In the early twenty-first century the Native American populations of the United States continued to live with the legacy of colonialism, ethnic cleansing, and cultural destruction. Although other minority groups had increasingly been able to make their voices heard, Native Americans struggled to bring attention to the continuing consequences of this history. Native Americans were the most economically challenged group in the United States and were disproportionately victims of police violence and mass incarceration. This note provides background for these challenges.

The late 20th century saw a dramatic shift in the criminal justice system of the United States. While incarceration rates had remained stable through the 1960s, they quintupled by the 2000s to 707 per 100,000, far exceeding that of all other nations in the world. By 2020, nearly 2.3 million individuals were locked up in U.S. prisons, jails, and detention centers. Of these, 60% were Black or Latinx. Why the mass incarceration, and why such disparities by race? Were they responses to recent political and economic shifts, or part of a deeper social and cultural history? And what could be done to address what was now widely recognized by policymakers as a crisis of the criminal justice system in the United States?

In August 2017, the Myanmar military commenced a brutal pogrom of the Rohingya minority in Rakhine State, Myanmar. The genocidal campaign marked the most recent and decisive of a series of ethnic cleansing efforts fueled by contention around race, religion, and national identity. Yet the violence came as a shock to the international world, who had watched Myanmar emerge out of a decades-long oppressive military dictatorship into an economically and socially liberalizing democracy in recent years.<br/><br/> Within three months, neighboring Bangladesh found themselves the home of 750,000 Rohingya who had fled across the border. A developing nation of 165 million, it struggled to allocate resources to what became the largest refugee camp in the world. As the Myanmar government navigated international outcry against and domestic support for the violence, Bangladesh navigated its next steps: should it allow the refugees to remain, or should they send them back? And what role did international actors, many of whom had economic stakes within Myanmar, play in this humanitarian crisis?

In the fall of 2018, Rohima Begum considered her options as the small island, or "char," on which her family's house rested slowly but inescapably eroded into the mighty Brahmaputra River in northern Bangladesh. The country, once unceremoniously dubbed a "basket case" by then US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, had since emerged according to many economic metrics. At the same time, it remained faced with a unique set of political, economic, international, and climactic concerns. For while most of the world saw climate change as a future threat to be mitigated, Bangladesh faced the immediate challenge of adaptation. Indeed, "climate refugees" from the country had become the single largest group of immigrants to Europe in 2017, and some observers recognized the country as a proverbial canary in the coalmine. Might Bangladesh's challenges be owned by the world?