Read all posts from ‘Relationship trouble’

The Salvadoran state is like a father who has many children. It is in debt, has limited wages, has maxed out its credit cards and overdrawn its checking account, and while it gets loans to restructure its debt, it always comes back for another overdraft. Father State thinks he’s doing well. He […]

There’s an old Communist-era joke that neatly sums up the way most Romanians think about the relationship between the state and the individual. It hinges on a play on words so is not so easy to translate into English: “Știi bancul cu Statuia? Statu’ ia tot.” (Do you know the […]

Beset by economic woes and laboring under rapid demographic change, Pakistan still manages to leverage the power of technological breakthroughs in new and creative ways to improve the workings of government. One such way was found by Zubair K. Bhatti, the government administrator of the district of Jhang, and his […]

A citizen and his State. This relationship is at the forefront of discussion as the welfare state tests its limits and migration patterns become increasingly metropolitan. Thanks in particular to Millennials, urban migration seems beyond inevitable. Yet this growing trend rarely factors into our larger debates about government’s role in […]

“You cannot drive change into a community and unload it off the back of a truck. That is the lesson of the Intervention.” —Northern Territory Emergency Response Review Report, 13 October 2008, p58 In 2007, the Australian federal government called in the military to intervene in the Northern Territory to […]