The Populist-Nationalist Rebellion: Challenge to Transatlantic Democracy. College of Europe Policy Brief #2.19, April 2019

> The United States and the European Union are confronted today by a surge of populist nationalism driven by rebellion against governing elites. This presents multiple challenges to transatlantic democracy. > The rise of economic globalization and a collision of social values since the end of the Cold War has produced widespread anxiety, economic disruption and a corrosive politics of fear. This has led to economic rebellion by people left behind by globalization, from which elites have disproportionately benefitted, and social and cultural rebellion by national and ethnic majorities feeling threatened by minorities, immigration and European integration promoted by governing elites. > A prime example of these trends is Hungary, which has become a European laboratory for populist nationalism. Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s soft authoritarianism is based on populist-nationalist manipulation, and his success has made him the strongman of the far right on both sides of the Atlantic. Similar populist-nationalist movements emerged around Brexit in the UK and the Tea Party in the US, exacerbating centrifugal forces in the EU and leading to the election of Donald Trump in the US. > Democratic institutions in the US and the EU – the electoral process, the media, the courts, law enforcement, civil service and above all, civil society – are potential sources of democratic resilience. The dangers democracy faces today can in fact stimulate its revival if populist-nationalist forces and the broader civil society are able to work together in a movement for economic fairness and democratic renewal

Human Rights & the International Criminal Court

From the EPIIC Symposium at Tufts University. These articles speak about topics on war and the effects that the US government had on it, issues about war crimes, and human rights to name a few

Erik Satie: A Conversation

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A Generalized Polynomial Identity Arising from Quantum Mechanics

We establish a general identity that expresses a Pfaffian of a certain matrix as a quotient of homogeneous polynomials. This identity arises in the study of weakly interacting many-body systems and its proof provides another way of realizing the equivalence of two proposed types of trial wave functions used to describe such systems. In the proof of our identity, we make use of only elementary linear algebra and combinatorics and thereby avoid use of more advanced conformal field theory in establishing the aforementioned equivalence