August 22, 2016 It’s Friday at the People’s Justice Project (PJP) office, and the walls are covered in giant note pads for battle plans. On butcher paper the team has written the names of the candidates in the Franklin County prosecutor’s race and the positions each one takes on mass incarceration and policing—PJP’s main issue … Read more
Between Cape Town’s airport and its city center, visitors drive past a poorly concealed scar: the underdeveloped townships allocated for black residents during apartheid. Despite legion policy efforts, they remain similarly peopled today. Arriving at the urban center, however, this destitution is replaced by bustling malls, luxurious hotels, and a booming tourism industry insistent that … Read more
What happens when you travel north from Manhattan’s downtown and Midtown, away from the eye-catching commercial billboards and throngs of office dwellers? You abandon the visual rush for a new intensity: cerebral, emotional, raw. The buildings remain nearly as tall, nearly as crowded, still grouped together for a purpose. In East Harlem, that purpose is … Read more
It started on Facebook. Alicia Garza drafted a post dubbed “A love note for Black People,” crafted largely out of sympathy for a dead child and disgust for the system that killed him. That post was the impetus for a movement hearkening back to the impassioned protesting of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Lives Matter. … Read more
At a time when Western anti-immigrant sentiment is increasingly endemic, good news comes from an unlikely source. On February 28, 2016, the Swiss people took to the polls, turning down an expansion to the country’s already strict immigration policies. The Swiss People’s Party, Switzerland’s largest party, proposed a piece of legislation last December that would … Read more
“Tenemos único camino, único destino, que es la muerte o el penal.” We have one path, one destiny, which is death or prison. Juan Flores is 32 years old and was born and raised in Apopa, a municipality in the northern district of San Salvador. Living near the country’s capital, nestled in the heart of … Read more
It’s a familiar story. Young, privileged students rally around the hyper-liberal iconoclast’s calls for political revolution. In a year where self-declared socialist Bernie Sanders has captured historic levels of support among young people, surely Harvard—the “Kremlin on the Charles,” housed in“the People’s Republic of Cambridge”—is a hotbed of Sanders activism. The story will be particularly recognizable to … Read more
Interview with spring 2016 IOP fellow and former Ambassador to China, Gary Locke. A transcript of the interview can be found here. Image source: Associated Press
On June 13, 2015, a recently completed memorial on the southernmost tip of Roosevelt Island came under the national spotlight. The newly-announced presidential candidate Hilary Clinton had chosen to kick-start her campaign at the Four Freedoms Park, a memorial dedicated to President Franklin Roosevelt and his famous Four Freedoms Speech from 1941. By evoking Roosevelt’s … Read more
French artist Edgar Degas once said, “Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.” Indeed, it is precisely this characteristic that has allowed art to become a key component of various aspects of our lives—including politics. Just ask the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists, whose caricature of the Prophet Mohammad ultimately led to … Read more