The Wall of Moms in Portland, Oregon, are mostly dressed in yellow to stand out and make it easier to find one another in case they get separated in a melée. On their first recorded night out as a unit, July 19, the women linked arms and chanted “Feds steer clear, Moms are here.” One of them was visibly pregnant. All were brave, as they faced anonymized federal police forces wielding tear gas, pepper bombs, and truncheons. Someone on Twitter called the women Momtifa, which is an excellent coinage. Moms against fascism and with antifa helps to undo the associations Trump and Barr have constructed. No longer thugs and anarchists, antifa becomes someone’s beloved sons and daughters. Those watching from afar may feel their sympathies start to shift.

In just over two months, the Northeast has gone from the country’s worst coronavirus hot spot to its most controlled. “It’s acting like Europe,” one expert said.

Corey Brettschneider with Jeffrey Tulis: Properly understood, the commutation of Roger Stone’s sentence is unconstitutional.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi demonstrates how to de-escalate a conflict while also saving face.

While comfortable Americans are passing the pandemic studying their favorite restaurants' takeout schedules and strategizing Zoom techniques, tens of millions of our countrymen dramatically less fortunate are desperately trying to keep their families from being tossed into the street.

The recent murders of innocent Black people have galvanized individuals to fight against the oppression of Blacks in this country. The Race and Capitalism Project, along with the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture, has organized a panel featuring historians, activists, and political theorists, Juliet Hooker (Brown), Barbara Ransby (University of Illinois), Vesla Weaver (Johns Hopkins), and Megan Ming Francis (University of Washington) to discuss "Anti-Black Violence and the Ongoing Fight for Freedom."

After the mid 20th century, a democracy is not a proper democracy unless it safeguards minorities. And if the minorities are also poor, the protection becomes even more necessary.

Polls, betting odds and pundits are all pointing toward a substantial victory for Joe Biden. The New York Times poll showed Biden leading President Trump by a staggering 50 percent – 36 percent, a 14-point margin. The Real Clear Politics polling averages show a 9-point lead for Biden. He leads Trump even more among women voters. The Times poll also indicated strong leads in critical swing states Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Florida, Arizona and North Carolina, ranging from 6 to 11 points. These results point to an overwhelming Electoral College victory.

It isn't easy being Donald Trump these days: so many people to silence and so little time. Muzzling those who have damaging evidence on you can be exhausting in the best of circumstances, and keeping a lid on so much incriminating information springing from so many different sources would make anyone cranky.

In June 2020 Jeff Colgan co-wrote, "Asset Revaluation and the Existential Politics of Climate Change," a piece focused on a dynamic theory of climate politics based on the present and future revaluation of assets that accelerate climate change, such as fossil fuel plants.

A look at war through the lens of the performance enhancers that help make it possible.

"You just get a much bigger fiscal bang for the buck," says Mark Blyth, the economics professor and author of "Angrynomics."

It's been another bad stretch for Donald Trump. The president's terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad week began with his labored shuffle down a short, modestly inclined ramp after giving an even more labored speech at West Point, one eliciting an audience response somewhere between tepid and silent. It was an event commandeered by Trump himself.

Join Watson Director Edward Steinfeld for a conversation with Rhodes Center for International Economics and Finance Director Mark Blyth about his new book, Angrynomics (co-authored with Eric Longeran).

Listen now (85 min) | Escaping household chaos, a car-bound Jonah talks prisons with Brown University’s David Skarbek. Bolivian jails and Soviet gulags are just two choices in this long game of Where’d-You-Rather: Incarceration Edition. Skarbek takes us through the highlights of his upcoming book and touches on the delicate subject of policing.

The inhabitants of Chelsea, Massachusetts, have known tough times for a long time, long before the COVID-19 pandemic hit them hard. Almost half of Chelsea's population consists of recent immigrants, largely from Latin America, and almost 1 in 5 lived below the poverty line even before the virus struck and wiped out the economy.

When the late film producer Julia Phillips published her 1991 expose of Hollywood's depravity in the 1970s and 1980s, she chose a title that correctly forecasted the movie establishment's retributive response. "You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again" was summed up by one Hollywood power broker as "the longest suicide note in history."

It wasn't the best of weeks for President Donald Trump. On Friday, he proclaimed it a "great day" for George Floyd, who had been murdered by Minneapolis police the week before. "Hopefully George is looking down right now and saying 'This is a great thing that's happening to our country,'" said Trump as Americans took to the streets in all 50 states to protest the persistence and scope of American racism, and as tens of millions remained jobless.

One of the most terrifying aspects of pathogens like the novel coronavirus is that they do not respect borders. Yet borders determine our vulnerability to infectious diseases. Today, governmental efforts have meant that citizens within certain national boundaries—like New Zealand or Vietnam—are much less likely to suffer from COVID-19.

Juliet Hooker, Professor of Political Science, discusses Black Lives Matter protests, asymmetrical perceptions of violence, and the role that images play in our politics.

In the Amereican Political Science Association's Comparative Politics 2020 Spring Newsletter, Professor Prerna Singh gives her take on COVID-19 and intergroup relations. Singh compares the impact of the ongoing pandemic to those of the past, specifically focusing on the evident increase in xenophobia. Read the full Q&A.

In a country claiming to be the first in the world to be founded on equality, why have black lives been so cheap? Can black Americans ever be treated with equality and dignity, instead of being brutalised?

Congratulations to all of the 2020 Political Science graduates

Until recently, it had been Sen. Joseph McCarthy who was the poster child for the thuggish impulse that occasionally rears its head in America — ebbing here, flowing there, but always present. If he has accomplished nothing else, President Donald Trump has supplanted McCarthy as the embodiment of the American thug, rising and reigning with the help of those who either thrill to his bullying or lack the courage to challenge it.

On March 13, following the U.S. House of Representatives passage of emergency relief legislation to support those most affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, U.S. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., recessed the Senate so he could fly to Louisville to celebrate the installation of one of his proteges, 37 year old Justin Walker, as a federal judge in Kentucky.

Doctor of Philosopy

Poverty in Pakistan may more than double, from 23% to 57%, as a result of the Covid-19 shock, according to one estimate from the Pakistan Institute of Development Economics. This is a dire picture and has the potential to undo much of the progress in poverty reduction that has occurred in Pakistan, particularly over the past two decades, unless urgent action is taken by the federal government.

The analogy of the COVID-19 crisis as war is inescapable. At first, the comparison seems apt: the disease’s global reach, the death toll, the active “threat” of the virus, and the public sacrifice required to fight it seem more similar to a global war than to a geographically confined natural disaster, constitutional crisis, or another form of sudden, transnational change.

In 1967, an unknown 38-year-old civil rights activist from New York took it upon himself to change the world, and then he did. Allard Lowenstein, a Yale-educated lawyer who had steadfastly avoided practicing law and was proud of having done so, was already a master of the quixotic. He had smuggled searing evidence about apartheid out of South Africa, managing to present it at the United Nations and forcing the United States to distance itself from its South African ally. Calling upon his credibility on campuses across America, he had spearheaded Freedom Summer, which drew hundreds of volunteers to Mississippi to register black voters in 1964.

The coronavirus pandemic death toll rises above 82,000 Americans. The administration continues to fumble the response leaving the nation’s governors on their own to design fifty separate strategies.

It is with great pleasure that we announce the winners of the 2020 DIAP Community Awards. The Office of Institutional Equity and Diversity, with generous support from the President’s Office, instituted the DIAP Community Awards in 2018. These awards recognize students, staff, and faculty as well as an administrative and academic department within our Brown community who have used the DIAP as a vehicle to actively create positive change within their departments, programs, and beyond. These awards are highly competitive and selections were made from a pool of exceptional candidates who were nominated by other members of the Brown community.

For some leaders, personal responsibility in disregarding warnings of an impending pandemic that has now killed 80,000 Americans and cratered the economy might stimulate reflection about the national good. Not so for Donald Trump, whose disastrous presidency continues to capsize the democratic institutions on which we have prided ourselves.

Professor Rose McDermott examines how leaders have dealt with illness during their time in office and how this impacts their leadership.

Before the pandemic struck, Sara Blazey made the same three-hour commute to work, three days a week, for the better part of 12 years. The 63-year-old family lawyer from the Blue Mountains works for a domestic violence legal advice hotline in Parramatta and it used to be that she would wake at 7am, drive seven minutes to Hazelbrook station and from there catch the 7.17am train to Parramatta before making the same one-and-a-half hour trip home in the evening.

Is a country that’s had a successful revolution doomed to endlessly re-enact it? In this episode, Adam talks to Professor Margaret Weir (Brown University and Oxford) about why anti-lockdown protests take the form they do in America: armed men entering legislatures and the waving of flags with the slogan "Don't Tread on Me".

As concern over Covid-19 shifts from a global health crisis to a global economic crisis we speak to political scientist Mark Blyth, author of the forthcoming book 'Angrynomics' about what this pandemic really means for the economy. How long can we afford lockdown? Is it time to abandon globalisation? And can our economies ever return to 'normal'? Mark Blyth was interviewed by Anne McElvoy, senior editor at The Economist and head of Economist Radio. You can find more about his forthcoming book here: https://amzn.to/3aP7ePH Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/intelligencesquared.

We should not only expect that labour flows will now be more strictly regulated than before. But also more than ever before in recent decades, Western investors will also have to factor in political risks in their investment decision-making.

This April, instead of submitting tax returns to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) as usual, many Americans were waiting for the IRS to send them cash payments as part of a coronavirus relief package. On April 14, The Washington Post broke the news that the U.S. Treasury Department had made an “unprecedented” decision that stimulus checks sent via postal mail would carry the words “President Donald J. Trump” printed on the memo line — the first time in U.S. history a president’s name appeared on an IRS check.

Every 10 years, the US government has taken a census of the country, then adjusted the number of Congressional seats for each state. After, states redrew the lines of House districts. Now, in the midst of the pandemic, the Census Bureau is asking for more time to complete in-person counting, thus delaying the information given to the states for redistricting.

Rich Arenberg, Visiting Professor of the Practice of Political Science, Senior Fellow in International and Public Affairs

Isn’t it ironic that bleach, an agent of whitening, may bring about Trump’s downfall? After all he has done for whiteness?

And that television, the medium that gave life to his personal and political ambitions, may be the instrument of his demise?

Rose McDermott, a professor of international relations at Brown University, argued that a lot of threat inflation comes from overrated low probability risks and underrated high probability risks. Things like terrorism or great power wars are low probability risks, but are highly overrated in public perception and public policy. People feared a terrorist incident far more than a global pandemic, even if such a pandemic was much more likely — and ultimately more deadly.

"Democracy is beautiful in theory," wrote Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. "In practice it is a fallacy. You in America will see that one day." The fiery fascist did not have a perfect score in the prognostication department. For example, his decision to ally with Adolf Hitler worked out poorly for him, and he ended up summarily executed by a countryman and hung upside down in a town square.

My dentist frequently reminds me not to grind my teeth. As I watched heroic Wisconsin voters stand in line for hour after hour during a pandemic, I ground harder. As I read the Supreme Court's decision requiring Wisconsin voters to choose between the risk of disease and their right to vote, I clenched my fists. And as I watch as the president on his nightly reality show in the White House press room fumble the chance to lead the nation, it makes my blood boil.

Rob Grace, PhD candidate in Political Science, writes on planning your 'please take social distancing seriously' conversations in The Conversation.

Oil prices have fallen dramatically in 2020, with dire consequences for some countries. The twin shocks of the novel coronavirus and a Russian-Saudi price war drove Brent crude to a low of about $25 a barrel in late March. Since then, prices recovered somewhat on rumors of an OPEC-plus production deal, but the outlook for oil prices remains low. Even if producers cut back significantly, oil prices are unlikely to return to $70 a barrel, as they were in January.