After the Pandemic: Perils and Promise for Western Balkans
As the coronavirus brings out the best and worst in countries in Southeast Europe, the democratic health of the region is at stake, says CES Visiting Scholar Albana Shehaj.
News
Herzl Re-imagined: Derek Penslar weighs the impact of Theodor Herzl’s personal power
Derek Penslar, William Lee Frost Professor of Jewish History at Harvard University, has long studied modern Jewish history from a global perspective. In his new biography of Theodor Herzl, Penslar, resident ...
COVID-19 – Moving classes online, Other updates
Harvard will begin transitioning to virtual instruction for graduate and undergraduate classes. Our goal is to have this transition complete by Monday, March 23, the first day of scheduled classes following Spring Recess.
How societies justify, sustain, and eventually dismantle inequality
As the gulf between the haves and the have nots continues to widen, the roiling debate over economic inequality has become a political prime mover in the U.S. and across Europe. French ...
William Barr thinks China is stealing American technology. Can the U.S. halt the exchange of knowledge?
Some U.S. government moves to halt China’s technology theft could cause significant brain drain and hurt the scientific community, argue CES Resident Faculty Peter A. Hall & Yeling Tan.
Der Handschlag von Erfurt (in German)
Demokratien können nur überleben, wenn man von der Macht fernhält, wer sie bedroht. In Erfurt geschah das Gegenteil. Das weckt Erinnerungen an den Aufstieg der NSDAP.
New Athens mayor wants to rebuild the city
The new mayor of Athens, Kostas Bakoyannis, M.P.A. ’04, wants to rebuild the capital from the ground up. He spoke to CES Executive Director Elaine Papoulias about his plans and challenges.
Why Historical Analogy Matters
In this article, Peter E. Gordon assesses what it means when scholars entertain analogies between different events, and how it is possible to compare events that occurred in widely different circumstances?
Impeachment: What this means, where this leads
"To survive, democracy requires at least two democratic political parties. We currently only have one. If this doesn’t change, our growing democratic disorder risks mutating into an even more extreme form," comments Daniel Ziblatt in a Harvard Gazette article on what impeachment may mean for the presidency and the future of American democracy.
Cities in a world of states
Any geopolitical order based on cities must depend upon the partial dismantling of the territorial state order and thus of the notion of a unitary sovereignty as it developed from the Renaissance until very recently. Is that really plausible in this day and age? – Charles Maier, Leverett Saltonstall Research Professor of History & CES Resident Faculty
