Opinion

IAS scholars share informed and diverse perspectives on high-level issues, contemporary society, and social change, lending expert insight to the global discourse.

By Maira Hayat, current Member in the School of Social Science

"As Pakistan is enduring devastating floods and an ongoing humanitarian disaster — including decimated crops, more than 500 children dead, hospitals filled with malaria and dengue-infected people and millions of people displaced from their homes — its water infrastructure and management have come under increasing scrutiny.

By Joan Wallach Scott, Professor Emerita in the School of Social Science:

"In his recent essay in these pages on the vexed question of 'presentism' in the discipline of history, David Bell offers a soothing alternative to the American Historical Association president James Sweet’s clumsy dismissal of 'presentism' as a deviation from the true path of historical scholarship."

“We can see the unseen. An astonishing deep-field image of crashing galaxies and bygone nebulae. A glimpse at what the death of our own sun might look like. Baby stars being born perched on cosmic cliffs. The first photographs of the JWST are breathtaking, and they will dramatically change how we understand the universe."

During the heyday of the social movements of the 1960s, Martin Luther King’s citation of the abolitionist Theodore Parker’s—“the arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards justice”—served as an inspirational and aspirational text. Even as events called into question that belief in the inevitability of progress, some things did seem to be permanent advancements.

Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine is a humanitarian crisis of epic proportions. It has created a refugee crisis, the scale of which has not been seen since World War II in Europe. The toll of civilian casualties is in the thousands, with countless others missing, injured, trapped, or lacking in essential medicines, food, and water.

By Adriana Petryna, Member (2003–04) and Visitor (2006) in the School of Social Science:

"Already this year, both Colorado and New Mexico have seen the most destructive wildfires in their states’ histories. Colorado’s Marshall Fire consumed almost 1,100 homes in Boulder County. At a time when rooftops and lawns would normally have been covered with snow, drought had left the region dry and vulnerable instead."

By Jonathan Haslam, past George F. Kennan Professor (2015–21) in the School of Historical Studies:

"Are sanctions against Russia working? Two months on from the first targeting of Russian banks and oligarchs, Putin's grip on power remains as firm as ever. This shouldn't come as a surprise: restrictions on Iran, Venezuela and North Korea have impoverished their populations, but haven’t led to political revolutions."