For most Americans, Huawei is hardly a household name. The Chinese telecommunications equipment and consumer electronics manufacturer has had only a limited consumer footprint in the United States. That began to change, though, last year when the daughter of the company’s founder and its chief financial officer, Meng Wanzhou, stepped off a plane in Vancouver, British Columbia, and was immediately taken into custody by Canadian authorities at the behest of the United States. Her arrest for allegedly helping Huawei evade US sanctions on Iran, and the tit-for-tat detention of a number of Canadian citizens in China, has brought renewed attention on the company, its relationship with China’s military and intelligence agencies, and its ambitious goals to be a dominant player in the race to deploy 5G wireless technology around the world. 

Paul Clifford, a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Ash Center and author of The China Paradox: At the Front Line of Economic Transformation, helped shed light on Huawei’s growth strategy and addressed directly some of the security claims lodged at the company by senior Trump administration officials at a talk at the Ash Center earlier this spring.... Read more about Huawei, a self-made world-class company or agent of China's global strategy?

With national elections under way in India, hundreds of millions of voters are casting ballots at nearly a million polling locations. For the world’s most populous democracy, it is a herculean feat of electoral administration. But beyond the heavy logistical lift, this election has the potential to shape the very future of the country’s pluralistic political system, according to noted India expert Ashutosh Varney.

Just days after Ryan Swann MC/MPA 2019 and his identical twin brother, Bryan MC/MPA 2019, walked across the stage to accept their diplomas at Prince George’s County Largo High School in Maryland, the brothers enlisted in the Marine Corps Reserve and were en route to basic training in Parris Island, South Carolina.

“I come from a large family of veterans and public servants,” says Ryan Swann, recipient of the Ash Center's 2018–19 Roy and Lila Ash Fellowship in Democracy, a scholarship that is awarded to a meritorious mid-career student with a proven dedication to democratic governance and public-sector innovation. “I really felt the need to serve.”... Read more about Roy and Lila Ash Fellow Ryan Swann: A Story of Service

In the United States, nearly 23,000 young people age out of the foster care system every year without having been reunited with their families or placed in permanent homes. Approximately 20 percent of those who leave foster care without a permanent home after turning 18 join the growing ranks of the homeless in cities and towns large and small across the country, according to the National Foster Youth Initiative. Only half will find gainful employment by the time they turn 24.... Read more about Working Wonders for Foster Youth

With camera equipment often in tow, Cecily Tyler MC/MPA 2016 has been a familiar face at the Ash Center since graduating from the Kennedy School three years ago. Tyler, a documentary filmmaker, has worked with scores of students at the Center since starting to teach videographic essay-making skills as part of Ash Center resident faculty affiliate Jorrit de Jong’s Innovation Field Lab course.... Read more about Behind the Lens: Cecily Tyler Is Building a New Generation of Citizen Storytellers

Getting eligible Harvard students to vote in US elections shouldn’t be hard, should it? After all, the University prides itself on being a training ground for emerging leaders, inculcating into successive generations of students the values and importance of civic engagement and democratic governance. But it turns out that many of these same students don’t exercise what is arguably democracy's core right and responsibility while at Harvard: showing up at the polls.... Read more about Harvard Votes

The Ash Center sat down for a conversation with Kathryn Sikkink, Ryan Family Professor of Human Rights Policy at HKS and one of Ash’s newest faculty affiliates.

You are known for your work on international human rights issues, but you also helped co-chair the School's participation in the Harvard Votes Challenge with Archon Fung. How did you go from the world of human rights, and the responsibility to protect, to voting?

Well, first, I've always been interested in human rights. I got interested in human rights as an undergraduate student living in Uruguay during the darkest days of the dictatorship.... Read more about Kathryn Sikkink on Voter Participation

Like most city leaders, Jennifer Musisi, the former municipal head of Kampala, Uganda’s capital city, came into office with plans to shake up how local government did business. She wasn’t afraid to ruffle a few feathers in order to improve how Uganda’s largest metro area, long plagued by corruption and poor administration, provided services to its one and a half million residents. What she didn’t expect was that her pursuit of greater government efficiency and transparency would result in threats on her life.... Read more about From Kampala to Cambridge: Jennifer Musisi knows what it takes to lead high-stakes change in city government

In two recently released papers, a pair of scholars affiliated with Harvard Kennedy School’s Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation take a close look at how urban leaders are grappling with the quick pace of technological and regulatory change in America’s cities today. In Reforming Mobility Management: Rethinking the Regulatory Framework, Stephen Goldsmith, the Daniel Paul Professor of the Practice of Government at Harvard Kennedy School, lays out a new model for how...

As much of official Washington gathered in the cavernous nave of the Washington National Cathedral earlier this month to pay their final respects to the late Senator John McCain, Harvard’s Thomas Vallely MC/MPA 1983 stood among former presidents, cabinet secretaries, members of Congress, and military service members to say goodbye to a friend of 30 years with whom he had worked to reshape U.S. policy in Southeast Asia... Read more about Remembering Senator John McCain and his efforts to heal the wounds of the Vietnam War

Kelly Lugbill Clark MPP 2018 was driving along the streets of Kinshasa in April 2015 when the news came over the radio that the death of a young African American man in police custody named Freddie Gray had touched off days of rioting in Baltimore. Clark, winner of the Ash Center’s 2018 Martha H. Mauzy Award for the Advancement of Democratic Governance, was in the Democratic Republic of the Congo helping to oversee human rights and democracy programming for the Carter Center of Atlanta. She was pressed by her Congolese colleagues on why she had traveled thousands of miles to work when America was plainly grappling with human rights issues of its own.... Read more about From Kinshasa to Richmond, Kelly Clark Works to Empower Community

A small, intensely blue, frozen pool sits isolated in a sparsely populated area of the Tibetan Plateau in Qinghai, China. It is hard to imagine, but this bit of ice, the Lasagongma Spring, is the start of a river that serves as the lifeblood to 60 million people.

With spring’s arrival, the ice melts and the pool is awash as mountain snows turn to water and flood the valley. Ultimately, the water will flow through China, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam, entering Vietnam’s Mekong Delta and then emptying into the South China Sea (or the East Sea to the Vietnamese). In total, the waters of the Greater Mekong Basin help feed an estimated 300 million people... Read more about Ensuring the Future of the Lower Mekong Basin

In Boston for a performance with Arcade Fire, the Montréal-based rock band he helped found, the Ash Center sat down Will Butler, a 2017 graduate of Harvard Kennedy School’s mid-career MPA program for a conversation on the intersection of public policy, the arts, and his efforts to strengthen a culture of public engagement and participation in government and elections... Read more about Arcade Fire's Will Bulter on Voting & Civic Participation

The Ash Center sat down with Scott Mainwaring, the Jorge Paulo Lemann Professor for Brazil Studies and an Ash Center resident faculty affiliate. Mainwaring also serves as faculty co-chair of the Brazil Studies Program at Harvard University’s David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies. Mainwaring is editor of the recently published Party Systems in Latin America: Institutionalization, Decay, and Collapse (Cambridge University Press, 2018).... Read more about Scott Mainwaring on Party Systems in Latin America

Nisreen Haj Ahmad MC/MPA ’08, a former visiting research fellow at the Ash Center, spent the first seven years of her professional career enmeshed in Israeli-Palestinian peace talks as a legal adviser to the Palestinian negotiating team. By the end of her tenure as a Palestinian negotiator, “I was depressed,” she recalls. “I studied law to defend the rights of oppressed people.” However, the minutiae and grinding pace of negotiations led Haj Ahmad to question whether the power of law was sufficient to impact the lives of ordinary Palestinians.

In 2007, wanting to gain new perspective, she seized an opportunity to attend Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) as a mid-career student... Read more about Ash Alumna Sparks Community Organizing in Jordan