Epicenter

Beyond Paris: Building a Practical Climate Coalition (with Arathi Rao, Dustin Tingley, and Catherine Wolfram)

Aluminum, steel, and concrete are some of the most carbon-intensive industries, and many countries already have a tax on them. But not the United States. That fact hasn’t

One Thousand Years of Capitalism (with Sven Beckert)

Sven Beckert, a history professor at Harvard, has written an epic book about the history of capitalism over roughly a millennium: it’s called Capitalism: A Global History

Life After War (with Melani Cammett, Dženana Šabić Hamidović, Cathal McManus)

When a war ends, the work of mending a society begins. Groups who were sworn enemies for decades, even generations, must find ways to live together in peace. The process

Exploring Commodity Frontiers (with Sven Beckert, Myles Lennon, Angélica Márquez-Osuna, and Rachel Steely)

Released January 14, 2025 / We don’t think about commodities very much. They’re all around us: cotton, sugar, oil, gas, chickens, cattle, and so many other things we take

Rare Films from Socialist Yugoslavia (with Damir Kapidžić, Denisa Sarajlic, and Nace Zavrl)

One room. One locked-down camera. One roll of film. A group of famous directors from the 1960s took the challenge: they would make a short film with these parameters plus

Migrants Bring Opportunity to Boston and Beyond (with Jacqueline Bhabha, Monique Nguyen, and Maggie Sullivan)

Massachusetts has long been a welcoming state to immigrants and migrant families. In the summer of 2023, its one-of-a-kind “right to shelter” law was put to the test when

Social Technology for Aging Societies (with Arthur Kleinman, Hong-Tu Chen, Ann Forsyth, and Fawwaz Habbal)

People aged sixty-five and older make up the fastest growing population around the world, posing unique challenges to societies. A Harvard initiative called Social Techno

Who Can Stop a Dictator? Resistance to the War in Ukraine (with Sasha de Vogel, Serhii Plokhy, and Alexandra Vacroux)

When the Wagner mercenary group staged a near coup in Moscow in June, it was seen as the greatest challenge to Vladimir Putin’s regime in decades. Though it didn’t come t

Can Erdogan be Unseated? (with Ahmet Akbiyik, Andrew O’Donohue, and SZ)

The presidential election in Turkey this spring is shaping up to be the most consequential in decades. Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has led the country for twenty years, is

What Is Holding Up the Transition to Green Energy? (with Dustin Tingley, Jeff Colgan, and Aleksandra Conevska)

Green technology has come a long way, to the extent that it can, in theory, be scaled up to solve the world’s energy problems. If this is true, then why does the US lag s

The Politics of Sports (with Susie Petruccelli, Justin Morrow, and Isabel Jijón)

There’s a shadow over World Cup Soccer this year, and it’s become impossible to separate the sports from the politics. Host country Qatar gained notoriety for bribes, exp

Lebanon in Free Fall (with Melani Cammett, Carmen Geha, Nate George, and Lana Salman)

Lebanon has been called many different things: a gem of the Middle East, a failed state, a geopolitical Gordian knot (or nightmare). Its financial system has recently col

Negotiating with Terrorists Part 2 (with Annette Idler, Jytte Klausen, and Fredrik Logevall)

Pulling out of Afghanistan was the top foreign policy event of 2021. Perhaps overlooked in the collective relief to be done with this twenty-year war is the fact that the

Negotiating with Terrorists Part 1 (with Annette Idler, Jytte Klausen, and Fredrik Logevall)

Pulling out of Afghanistan was the top foreign policy event of 2021. Perhaps overlooked in the collective relief to be done with this twenty-year war is the fact that the

The Blurry Lines of Belonging (with Talia Shiff, Anna Skarpelis, and Elke Winter)

We think of citizenship as a binary category: you’re either a citizen or you’re not. But the levels of membership can be complex. Refugees and asylum seekers often find t

COVID-19 and Climate Change Part 2 (with Alicia Harley, Rob Paarlberg, and Troy Vettese)

COVID-19 radically reduced global productivity, but isn’t that just what we need to combat climate change? Is there such a thing as a silver lining in this pandemic? In E

COVID-19 and Climate Change Part 1 (with Alicia Harley, Rob Paarlberg, and Troy Vettese)

COVID-19 forced radical change on the world, but isn’t that just what we need to combat climate change? The simple concepts of how we use land and how we eat may very wel

Pandemic Stress (with Vikram Patel, Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good, and Giuseppe Raviola)

Whether or not you’ve been exposed to the virus, the COVID-19 pandemic impacts everyone’s sense of well-being. Three scholars in the field of global mental health look at

Brexited! (with Jeffry Frieden and Christina Davis)

It was a momentous day for the UK. The United Kingdom finally exited the European Union on January 31, 2020. So what happens next, and should we care? Our guests both dem

Inequality in the US and Europe (with Michèle Lamont, Peter A. Hall, and Paul Pierson)

Despite the decline in global poverty rates over the past five or six decades, the gap between the rich and the poor continues to grow ever wider, especially in the indus