HKS Students and Research Affiliates

In this article, Ms. Goldenziel explores the administrative and constitutional peculiarities of the Bush Administration's Faith-Based Initiative. She argues that the Supreme Court's establishment clause jurisprudence offers no clear standards for administrative rule-making. However, the Bush administration has ignored the Supreme Court's guidelines and has crafted a program of dubious constitutionality. The Initiative is nearly impermeable to constitutional challenges or other public checks because of its peculiar place in the administrative structure. Because the Initiative endangers the fundamental constitutional right to freedom from religious establishment, Ms. Goldenziel calls for the Initiative to be publicly accountable, and provides suggestions for how the Bush administration can achieve this goal.

This thesis investigates the role of Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a catalyst for the climate transition, analyzing how AI enables emissions reduction, resource optimization, and advanced climate-risk measurement across energy, mobility, agriculture, finance, and urban systems. With foundational models increasingly commoditized, competitive advantage shifts toward high-quality data, integration capabilities, and alignment with emerging ESG and disclosure standards. The study proposes a structured framework for evaluating and deploying Climate AI solutions, emphasizing measurable climate impact, policy-fit, and system-level scalability. Case studies illustrate how AI-enabled platforms—particularly in carbon accounting, smart grids, predictive industrial systems, and nature monitoring—can accelerate climate outcomes when supported by coordinated stakeholder action. The thesis concludes that AI is evolving into essential climate infrastructure, requiring investment strategies that merge venture-style innovation with long-horizon sustainability priorities.

Governments around the world try to accelerate sociotechnical change toward sustainability by introducing policy mixes that combine technology-push and demand-pull instruments. Beyond innovation and deployment, other objectives, such as domestic job and industry creation, are usually part of these policy mixes. However, little is known about how policy mixes should be designed and interactions between policy instruments considered when governments try to achieve multiple objectives simultaneously. We address these questions using an agent-based model of the sociotechnical system for solar photovoltaics in Germany that simulates technology adoption, industry dynamics, international spillovers and trade. By changing public spending on research and development and the solar feed-in tariff, forty-five variations of the historical policy mix in Germany are systematically evaluated. The results show that a narrow focus on innovation and deployment outcomes by academic researchers can lead to recommendations for the design of policy mixes that compromise key dimensions of sociotechnical change, such as job creation. Moreover, the simulations reveal that, because of path-dependent interactions between policy instruments, minor changes in the design of policy instruments can lead to vastly different policy outcomes. These findings have important implications for the literature on policy mixes, technology-push and demand-pull instruments, and sociotechnical transitions.

In this article, Ms. Goldenziel explores the growing controversy over no-funding provisions, state constitutional provisions that restrict state funding of religious institutions. These provisions, allegedly rooted in anti-Catholic bigotry, may threaten state implementation of school choice programs and faith-based initiatives involving public funding of religious social service organizations. Ms. Goldenziel argues that these no-funding provisions, which are commonly termed Blaine Amendments, Little Blaines, or Baby Blaines, are often unrelated to the failed federal Blaine Amendment, and do not always share the federal amendment's infamous anti-Catholic history. In the first study of its type, Ms. Goldenziel surveys the language and history of constitutional provisions prohibiting funding of religious institutions in all fifty states, and details the constitutional history and judicial interpretation of these provisions in eight representative states: Ohio, Wisconsin, Arizona, Florida, Colorado, Michigan, Vermont, and Maine. Ms. Goldenziel concludes that the fates of school vouchers and faith-based initiatives will not rest on the so-called Blaine Amendments, but on the ideological and jurisprudential tendencies of state judiciaries. Debate over school choice and charitable choice should therefore move from courtrooms to the political arena.

This review situates Rewiring Democracy within debates on artificial intelligence, democratic governance, and institutional design. In contrast to work that emphasizes technological determinism or narrowly defined risk mitigation, the review engages Bruce Schneier and Nathan E. Sanders’ argument that AI is becoming embedded in democratic institutions and everyday civic practices, shaping how governments process information, allocate authority, deliver public services, and mediate civic participation.

The book is positioned alongside scholarship on surveillance capitalism, infrastructural power, and sociotechnical governance, while highlighting its distinctive contribution: a pragmatic framework for examining how AI may reconfigure legislatures, administrative agencies, courts, and civic life under conditions of democratic constraint. The review argues that the book is strongest when it treats AI as a governance challenge rather than merely a technical tool, but less complete when it moves from plausible use cases to durable institutional reform. It also assesses the book’s methodological orientation, noting both its strengths in conceptual synthesis and its limits in institutional specification, political economy, and democratic theory.

The 2025 border conflict between Cambodia and Thailand brought great disruptions to both countries: nearly a million migrant workers were displaced, oil and agricultural goods had to be rerouted, and border closures interrupted daily life and supply chains. The impact on Cambodia so far appears milder than might be expected for a small economy that depended on trade and labour flows with its larger neighbour. In the last 10 years, Cambodia pivoted towards trade and investment with China and Vietnam, with the United States as the leading export destination. In 2022, Thailand fell from being Cambodia’s second-largest to its third-largest source of imports. Cambodia had relied on trade with Thailand in several key product areas, especially fuel, vehicle parts, and agricultural processing. Industrial machinery and intermediate goods trade quickly rebounded, while fuel and agricultural trade pivoted to other regional suppliers. Other areas of bilateral trade appear to be in structural decline. The conflict worsened incomes for migrant workers and border area farmers and businesses. Cambodia’s economy has continued to grow, buttressed by foreign investment and manufacturing growth around Phnom Penh and in the southeastern provinces. The conflict’s limited economic effect on Cambodia may reflect: the versatility of trade for small open economies with sea access and multiple neighbours; the geopolitical benefits of investments from larger economies; and the limits to geoeconomic tools among regional states. Cambodia’s future growth depends on how it stabilises displaced workers’ finances, diversifies and upgrades its industrial base, and fosters new growth drivers in its western provinces.

Thailand’s attempts to use economic power to influence the outcome of its border conflict with Cambodia in 2025 largely failed, due to major changes in the Cambodian economy that have lessened its reliance on its richer neighbour. The conflict’s aftermath highlights how the growth and diversification of Southeast Asian economies increasingly precludes regional governments’ use of so-called ‘geoeconomic’ strategies against one another.

India’s return to caste enumeration after a 94-year hiatus is not merely a statistical event but a watershed in the nation’s unfinished struggle for social justice. This paper interrogates the consequences of governing with century-old caste data, exposing how this “data desert” perpetuates the invisibility of OBCs, Denotified Tribes, Dalit sub-castes, and intersectional minorities. Drawing on the frameworks of data justice, intersectionality, and the political economy of enumeration, we analyze empirical evidence from the SECC 2011, Bihar’s 2023 caste survey, and state and central reports. The findings reveal systemic upper-caste overrepresentation, elite capture within OBC reservations, and the ongoing erasure of Denotified Tribes and Dalit women and trans persons. We argue that blanket quotas without granular sub-categorization have hollowed out the transformative promise of affirmative action. This is the empirical foundation—and the policy roadmap—to dismantle caste-based privilege and forge a truly just republic.Only by reckoning with its data deficit can India renew its constitutional contract and advance genuine social equity.

Regular physical activity supports healthy human functioning1,​2,​3. Might climate change—by modifying the environmental determinants of human physical activity—alter exercise rates in the future4? Here we conduct an empirical investigation of the relationship between meteorological conditions, physical activity and future climate change. Using data on reported participation in recreational physical activity from over 1.9 million US survey respondents between 2002 and 2012, coupled with daily meteorological data, we show that both cold and acutely hot temperatures, as well as precipitation days, reduce physical activity. We combine our historical estimates with output from 21 climate models and project the possible physical activity effects of future climatic changes by 2050 and 2099. Our projection indicates that warming over the course of this century may increase net recreational physical activity in the United States. Activity may increase most during the winter in northern states and decline most during the summer in southern states.

This report applies behavioural science to analyse the persistent decline in routine childhood immunization in Mozambique. Using Ipsos household data, latent class analysis, and gender-dynamics mapping, it identifies socio-cultural, cognitive, and informational barriers that limit vaccine uptake. A review of 58 global interventions informs a set of behaviourally grounded recommendations—spanning community-led communication, mHealth reminders, social-norm messaging, and improved health-worker interaction—to address demand-side frictions. The report offers a scalable framework for strengthening routine immunization in low-resource settings.

Semi-State Terrorist Organizations (SESTOs) are armed groups that not only control territory but also govern civilian populations, blending militant violence with governance functions. Despite their rarity, SESTOs account for a disproportionate share of terrorist attacks and fatalities globally. Here we identify 24 SESTOs using explicit criteria applied to organizations in the Global Terrorism Database (1970–2020), constructing an organization-quarter panel to compare their violent activity against thousands of non-SESTOs. Fixed-effects regressions reveal that SESTOs sustain significantly higher attack frequencies and aggregate fatalities without systematically increasing per-attack lethality or targeting state actors disproportionately. Notably, SESTOs exhibit episodic, extreme bursts of violence. A Random Forest machine learning model trained solely on violent activity accurately distinguishes SESTOs from non-SESTOs, confirming their distinct operational profile. These findings suggest that governance capacity shapes SESTOs' sustained and intense violence, highlighting their outsized threat and the need for nuanced policy responses that consider their unique behavioral patterns.

The unexpected ocean fertilization experiment off the west coast of Canada in 2012 highlights the reality that non-governmental actors can already initiate small- to medium-scale environmental experiments and solar radiation management (SRM) field experiments with no government funding or approval. Without careful consideration and development of a governance framework for these types of experimentation, governments could be caught out having to respond ad hoc to situations driven by non-governmental actors.

This two-day workshop considered and evaluated governance mechanisms that may be useful for managing proposed SRM field experiments. Two specific procedural mechanisms were under consideration: environmental impact assessments and research registries. To ensure discussions were as realistic as possible, participants used a set of recently published SRM field experiment proposals as hypothetical examples when considering and evaluating both mechanisms. The workshop operated under the Chatham House Rule, and no attempts were made to forge consensus positions or to generate policy recommendations. Rather, this workshop was exploratory in nature, with discussions ranging widely along with personal opinions on some topics.

This paper explores the context, practice and lessons related to management and leadership development in a handful of large international NGOs (INGOs) focused on humanitarian and development efforts. The paper is based on eighteen semi-structured interviews with senior managers of human resources or organizational development at INGOs including ActionAid, CARE, Catholic Relief Services, Habitat for Humanity, Médecins Sans Frontières, Mercy Corps, Oxfam, Save the Children and World Vision. It describes how INGOs (individually and collectively) are addressing the challenge of developing strong managers and leaders, what some promising approaches in management and leadership development currently are, what lessons can be learned from past and ongoing experiences in management and leadership development, what challenges and priorities remain, and whether and how academic institutions might be a resource.

How can international law better protect both international security and the human rights of people fleeing violence? International refugee law protects only the refugees: those fleeing across borders due to a well-founded persecution on the basis of race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group. The world’s other 42.3 million people displaced by violence have few protections under international law. This article proposes and sketches new international law to address this crucial human rights problem. I argue that a new Displaced Persons Convention to protect people fleeing violent conflict is needed to supplement the 1951 Refugee Convention. The Refugee Convention must be preserved because of the critical protections it provides for the rights of minorities and political dissidents. Adding a new Displaced Persons Convention would better protect the human rights of individuals fleeing violent conflict and state failure, further state interests, and improve international security.

How can international law protect both international security and the human rights of displaced people? Existing international law protects only displaced refugees: those who flee persecution on the basis of religion, race, nationality, or political opinion. This article argues that a new Displaced Persons Convention must be created to protect the human rights of the world’s other 35 million victims of civil conflict and climate change who do not meet this narrow definition. International Refugee Law must be preserved as it is because it enshrines critical protections for minority rights that must not be diluted. However, an additional instrument of international law is necessary to resolve an issue that is at once one of the greatest human rights issues of our time and a threat to international peace and security. To support this argument, this article presents a comprehensive history of refugees in international law, combining primary sources and original interview data to trace how states have agreed for centuries that refugee law should protect minority rights, even as shifting state interests have changed refugee protection over time. This article refutes other scholarly proposals and UN practices that expand the category of “refugee.” It also contributes to growing scholarly interest in the history of human rights law by arguing that refugee law predates the modern human rights regime, challenges its foundations, and extends its claims to universality.

Solar geoengineering has been proposed as a possible response measure in the event of a "climate emergency." Scientific evidence for climate emergencies in the form of tipping points, however, is contested and unsettled. Furthermore, declarations of emergency entail authoritarian political tendencies that historically have given rise to repression and abuse. By definition, an emergency must exhibit a combination of high risk, urgency and necessity; no plausible climatic tipping point displays all these attributes simultaneously. A weak scientific basis together with genuine societal peril argues against the continued emergency framing of solar geoengineering.

The enormous growth of China’s investments in Israel has become one of the major changes in the Middle East’s geopolitics during the last decade. This paper examines the nationalist motivation behind China’s investment in Israeli technologies and Israel’s strategic role in China’s intended transition from the “world factory” to a global innovation champion. China’s engagement with Israel in the Belt and Road Initiative reflects Chinese techno-nationalism, and the Chinese government has used nationalist discourse to mobilize private enterprises to invest in Israeli technology, promoting the growth of Chinese private investments alongside Chinese state-affiliated investments in Israel since 2014. This chapter also analyses how the surge in Chinese investment activities has shaped larger debates and tensions in Israel’s policymaking and national identity.

The European Union’s 2030 climate and energy package introduced fundamental changes compared to its 2020 predecessor. These changes included a stronger focus on the internal market and an increased emphasis on technology-neutral decarbonization while simultaneously de-emphasizing the renewables target. This article investigates whether changes in domestic policy strategies of leading member states in European climate policy preceded the observed changes in EU policy. Disaggregating strategic change into changes in different elements (goals, objectives, instrumental logic), allows us to go beyond analyzing the relative prioritization of different goals, and to analyze how policy requirements for reaching those goals were dynamically redefined over time. To this end, we introduce a new method, which based on insights from social network analysis, enables us to systematically trace those strategic chances. We find that shifts in national strategies of the investigated member states preceded the shift in EU policy. In particular, countries reframed their understanding of supply security, and pushed for the internal electricity market also as a security measure to balance fluctuating renewables. Hence, the increasing focus on markets and market integration in the European 2030 package echoed the increasingly central role of the internal market for electricity supply security in national strategies. These findings also highlight that countries dynamically redefined their goals relative to the different phases of the energy transition.

This chapter discusses French efforts to counter extremism and radicalization. It focuses on ongoing social, political, and legal debates in France, and highlights policies and programs to prevent radicalization among individuals deemed “at risk,” to deter disaffected individuals from committing terrorist acts, and to reintegrate already “radicalized” individuals into society.

This chapter traces the history of the community of elite German natural scientists in the early twentieth century through the scientists’ nationalism and participation in World War I. Many leading German scientists sacrificed their research interests, international reputations, and scholarly freedom for harsh war work that military officers largely did not respect. In analysing their actions and writings, and the text of the 1914 “Call to the Civilized World,” the chapter describes scientists’ commitment to a collectivistic nationalism and compares the statements of German and British scientists. The scientists’ post-1918 crises and transformed identities further highlight the significance of nationalism in shaping the early twentieth-century German scientists’ work and careers.