian left.

  • Emma Goldhammer

The Promise and Limits of Private Power

Richard M. Locke at the Watson Institute

  • Richard M. Locke

Justice Postponed in Guatemala

Ríos Montt—and the United States—evade reckoning with the past.

  • Lauren Carasik

Can Global Brands Create Just Supply Chains?

Private efforts to improve global working conditions have failed.

  • Richard M. Locke
with responses from
  • Isaac Shapiro
  • Tim Bartley
  • Jodi L. Short & Michael W. Toffel
  • Gary Gereffi
  • Hannah Jones
  • Pamela Passman
  • Drusilla Brown
  • Aseem Prakash
  • Layna Mosley

Martial Flaw

Why Tsarnaev is not an enemy combatant.

  • Elizabeth Goitein
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