Does social media use have a positive or negative impact on civic engagement? The cynical “slacktivism hypothesis” holds that if citizens use social media for political conversation, those conversations will be fleeting and vapid. Most attempts to answer this question involve public opinion data from the United States, so we offer an examination of an important case from Mexico, where an independent candidate used social media to communicate with the public and eschewed traditional media outlets. He won the race for state governor, defeating candidates from traditional parties and triggering…
More and more military robots are being programmed to kill. The hope is that the absence of emotions and promotion of technical precision will save lives. But officials also expect these same robots to become fully autonomous, or capable of making their own decisions, when it comes to killing. The possibility that they may begin to kill indiscriminately is a scenario that more and more military strategists and ethicists are taking seriously.
What now, José
The party is over,
the light is out,
the people have left,
the night is cold,
what now, José?"
This article examines the situation of Iran’s Bahá’í community, the country’s largest non-Muslim religious minority, in the context of the Islamic Republic’s legal framework as well as President Hassan Rouhani’s proposed Citizenship Rights Charter. Discussing provisions of the Iranian Constitution, Iran’s criminal statute known as the Islamic Penal Code, and the proposed Citizenship Rights Charter, it is demonstrated that the Iranian government has institutionalized religious discrimination. Several examples of discrimination against Iranian Bahá’ís are provided to show the broad…
The dynamic nature of America’s conflicts overseas have resulted in unintended and undesirable consequences. In the midst of a global refugee crisis, the displacement of thousands of U.S.-trained Iraqi and Afghan security forces poses a threat not only to these wartime allies themselves but also to U.S. national security interests. These wartime allies represent some of the “best and brightest” needed to lead Iraq and Afghanistan during the next decade of U.S. military draw-down in the region. The international refugee resettlement paradigm is based upon antebellum systems which are no longer…