- What did Rudolf Eucken mean by 'ethical activism' or the 'spiritual life' philosophy he promoted?
Authoritarianism and Political Dissent
Repressive regimes and the dissidents who resisted them.
- Why was Hauptmann's 1892 play about the Silesian weavers' uprising banned by the Prussian authorities?
- What did the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service require, and who did it target?
- Which major physicists and mathematicians left Germany as a result of the 1933 purges?
- How did the expulsion of German-Jewish scientists ultimately benefit the Allied war effort, including the Manhattan Project?
- What did Carl von Ossietzky publish in 1931 that led to his imprisonment?
- Why couldn't Ossietzky travel to Oslo to accept his Nobel Peace Prize?
- What happened to Ossietzky after he received the Peace Prize?
- How did the circumstances of the 1936 Peace Prize contrast with Carl von Ossietzky's award the year before?
- What allowed Fermi to leave Fascist Italy permanently under the guise of attending his own Nobel ceremony?
- What set The Good Earth apart from other Western fiction about China published in the same period?
- How did Lise Meitner, working in exile, supply the physics explanation for Hahn's puzzling barium result?
- Why did André Gide's account of his trip to the Soviet Union anger the French Communist Party he had once admired?
- Why was Doctor Zhivago published in Italy in 1957 instead of in the Soviet Union?
- How did the Soviet literary establishment and the Writers' Union respond to Pasternak winning the Nobel Prize?
- Why did some California towns burn Steinbeck's books, and what accusations did he face?
- What did Pauling's 1958 petition to the United Nations demand, and how many scientists signed it?
- How did the US government respond to Pauling's anti-nuclear-testing activism, including the FBI and his passport?
- What did Seferis's 1969 statement against the Greek military junta cost him?
- Why did the Soviet press not report the near-disaster during Leonov's spacewalk at the time it happened?
- How large was Churchill's funeral compared to other events in British history, and how was it broadcast?
- Why was El señor presidente unpublishable in Guatemala for nearly two decades after it was written?
- How did 'One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich' manage to get published during the Khrushchev thaw?
- What happened when Brandt visited the Warsaw Ghetto memorial in December 1970?
- What role did Andrei Sakharov play in developing the Soviet hydrogen bomb?
- Why did the Soviet government strip Sakharov of his security clearance and institute position?
- Why couldn't Sakharov travel to Oslo to accept his Nobel Peace Prize in person?
- Why was Aleixandre's surrealist poetry unpublishable under Franco's regime, and what themes made it so?
- What methodology did Amnesty International use to advocate for prisoners of conscience by 1977?
- Why was Anwar Sadat assassinated in 1981, and how was it connected to the peace treaty he signed?
- What argument does The Captive Mind make about how intelligent people accommodate themselves to totalitarian systems?
- How did news of Miłosz's Nobel Prize reach readers in Poland, given that his books were still officially banned there?
- What was Charter 77 and why did signing it put Seifert at odds with the Czechoslovak government?
- What assumption about government did James Buchanan challenge with public choice theory?
- Why did Buchanan argue that politicians and bureaucrats pursue self-interest just as market actors do?
- What role did Sakharov play in developing the Soviet thermonuclear bomb before he became a dissident?
- What arguments did Sakharov make in his 1968 essay that led the KGB to revoke his security clearances?
- Why was Sakharov exiled to Gorky, and what changed to allow his return to Moscow in 1986?
- Why was La colmena published in Buenos Aires rather than in Spain, and what does that say about Francoist censorship?
- What circumstances led the 14th Dalai Lama to flee over the Himalayas into India in 1959?
- What does the 'Middle Way' position actually propose for Tibet, as distinct from full independence?
- Why did the South African government ban several of Gordimer's books, and how did she respond?
- How did Aung San Suu Kyi come to lead Burma's pro-democracy movement in 1988?
- Why did the Burmese military place her under house arrest before the 1990 election?
- What events in 1992 broke open tensions between the LAPD and Los Angeles under Chief Daryl Gates?
- Why did the Ig Nobel committee's citation for Daryl Gates function as an ironic joke?
- What behaviors did Singapore under Lee Kuan Yew punish, and why did the Ig Nobel committee frame this as a psychology study?
- Why was chewing gum unavailable in Singapore for years?
- What argument does the citation make for physical confrontation among politicians over war between nations?
- What methods of execution did Harold Hillman analyse from a physiological standpoint?
- Which methods presumed to be humane did Hillman conclude probably were not?
- How did living as a communist writer under Salazar's Portugal shape Saramago's path to publication?
- Why was Gao Xingjian banned in China after moving to France?
- What persecution did Kim Dae-jung survive before becoming South Korea's president?
- What happened at the June 2000 inter-Korean summit in Pyongyang?
- Why did Fatelessness go largely unnoticed for years after its 1975 publication in Hungary?
- What were the Chain Murders, and how did Ebadi's legal work connect to them?
- Which real historical figures did the committee cite as recurring characters in these emails?
- What political causes did Pinter use his Nobel platform to address?
- How did growing up in Romania's German-speaking Banat minority under Ceaușescu shape Herta Müller's prose style?
- Why was Müller dismissed from her job in 1979, and what happened to her afterward?
- What was Charter 08 and why did it lead to Liu Xiaobo's imprisonment?
- How did the Chinese government retaliate against the Nobel Committee's decision?
- What ultimately happened to Liu Xiaobo after he won the prize?
- How did growing up during the Great Leap Forward famine shape the fiction Mo Yan later wrote?
- Why did Belarus make public applause illegal, and how was the law enforced?
- What happened to a one-armed protester who clapped using his prosthetic hand?
- Why did the Ig Nobel committee award the Peace Prize jointly to Lukashenko and the state police?
- How did Malala Yousafzai's anonymous BBC Urdu blog turn into a public campaign for girls' education?
- What triggered the political crisis that led the Quartet to form in 2013?
- How did Nadia Murad's experience under ISIS captivity shape her advocacy work?
- What reporting did Maria Ressa's Rappler do that led to criminal charges against her?
- How many Novaya Gazeta journalists were killed during Dmitry Muratov's editorship?
- What did Ressa and Muratov each do with their Nobel medals after winning?
- Why was Ales Bialiatski in prison when the 2022 Peace Prize was announced?
- What was Memorial's decades-long documentation project, and why was it dissolved by a Russian court in 2022?
- Why was Narges Mohammadi unable to accept her own Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo?
- How did the Iranian government respond to her winning the prize?
- What happened in Venezuela's 2024 presidential election, and how did the Maduro government respond to the results?
- Why was María Corina Machado barred from running for president herself, and how did she lead the opposition anyway?