Insights

Immigrants do not uniformly support progressive parties despite their pro-immigration policies because their political preferences are shaped by the regimes where they were socialized. Research on Green party support in Western and Northern Europe shows immigrants from established democracies are more likely to back these parties, which emphasize environmental and post-materialist issues, than those from authoritarian or post-authoritarian regimes. This is due to differing political socialization: established democracies historically prioritize environmental issues and foster post-materialist values, while authoritarian contexts focus more on economic insecurity and survival, limiting exposure to such concerns. Thus, immigrants’ early political environments shape their issue priorities and party support after migration.
Latin America
Why don’t all immigrants support progressive parties?
Across Asia and the Pacific, escalating climate pressures and inequalities intensify water challenges, necessitating meaningful partnerships with civil society organizations (CSOs). CSOs bring trusted community connections, social insights, and technical expertise that enhance inclusion, accountability, and sustainability in water projects. Effective engagement involves early involvement across project phases, clear roles, inclusion of local groups, transparent communication, and mutual capacity strengthening. Successful CSO partnerships improve equitable access, project relevance, social accountability, and long-term system sustainability. Strategies like stakeholder mapping, co-design, bridging technical and social aspects, and social accountability tools optimize CSO contributions, advancing Sustainable Development Goals on clean water, gender equality, and partnerships.
Partnering with Civil Society for More Inclusive Water Solutions
The concept of an AI singularity as a solitary, godlike intelligence is flawed. Intelligence is inherently high-dimensional, relational, and collective rather than a singular measure surpassing human scale. AI development is likely to follow a plural and social trajectory, deeply intertwined with human intelligence. Recent advancements in agentic AI demonstrate that transformative intelligence arises from interactions among distributed agents, including human-AI collaborations ("centaur" configurations) and complex microsocieties within AI models themselves. This social and collective nature defines the next intelligence explosion.
Education
Agentic AI and the next intelligence explosion
Alan Shark’s book provides a comprehensive guide for public sector leaders on AI adoption, organized into five parts. It covers AI fundamentals, key questions for administrators, and emotional intelligence in machines. It addresses governance challenges like AI auditing, cybersecurity, and organizational fatigue from rapid change. The book explores leadership roles, procurement impacts, and power dynamics in technology integration. It discusses policy issues including regulation, workforce concerns, generative AI use, and responsible implementation. Finally, it highlights sustainability challenges, the rise of voice interfaces, workforce readiness, and accountability issues in public sector AI deployment.
Education
A Practical Guide for AI Use by Public Sector Leaders — and Why This Matters Now More Than Ever
SciSciGPT is an open-source AI collaborator designed to enhance research in the science of science domain by automating complex workflows, supporting diverse analytical methods, accelerating prototyping, and improving reproducibility. It streamlines empirical and analytical research tasks, demonstrating significant potential to advance scientific discovery. The project introduces a capability maturity model for human–AI collaboration, outlining a roadmap to enhance AI frameworks like SciSciGPT. As AI evolves, such tools will be integral to scientific inquiry, though challenges like transparency, ethical use, and balancing human-AI roles must be addressed to shape the future research ecosystem.
SciSciGPT: advancing human–AI collaboration in the science of science
In 2025, violent events nearly doubled compared to 2021, with over 185,000 incidents recorded globally. Warfare is increasingly shaped by technologies like drones, AI, and smartphones, which also draw civilians into conflict as real-time information sharing risks greater harm. Online communication tools enable conflict escalation through disinformation and hate speech. Despite these challenges, PeaceTech innovations have emerged, leveraging technology to promote human dignity and peacebuilding before, during, and after conflicts. These developments highlight new pathways for peace amid evolving warfare dynamics.
What’s New in PeaceTech? 10 Notable Developments from 2025
Eco-dystopian novels from Asia and Africa are expanding the environmental fiction genre by addressing urgent ecological issues through speculative futures. In China and Taiwan, works like Liu Cixin’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past and Chen Qiufan’s Waste Tide depict environmental degradation and its social consequences, reflecting contemporary concerns. Nigerian authors such as Suyi Davies Okungbowa explore climate disasters and inequality in flooded Lagos, while Indian writers like Lavanya Lakshminarayan and Varun Thomas Mathew focus on mistrust of technological change amidst ecological collapse. These globally diverse narratives use futuristic settings to explore loss, injustice, and environmental crisis, broadening the eco-dystopian imagination beyond the West.
How ‘eco‑dystopian’ novels from Asia and Africa are pushing boundaries
The U.S. and Israeli military operation against Iran, launched on February 28, has failed militarily, economically, and politically, revealing an underestimation of Iran’s resilience. Despite targeted strikes, Iran maintains robust missile and drone capabilities, an intact nuclear program, and active regional proxies. The conflict disrupted global energy markets by restricting Strait of Hormuz transit, raising oil prices above $110 per barrel and increasing the risk of a global recession. Internally, the strikes have bolstered national unity and strengthened Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, complicating the geopolitical landscape and undermining efforts for regional stability.
Latin America | Financial services
War in Iran: Triple Failure and Strategic Deadlock
Time and attention are highly valuable in today’s attention economy, with algorithms exploiting behavioral biases to capture user engagement and reinforce echo chambers and misinformation, especially during politically sensitive periods. Algorithms use choice architecture, variable rewards, and confirmation bias to shape user behavior, often leading individuals down unplanned content paths. They optimize for emotional reactions like outrage or humor to maximize attention. This data-driven system not only predicts preferences but steers users toward polarizing content, impacting political discourse as seen in events like the 2020 U.S. election. Algorithmic resistance is essential to preserve user autonomy amid these manipulative influences.
Is it time to resist algorithmic influences?
Research on citizens’ assemblies has traditionally focused on members’ deliberative experiences, but recent studies examine the governance behind their organization and operation. Governance involves who governs, decision-making processes, and integrity, defined as negotiating tensions between deliberative values and practical constraints in commissioning and running assemblies. Findings from the 2021 Global Assembly on Climate and Ecological Crisis highlight three core governance tensions: collaboration among diverse stakeholders, grounding decision-making, and balancing horizontal and vertical organizational logics. These insights inform future research and practice on citizen assembly governance.
The Governance of Citizens’ Assemblies: Negotiating deliberative values and practical constraints and practical constraints
Hundreds of global technology experts emphasize the need for a comprehensive, systemic response to rapid AI advancements to benefit humanity. They highlight AI’s growing role as society’s invisible operating system, fundamentally shaping opportunities, services, risk management, and human rights. By the next decade, 82% foresee AI significantly influencing daily life and societal systems, with over half expecting AI to guide or control most human decisions. However, 45% predict low human resilience to such changes, partly due to passive acceptance of AI’s influence. Satisfaction with AI is mixed, with roughly equal proportions expressing satisfaction, dissatisfaction, or ambivalence. Traditional individual resilience strategies are deemed insufficient for the AI-driven future.
Education
Building a Human Resilience Infrastructure for the Age of AI
AI regulations in over 100 countries largely neglect environmental impacts, focusing instead on privacy, bias, and security. AI production and use drive significant greenhouse gas emissions, water consumption, pollution, and habitat loss, primarily due to energy-intensive GPU manufacturing, rare earth extraction, and AI model training and deployment. The EU’s AI Act, effective from August 2024, requires some environmental disclosures but lacks compulsory sustainability mandates. The UK has no AI-specific laws addressing environmental risks. Greater transparency on energy, water use, and emissions is needed, alongside mandatory targets, AI sustainability labeling, and incentives for greener practices to curb AI’s environmental damage as the technology expands.
Education
AI laws overlook environmental damage – here’s what needs to change
Daniel P. Aldrich’s Beyond Common Ground highlights how social infrastructure—physical and virtual spaces like parks, libraries, and radio programs—can effectively address complex issues such as climate change, terrorism, and crime. Drawing on evidence from nine countries, the book shows how these systems build social capital and resilience. Examples include Japan’s Ibasho center reducing tsunami mortality, Philadelphia’s greening initiatives lowering crime, and radio programs countering extremist recruitment in the Sahel. Aldrich advocates for prioritizing social infrastructure as a multi-benefit solution to interconnected social challenges.
Beyond Common Ground: How Everyday Places Solve Big Social Challenges
Scientists publish over 10 million studies annually, but many findings fail to hold up under scrutiny. To address this, a DARPA-funded project called SCORE developed AI systems to predict which studies would replicate reliably, aiming to create a "credit score" for scientific robustness. Despite extensive efforts analyzing and replicating hundreds of studies, AI currently cannot reliably predict study reproducibility. Replication efforts in psychology and biomedical research reveal that fewer than half of the original findings consistently reproduce, highlighting ongoing challenges in scientific reliability.
Can Science Predict When a Study Won’t Hold Up?
On June 13, 2025, Israel used AI-coordinated quadcopter drones to disable Iran’s radar and missile sites before launching a bombing campaign, demonstrating a new warfare paradigm combining AI and drones. Similarly, Ukraine used AI-trained drones to target Russian bombers deep in Siberia. Though these incidents did not cause immediate geopolitical shifts, they signify a transformative moment in military strategy, akin to Sputnik or the atomic bomb, highlighting a move toward war conducted with minimal direct human involvement.
A Shakeup Is Coming for the Nation-State
OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic employ distinct business models and growth strategies to compete in the evolving AI market. These leading platforms differentiate themselves through their approaches to strategy, monetization, and market positioning. Their varied paths reflect diverse priorities in capturing value within the rapidly expanding artificial intelligence industry.
Inside the Business Models of Today’s Top AI Platforms
The government's social cohesion plan, Protecting What Matters, addresses community division through integration and dialogue but overlooks deeper causes. It equates cohesion with unity but fails to measure or address economic deprivation, which research shows is the primary driver of mistrust and social disengagement—not diversity. True community resilience depends on tangible social infrastructure such as jobs, clubs, and public spaces that foster routine interaction and shared purpose. Reviving these material foundations, tailored to local needs, is essential for building solidarity and tackling division beyond superficial cultural integration efforts.
Financial services
What the government’s plan for social cohesion gets wrong about community division
Finnish Prime Minister Petteri Orpo’s 2023 labour market and social security reforms aimed to boost employment by easing dismissal rules, reducing unemployment benefits, and weakening trade union influence. These changes dismantled long-standing industrial relations structures without involving key labour market actors, leading to widespread union strikes. Despite intentions to stimulate job creation and reduce public debt, employment stagnated, government debt increased, and economic growth lagged behind peer countries. Additionally, austerity measures and tightened migration policies further constrained economic dynamism, undermining Finland’s traditionally cooperative tripartite model and delivering results contrary to government goals.
Finland
Finland’s “Orpo reforms” have failed to deliver
AI is transforming apprenticeships by automating many basic tasks traditionally done by trainees, reducing their value to masters and threatening the viability of apprenticeship systems. However, AI also elevates the potential productivity and skill ceiling of advanced apprentices by complementing their higher-level work, thereby increasing their value. This creates a dynamic tension: AI shrinks profits by replacing menial apprentice work but can grow profits by enabling apprentices to contribute more advanced, valuable work faster. The outcome depends on which effect dominates, potentially dictating the future structure and profitability of apprenticeships, especially in fields like law where accelerated training and higher productivity coexist with reduced long-term training incentives.
Education
Are Apprentices an Endangered Species?
Negotiation skills used in business settings can aid in resolving conflicts with friends and family if approached thoughtfully. Key is shifting from a transactional to a relational mindset, avoiding the term "negotiation"—which can trigger mistrust—and instead framing discussions as "problem-solving." Timing conversations appropriately and avoiding ambushes helps foster cooperation. Using BATNA (Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement) tactics at home often escalates conflict, so it's better to focus on shared goals and express emotions like disappointment rather than anger to encourage repair. In multi-party family negotiations, avoid secret side talks to preserve trust, hold open forums, and establish mutual objectives for successful outcomes.
When the Negotiation Table Is the Dinner Table

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