Make Sense of the world
Unique insight from 2,000+ contributors in 80+ Countries
The COVID-19 pandemic lays bare a global crisis of gender inequality. While women have achieved considerable success in their fight for equality, they continue to face violence, discrimination and exclusion globally. Women are now disproportionately bearing the costs of the pandemic, surfacing...
Today, the world faces one of its most challenging crises of the 21st century. A tiny yet powerful virus has been able to shed light on a number of questions we all knew but might not have truly comprehended. First, we are incredibly interconnected, from Wuhan to Milan to New York. Second, we are...
The Syrian refugee crisis in Lebanon is just the latest in a sequence of disenfranchisements that have plagued the Middle East for generations. In 1948, just years after Lebanon was founded, the Palestinians were pushed out of their homeland by the Israelis and the Lebanese granted them refuge....
Article 1 of the UN Refugee Convention defines a refugee as “someone who is unable or unwilling to return to their country of origin owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion.” In...
The late Brazilian educator Paulo Freire (1921-1997) was a prominent figure in the 20th-century critical pedagogy movement and the celebrated author of the ground-breaking 1968 text, “Pedagogy of the Oppressed.” Freire’s seminal work proposes a dialogical method of teaching literacy that...
While celebrating the contribution of refugees, we must acknowledge the importance of all who are driven from their homelands not only by fear and terror, but also by desperate need. Human bridges and personal connections have been built by great movements across the globe as people escape war and...
On September 6, 2018, the Supreme Court of India struck down Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code in a landmark decision, Navtej Singh Johar v. Union of India, decriminalizing consensual sexual intercourse between consenting adults of the same sex. More than a year and a half later and on the...
As the COVID-19 pandemic rages on, health-care systems around the world are left strained. The outbreak continues to throttle the efficiency of many health-care sectors, pushing some to the brink. While deficiencies within public health systems are exposed, other viral enemies have come to the...
Like most other human activities, education has been brutally affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. The traditional classroom, a place of safety in which the teacher reigned over students and represented a form of political order, suddenly came to be seen as a petri dish of disease threatening not...
The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is grappling with COVID-19, an unresolved war in Yemen and collapsed oil prices. At the same time, recurrent purges of opponents of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) are harming the country’s foreign investment climate. Within this context, the ambitious Vision...
For months, analysts have warned that Somalia is one of many African countries at the highest risk for the spread of the novel coronavirus, known as SARS-CoV2. Now, that forecast is turning quickly into a grim reality. Somali authorities have confirmed over 2,100 cases of COVID-19 — the disease...
