Given the preponderance of violence and civil conflict in Africa, development practitioners are eager to understand the relationship between economic conditions and conflict. Conflict can negatively impact education, health, and state capacity—all important co... More »
Literature on development aid ranges from analyzing the effectiveness of aid to assessing foreign policy attitudes. However, as many members of society scrutinize government spending and demand transparency, it becomes increasingly necessary to justify a forei... More »
It is impossible to understate the impact that information and communication technology (ICT) has had on the social and political environment of the 21st century. Scholars have argued that improvements in ICT lead to significant economic growth—in part, by dev... More »
When a gang member on the south side of Chicago posted a photo of himself throwing down a gang sign in enemy territory on his social media account, the backlash was immediate and severe. The response was not limited to the comments section alone; it took only ... More »
Climate change and environmental degradation may be the greatest existential threats the world will face for generations to come. After entering in to office in January 2017, the Trump administration signaled that it would pull out of the Paris Climate Agreeme... More »
The 2017 Atlantic hurricane season was one of the priciest on record, mirroring a global trend of natural disasters becoming more expensive. Understanding the impacts of these natural disasters has become increasingly important. Researchers often model these i... More »
Uber, Airbnb, Seamless, Waze—Twenty years ago these concepts were a distant impossibility. Smart phone technology has given programmers, computer scientists and entrepreneurs tools to revolutionize traditional industries like hospitality, transportation and su... More »
Roger Thurow has served as a senior fellow on the global food and agriculture team at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs since January 2010. Before joining the Council, he reported for the Wall Street Journal where he wrote a series of stories on famine in ... More »
Most countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) offer one form or another of tax breaks for commuting expenses. In countries like Germany and Denmark, the cost of commuting to and from one’s place of work is exempted from tax... More »
Over the past several decades, public sector unionization rates have held fairly steady, even as private sector unionization rates have plummeted. Among economists and social scientists, a debate persists as to whether public sector unions serve the public int... More »
Dehumanization is the process through which we come to believe that a person cannot think, feel, and behave intentionally, nor experience right and wrong. A substantial body of literature from the social sciences posits that dehumanization may be the psycholog... More »