What Can We Learn from Cape Town’s Dance with Day Zero?
Flying into Cape Town, the city’s water crisis becomes apparent even before the plane’s wheels touch down. As the sprawling coastal hub comes into view below, framed by craggy mountains on one side and the Indian and Atlantic oceans on the other, the pilot’s voice crackles over the intercom to welcome passengers to “the Mother […]
A Notorious Traffic: A History
It is a sad but inescapable truth about the history of international law—and internationalism more broadly—that much of it is fraught with racism, imperialism, and moral crusading. The counter-human trafficking regime is no exception. The earliest legislative action against human trafficking on an international level was conceived of as the International Agreement for the suppression […]
A Look Back at Kurdistan’s Tumultuous September
On June 7th, 2017, a certain political leader shook the world with a tweet. No, not Donald Trump, but Masoud Barzani, President of the Iraqi Kurdish Regional Government. His tweet proclaimed, “I am pleased to announce that the date for the independence referendum has been set for Monday, September 25th, 2017,” thereby launching a bid […]
The New Global Arms Race
International tensions between North Korea and the rest of the world hit a high point this September, when Chairman of North Korea Kim Jong Un sanctioned the launch of a mid-range nuclear missile that flew directly over northern Japan before landing in the Pacific Ocean. For the past several years, North Korean leadership has been […]
The Cost of Freedom in Kurdistan
Spiritual leader Thich Nhat Hanh once said, “If we are free from attachment, we can easily recognize ourselves in other people, in different forms of manifestation, and then we don’t have to suffer.” Hanh’s words are dreams to the Kurdish people, who exist today fragmented, stateless, and in a forced union with Iraq. Against the […]
Never Again and Other Lies
I don’t remember when I became aware of the reality of the Holocaust. At some point, between heavily censored history books with veiled allusions to the fact, an unprecedented access to the Internet, and Zlata’s Diary, my presumably too-young mind was forced to grapple with the systematic murder of millions of people. Millions. Numbers are […]
Colombia’s Eternal War May Finally Rest in Peace
What do you first think of when I say I’m Colombian? Coffee? Sofia Vergara? James Rodríguez? Maybe. But I would be surprised if most of you didn’t first think about cocaine, Pablo Escobar, or Netflix’s Narcos. Truth be told, that image is not entirely unreasonable. There was a time during the 1980s and 1990s when […]
Avoiding a Lost Generation in Syria Through Tech Education
As the war in Syria continues, many fear that we are experiencing a “lost generation” of Syrian youth who will be uneducated and unable to rebuild the country, even after the war ceases. If a large-scale intervention occurs, in which Assad is deposed and the Syrian civil war ends, Syria will be left with a […]
UN Climate Summit 2015
The 21st Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) took place from November 30 to December 11, 2015 in Paris, France.[1] More than 150 nations submitted Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs) outlining plans for decreased carbon emissions and increased energy efficiency.[2] The goal of this conference was to […]
Why Donald Trump Needs to Have a Conversation with Amal Clooney
International lawyer Amal Clooney has taken on the case of imprisoned investigative journalist Khadija Ismayilova, signaling hope for media freedom in Azerbaijan and striking fear in the hearts of repressive regimes everywhere. Khadija Ismayilova, 37, is an investigative journalist from the former-Soviet state of Azerbaijan. She dug into the regime of President Ilham Aliyev, whose […]