Ethiopia’s economic success has attracted widespread attention. Its GDP grew by 10.5 percent annually between 2006 and 2016, outpacing East Africa’s 5.4 percent growth rate over the same time period. As extreme poverty declined by nearly 40 percent in the country between 2000 and 2011, Ethiopia is quickly emerging as a model of how rapid … Read more
Though developed, non-authoritarian countries all over Western Europe and North America abandoned capital punishment years ago, the United States remains the only country in those regions to have not done so. In fact, the United States is ranked in the top five countries in terms of state killings, along with Saudi Arabia, China, Iraq, and … Read more
The political legitimacy of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), the ruling party of Mexico from 1929 to 2000, has declined since the 1980s. Economic crises in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the splintering of the PRI’s leftmost-wing in 1988, and the formation of the Party of the Democratic Revolution in 1989 have not boded … Read more
Two weekends ago, almost one million people descended on Washington, D.C. in one of the biggest protests in the capitol’s history. The target of the protest, dubbed the March for Our Lives, was America’s lax gun regulation, the product of years of advocacy by gun rights lobbying groups and intransigence by lawmakers. The march, and affiliated … Read more
Mexico is preparing to elect its 58th president on July 1, 2018. But Mexico has not always been democratic. The Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) political machine controlled Mexico from 1929 until 2000 under the informal norm of dedazo, when the sitting president would reveal his hand-picked successor without a primary election. This lasted until the … Read more
Over the past year, torrents of tweets, rhetoric of “fire and fury,” and debates over “button” sizes have kept the world’s attention on the threats of nuclear weapons. After all, much of today’s adult population lived through the Cold War, an era when prospects of nuclear war veered dangerously close to reality. But despite the … Read more
With nationwide progress on the abolition of the death penalty, and with California’s clear lead on a host of progressive issues, one would have expected that California’s Proposition 62 to abolish the death penalty in 2016 would have sailed through. And yet, for the second time in a decade, California voters rejected such a proposition, … Read more
Qeeroo means “youth” in Oromo, the language of Ethiopia’s largest ethnic group. It is also the preferred name of the young Oromo who have led anti-government protests calling for greater ethnic equality since November 2015. The protests have spread throughout Oromia and Amhara, home to the Oromo and Amhara ethnicities that constitute 34 and 27 … Read more