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2024 is a massively consequential year for national and global politics. Sixty-four countries across the world will have elections over the next 12 months - including the U.S., U.K., European Parliament, Taiwan, India, South Africa, and Mexico. This is a watershed moment for democracy as a governing system not simply because so much of the world's population will mobilize to decide who comes to power - but because, at this moment, countries are more polarized than they have ever been. How di ...
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Peace as an Active Goal with Jennifer Llewellyn
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One of the markers of a deeply polarized society is an inability to talk with those outside one's political or social groups. There's a heightening of the "us versus them" dynamics that make any intergroup interactions undesirable or even impossible. This breakdown in communication contributes to the iterative nature of polarization; we spend more …
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Shared Future vs. Shared Vision with Byron Bland
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How do you repair polarized relationships? Many political depolarization strategies emphasize the value of common interests and elevating similarities to drown out our differences - contact theory, for short. Such strategies certainly have their place, but there is something to be said about learning skills that allow you to co-exist with someone w…
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Polarization and Civil Disorder with Omar McDoom
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What happens when a polarized society turns violent? In Rwanda, decades of tension between the Hutu and Tutsi ethnic groups came to a head in a Civil War that, seemingly overnight, devolved into one of the bloodiest genocides of the 20th century. With concerns about a potential civil war in the United States, it's worth examining what exactly was h…
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Misinformation, Disinformation with Lee McIntyre
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It is not enough that we find ourselves in a global polarization crisis. No, no, no. We simply needed to be entrenched in a global mis/disinformation crisis as well. Indeed, there is reason to believe that the two are interlinked - nefarious actors manufacture false information for a public searching for answers and assume positions of power based …
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Social Media and Knowledge Production with Yoel Roth
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Anyone who's spent time on social media can tell you just how divisive the digital communications space can be. Opinions and ideologies take on a life of their own on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and the icon formerly known as Twitter. The combination of opposing views, loud voices, and general lawlessness makes the internet ripe for…
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Origins of Polarization with Yphtach Lelkes
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How much of our identity is informed by our ideology? How much of our ideology is informed by our identity? Are politicians pulling the electorate to the extremes? Or are voters demanding that politicians take more hard-line policy stances? These are just some of the chicken-and-egg scenarios that come to light when trying to understand what drives…
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Polarization as a Global Phenomenon with Jennifer McCoy
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Pernicious polarization is spreading like wildfire across democracies around the world. And the outlook for the world is, well, awful. The World Economic Forum ranks "Societal Polarization" third in its list of short-term risks - and ninth in long-term risks - in its 2024 Global Risk Report. Adding to the concern are the interactions between polari…
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Democracies are divided. So divided, in fact, that Tom Carothers - Co-Director of the Democracy, Conflict, and Governance Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace - wrote an entire book on it. If someone asked you to think about a democracy in trouble, chances are the United States comes to mind. And not without reason; the current…
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