Pride month - celebrated on the anniversary of the Stonewall riots - is now in full swing. Forty-eight years ago this Wednesday (June 28), queer people fought New York police in a violent three day riot, emerging victorious and celebrating it with a daring march through the city's streets, where the first pride was born. Today, there are two...

After the spread of democracy at the end of the 20th century, authoritarianism is now rolling back democracy around the globe. In the US, supporters of democracy disarmed themselves by imagining an “end of history” in which nothing but their own ideas were possible. Authoritarians, meanwhile, keep practicing their old tactics and devising new...

Countering Terrorism Financing regulations adversely impact women’s rights activists and their organizations. These organizations regularly challenge the status quo and power elites by promoting gender equality and raising awareness about human rights violations and abuse of power. Yet they frequently find themselves at odds with, and regularly...

Workers marched in Nairobi on Monday. As in much of the developing world, they are becoming a potent political force, with former agricultural laborers moving to sprawling cities for jobs in manufacturing and in service industries. Thousands of workers marched toward the presidential palace in Jakarta to demand that the government raise minimum...

After Turkey’s constitutional referendum, it is increasingly apparent that its government has exhibited similar authoritarian tendencies to Egypt since the Gezi Park protests in 2013. However, it was undoubtedly following the bombing of parliament and the deployment of troops against civilians in the night of July 15, 2016 that this...

The first-ever March for Science, which was timed to coincide with Earth Day, was aimed at promoting action to protect the environment. Many were protesting against what they consider to be an "alarming trend" among politicians for discrediting their research. At the demonstration in Washington DC, Dr. Jonathan Foley, the executive director of...

Nicholas Kristof, an Op-Ed columnist for the New York Times, speaks with Gene Sharp, Jamila Raqib and Sam Daley-Harris – leading experts in civil resistance – on the most effective ways to resist the Trump administration’s agenda. Kristof also offers his own lessons on “patriotic resistance,” encouraging advocates to skip the lofty rhetoric and...

Over the past few weeks, many social scientists have mobilized alongside their compatriots to resist the Trump administration’s policies. However, many of these scholars have little formal training in engaged scholarship – the practice of doing scholarly work that matters for the real world and actively getting it out there. Chenoweth provides...

Civil society organizations have been subject to considerable criticism and doubt over the past ten years. They argue that Western-style NGOs are looking increasingly ineffective, tired, and out of touch—artificial creations often nourished by foreign supporters that lack real domestic constituencies and the ability to sustain themselves...

“A key lesson here is that engaging in nonviolent struggle is both an art and a science. What I’m talking about here is the science part—general knowledge and principles that we have seen work everywhere. We look at civil resistance as a social science, but we also don’t think there is any formula. I can share with other people what I know,...