DEPARTMENT OF POLITICAL SCIENCE

"The 2008 global financial crisis set in motion the first major increases in banking regulation since the 1930s, culminating in the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act 2010 in the US. A core provision of this Act, known as the Volcker Rule, represents one of the most substantive attempts to change the universal banking model, which involves the merging of investment and commercial banking. The universal model had taken hold since the 1980s and received official sanction since the Clinton- era deregulatory reforms. The Volcker Rule banned proprietary trading by commercial banks, based on the perception that excessive risk-taking with customer deposits had been a core cause of the wave of bank solvency and liquidity crises in 2008–09, incentivized by public backstopping of banks deemed too big to fail.

"“It’s quite heartening to see places with such different dynamics in their local environments and we’re reminded that we’re all part of the same enterprise,” said Northwestern University political science professor Ian Hurd. Northwestern appears to be the only Big Ten school with federal grant funding frozen by the Trump administration. Hurd, who is president-elect of its faculty senate, said the group hasn’t officially considered joining the alliance effort, but he feels there’s strong interest. “I think there’s a really clear sense of shared fate across American universities at the moment in the face of a common threat. So working together seems like a very obvious step forward,” he said."

"In the weeks since the explosive revelation that top U.S. officials inadvertently shared attack plans in Yemen with a journalist on a Signal group chat, fresh questions about the Trump administration’s lax approach to digital security have continued to emerge. On April 20, The New York Times reported that the security breach is even worse than initially understood: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had also shared many of the same details about the imminent U.S. bombing strike in Yemen in a second group chat with several family members, a personal lawyer, and others, using his private phone. The fiasco now known as SignalGate raises many urgent issues related to national security.

"Northwestern student Ethan Barnes has been named a 2025 Truman Scholar in recognition of his academic achievement and commitment to public service leadership. A junior studying political science in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, Barnes is planning to pursue a law degree and a career in law and public service. Before transferring to Northwestern from Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, he made history as the town’s youngest civil service commissioner. Barnes is deeply committed to criminal justice reform and civic engagement, and he worked in Carlisle to help facilitate local police hiring and promotion processes.

"Until this week, Kilmar Abrego Garcia — the Maryland resident wrongfully detained and deported to El Salvador in March — was being held in El Salvador's infamous new mega prison. Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran native who fled as a teenager for his safety, was being held in the high-security prison alongside other deportees and alleged gang members. For more on the history of the prison, who it houses, and the myriad of human rights concerns around it, host Deepa Fernandes is joined by Emerson College professor Mneesha Gellman, founder and director of the Emerson Prison Initiative, who has covered the mega prison."

Until 2019, Japan was the only mature democracy to maintain closed borders to unskilled foreign labor since the end of World War II. Despite facing signifi-cant labor shortages since the 1980s and a pending demographic crisis—with among the world’s lowest birth rates and the fastest-aging population—Japan’s foreign population, ranging from recently arrived short-term foreign workers to six generations of foreign permanent residents, has not exceeded 3 percent of the total population since the early 1950s.

It all began in 2007. Jacqueline Stevens (1962) read about Pedro Guzmán, a mentally ill 31-year-old man who was jailed for a misdemeanor in Los Angeles, California, where he was born, when he was removed from the country as an illegal immigrant. Guzmán was deported to Mexico and spent three months adrift, sleeping on the streets and eating out of the garbage, while his family desperately searched for him. Learning of his story made the researcher and professor of political science at Northwestern University (Illinois) set out to study something that until then no one had analyzed in depth: how many U.S. citizens are deported by their own country’s immigration authorities, a phenomenon the federal government does not track on its own.

"Alisher Juzgenbayev is a political science JD/PhD candidate jointly through the Pritzker School of Law and the Department of Political Science in the Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences. He is advised by Jordan Gans-Morse. Alisher's dissertation project explores how ordinary citizens navigate everyday disputes with state officials, contesting decisions like denied benefits, fines, or refused permits.

Si Mario Vargas Llosa hubiese ganado las elecciones presidenciales de 1990, el país no habría cambiado radicalmente. Pero su trayectoria intelectual, sí. En sus caminatas por el Jardin de Luxemburgo o encerrado en su departamento de la rue de Tournon, lo embriagaría la sensación de que algo le falta: acaso el cariño y la admiración de sus compatriotas, acaso el Premio Nobel de Literatura que nunca se ganaría. O quizá ese vacío tendría su origen en la falta de reconocimiento —cuando no el desdén— hacia su paso por la política, que, a diferencia de sus colegas Fernando Henrique Cardoso o Václav Havel, no le otorgaría la fama de estadista exitoso al que acudir por consejos.

"But Imamoglu’s arrest last month came just three weeks after Abdullah Ocalan, the imprisoned leader of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, asked his movement to lay down its arms following a decades-long insurgency. Erdogan’s government has rejected any suggestion that it is cutting a deal with Ocalan and the PKK, which is classified as a terrorist organization by Turkey, the European Union and the United States. But some in the CHP worry that the timing is not coincidental. Members of the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Equality and Democracy Party, or DEM, were recently allowed to visit Ocalan in prison and later met with Erdogan for the first time in over a decade. “The pro-Kurdish party is now in a dilemma: If they support the rest of the opposition very strongly, they risk derailing the process,” said Mert Arslanalp, a political scientist."