HOME / SEARCH / OUR WORK /

Search

Search results

    2018 Mar 05

    The Fierce Urgency of Now Speaker Series: Sushma Raman - Human Rights on the Horizon: What Lies Ahead for the Human Rights Movement

    5:30pm to 6:45pm

    Location: 

    Wexner 434AB, Harvard Kennedy School, 79 JFK Street, Cambridge, MA

    Fierce Urgency of Now speaker seriesThe Carr Center is excited to announce its 2018 Speaker Series: The Fierce Urgency of Now: Human Rights in 2018. The series will be facilitated by Professor...

    Read more about The Fierce Urgency of Now Speaker Series: Sushma Raman - Human Rights on the Horizon: What Lies Ahead for the Human Rights Movement
    2018 Feb 20

    The Fierce Urgency of Now Speaker Series: Stephen Walt -Same As It Ever Was? U.S. Human Rights Policy under Donald J. Trump

    5:30pm to 6:45pm

    Location: 

    Wexner 434 AB, Harvard Kennedy School, 79 JFK Street, Cambridge, MA

    fierce urgencyThe Carr Center is excited to announce its 2018 Speaker Series: The Fierce Urgency of Now: Human Rights in 2018. The series will be facilitated by Professor...

    Read more about The Fierce Urgency of Now Speaker Series: Stephen Walt -Same As It Ever Was? U.S. Human Rights Policy under Donald J. Trump
    2018 Feb 15

    The Fierce Urgency of Now Speaker Series: Bill Rapp - Use of Military Force in the War on Terror in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan

    5:30pm to 6:45pm

    Location: 

    Taubman T-520 (Allison Dining Room), Harvard Kennedy School, 79 JFK Street, Cambridge, MA

    fierce urgencyThe Carr Center is excited to announce its 2018 Speaker Series: The Fierce Urgency of Now: Human Rights in 2018. The series will be facilitated by Professor Mathias Risse.

    At the 1963...

    Read more about The Fierce Urgency of Now Speaker Series: Bill Rapp - Use of Military Force in the War on Terror in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan
    How Trump Just Might Close Guantanamo Prison
    Alberto Mora. 2/5/2018. “How Trump Just Might Close Guantanamo Prison.” Defense One. See full text.Abstract
    See Carr Center Senior Fellow Alberto Mora's new Op-Ed in Defense One.

    The president asked SecDef and Congress to ensure that detention policies support warfighting aims. That should mean shutting Gitmo down.

    Will President Trump close the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay?  

    This question may sound preposterous. After all, President Obama, who called the prison a threat to national security and American ideals, actually tried to close it. President Trump, by contrast, is on record as vehemently favoring not only its continuation but its expansion. On Jan. 30 he reaffirmed that commitment both in his State of the Union address and in an executive order revoking President Obama’s order commanding its closure. 

    Why, then, even raise the prospect of closing Guantanamo during this administration? The answer lies in two related actions recently taken by the president: his command to Defense Secretary Jim Mattis to “reexamine our military detention policy” and report back to him within 90 days and his request to Congress to ensure that “we continue to have all necessary power to detain terrorists.” The two actions in conjunction represent an unexpected open-mindedness on the part of the president with respect to detention policy. By seeking a broad-focus, “blank-sheet-of-paper” review, asking Mattis to take charge, and inviting Congress to join with them, President Trump acted prudently and, dare I say it, wisely. 

    Full Op-Ed in Defense One.

    Trump's First Year: How Resilient is Liberal Democracy?
    John Shattuck. 2/15/2018. Trump's First Year: How Resilient is Liberal Democracy?. Carr Center Discussion Paper Series. 2018001st ed. Cambridge, MA: Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, Harvard Kennedy School. See full text. Abstract
    In his recent discussion paper, Shattuck examines the Trump administration’s attacks on liberal democratic institutions during its first year, and assesses their institutional resilience.

    In its 2016 “Democracy Index” report, the Economist Intelligence Unit downgraded the United States from a “full” to a “flawed democracy”. The report cited “an erosion of trust in political institutions” as the primary reason for the downgrade.1 In January 2018 Freedom House made a more dire assessment: “democratic institutions in the US have suffered erosion, as reflected in partisan manipulation of the electoral process, bias and dysfunction in the criminal justice system, and growing disparities in wealth, economic opportunity and political influence.”2

    Declining levels of political participation and public confidence in government in the US are not new, but the populist forces that propelled the election of Donald Trump in 2016 signaled a new level of public disillusionment with democratic politics as usual. There has been a sharp increase in democratic discontent over the last fifteen years. An October 2017 Washington Post/University of Maryland poll found that 71% of Americans believe that political polarization and democratic dysfunction have reached “a dangerous low point”. Three years earlier, in 2014, a Gallup Poll showed that 65% of Americans were “dissatisfied with their system of government and how it works,” a dramatic reversal from 68% satisfaction twelve years earlier in 2002.

    How resilient is liberal democracy, and how broad is its base of support? On a global level there is evidence of both erosion and resilience. A November 2017 report of the Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, an intergovernmental organization that assesses the state of democracy worldwide, put it this way: “The current situation is more positive than suggested by an increasingly gloomy view that democracy has been in decline for the last ten years or more. This period appears to be one of trendless fluctuations in which gains and downturns in individual countries

    tend to balance each other out at the global level.”3 From this vantage point, democracy in the US may be resilient when compared to some other democracies where neo-authoritarian leaders -- such as Orban in Hungary, Kaczyński in Poland, and Erdoğan in Turkey -- have recently undermined the independence and functioning of pluralist institutions.

    But the health of American democracy has been called into question. Experts are divided on whether the illness reflects an ongoing struggle in the US by the proponents of liberal democracy to fend off anti-democratic tendencies ,4 or a long-term trend toward democratic deconsolidation.5 This paper considers a sampling of evidence about attacks on key institutions and elements of democracy in the US during the first year of the Trump administration, and potential sources of democratic resilience in the media, the judiciary, law enforcement, democratic norms and principles, the electoral process, civil society, state and local government, the federal civil service, and the Congress. The stakes are high. A central question, posed by a provocative new book, How Democracies Die, by Harvard scholars Stephen Levitsky and Daniel Zieblatt, is whether these institutions will withstand anti-democratic pressure, or “become political weapons, wielded forcefully by those who control them against those who do not?”6

    Following is a summary of the Trump administration’s challenges to democratic institutions during its first year and an assessment of institutional resilience compiled in this report.

    2018 Feb 12

    The Fierce Urgency of Now Speaker Series: Douglas Johnson - Trump's Human Rights Policy: Waiting for the Shoe to Drop

    5:30pm to 6:45pm

    Location: 

    Wexner 434 AB, Harvard Kennedy School, 79 JFK Street, Cambridge, MA

    fierce urgencyThe Carr Center is excited to announce its 2018 Speaker Series: The Fierce Urgency of Now: Human Rights in 2018. The series will be facilitated by Professor...

    Read more about The Fierce Urgency of Now Speaker Series: Douglas Johnson - Trump's Human Rights Policy: Waiting for the Shoe to Drop

Pages