Politics

Human Rights

Justice for Chagos?

Decades after the Indian Ocean island colony’s inhabitants were forcibly deported to accommodate an American military base, the ICJ has ruled that they be allowed to return. But is international law sufficient to bring them justice?

May 15, 2025 issue

Francisco Cantú

Legacies of Japanese American Incarceration

The Afterlife Is Letting Go, Brandon Shimoda’s book about how survivors and descendants of the United States’ Japanese internment camps try to keep their families’ histories alive, is also a look at the brutal system of migrant detention that continues to this day.

April 24, 2025 issue

Brenda Wineapple

Peaceable Revolutions

In her history of American social movements, Linda Gordon argues that they are vital and transformative partnerships that, by challenging the status quo, are indispensable to the health of the nation.

April 10, 2025 issue

David Cole

The Wrong War on the War on Drugs

The war on drugs has failed, but so has the constitutional counteroffensive in the courts. What should reformers do instead?

March 13, 2025 issue

Aryeh Neier and Amrit Singh

Guatemala: Democracy Imperiled

Bernardo Arévalo’s inauguration last year as president of Guatemala symbolized the revival of democracy in a notoriously corrupt country. A concerted effort by obstructionist elites now threatens to oust him on specious grounds—and bring repression back.

February 13, 2025 issue

Ursula Lindsey

Joy and Apprehension in Syria

There is widespread relief after Assad’s fall, though no one is more aware than Syrians themselves of the dangers and challenges that await them.

January 16, 2025 issue

Joshua Leifer

Reoccupying Gaza

A consensus has by now emerged among Israel’s leaders that the country’s army will take direct, long-term control of the Strip—and attempt to expel its inhabitants.

April 23, 2025

Nadia Abu El-Haj

‘Mahmoud Is Not Safe’

Mahmoud Khalil’s detention is the result not just of the Trump administration’s agenda but of more than a year of moral panic around pro-Palestine protest.

March 15, 2025

America’s Housing Crisis

Francesca Mari

The Housing Vultures

The investors who exploited the 2008 financial crisis are dictating the bailout of this one.

June 11, 2020 issue

Gabriel M. Schivone

America’s Eviction Epidemic

Across the country, millions of people are facing eviction as protections in place for the pandemic have lapsed.

September 16, 2020

Roberta Brandes Gratz

How NYC Is Zoning Out the Human Scale

This is a New York story only for now. Upzonings and transfers of newly created air rights are occurring in cities around the country. When it comes to real estate, New York City may lead the way, but others follow in time.

December 30, 2019

A view from 7 DeKalb Avenue, an apartment tower in Downtown Brooklyn. Eighty percent of its 250 apartments are subsidized units, for which there were 87,754 applications when it opened.

Michael Greenberg

Tenants Under Siege: Inside New York City’s Housing Crisis

New York City is in the throes of a humanitarian emergency. The tide of homelessness is only the most visible symptom.

August 17, 2017 issue

Life Under Occupation

Nathan Thrall

A Day in the Life of Abed Salama

One man’s quest to find his son lays bare the reality of Palestinian life under Israeli rule.

March 19, 2021

Nathan Thrall, interviewed by Matt Seaton

The Endless Occupation, a New Understanding

“Today’s reality in Israel-Palestine is at odds with everything the United States claims to stand for.”

March 20, 2021

Protesters against the Israeli separation barrier fleeing a tear gas attack by Israeli soldiers in the West Bank village of Bil’in, July 10, 2009

David Shulman

Israel Without Illusions

“No one who regularly visits the Palestinian territories controlled by Israel has to speculate about whether or not Israel is engaged in the routine abuse of human rights.”

December 17, 2009 issue

I.F. Stone

Holy War

“A certain moral imbecility marks all ethnocentric movements. The Others are always either less than human, and thus their interests may be ignored, or more than human and therefore so dangerous that it is right to destroy them.”

August 3, 1967 issue

The Latest

Sari Bashi

Gaza: Starvation and Exile

The Israeli government has announced plans to make civilians in the Strip accept further displacement as a condition of receiving food—and eventually to push them out of Palestine altogether.

May 18, 2025

Gal Koplewitz

‘Legal Whack-A-Mole’

Since October 7, Israel’s oldest and most prominent human rights group has faced stiffer opposition than ever before.

May 9, 2025

Rachel Nolan

‘There’s Nothing for Me Here’

What caused Venezuela’s collapse, and who is responsible? A recent memoir tells the story as so many families have lived it.

May 29, 2025 issue

David Cole

From Evasion to Defiance

As the courts resist his deportation orders, Trump has responded with shockingly bad-faith arguments—and brought the country to the brink of a constitutional crisis.

May 1, 2025

Yassin al-Haj Saleh, translated by Yasmine Seale

The Return

Syria will not be liberated as long as the better part of her, you, remains a hostage of this long-drawn-out captivity.

April 10, 2025

Duncan Hosie

The Apathetic Court

The Supreme Court has in recent years consistently neglected petitions from inmates across the country—even those with the most persuasive claims.

April 9, 2025

Peter Singer

Circling the Good

In his new book the eminent philosopher Thomas Nagel asks whether humans are capable of redefining morality itself.

April 24, 2025 issue

Omer Bartov

‘Infinite License’

The memory of the Holocaust has, perversely, been enlisted to justify both the eradication of Gaza and the extraordinary silence with which that violence has been met.

April 24, 2025 issue

Michael McFaul

Don’t Join the Autocrats!

Trump’s overtures to Vladimir Putin are not just morally wrong but damaging to the US’s long-term interests.

April 2, 2025

Julia Preston

In Trump’s Dragnet

Over the past two months, the president has been doing just what he promised during his campaign: assaulting every aspect of the US immigration system.

March 30, 2025