In explaining her political trajectory, Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema once described her younger progressive self as “the patron saint of lost causes,” saying she’d learned the hard way about the need to build diverse coalitions to get things done.

Time will tell whether her latest shift – leaving the Democratic Party to chart her own path as an independent – will be another “lost cause” or a shrewd move in today’s political environment.

The first Democrat in decades to win a Senate race in Arizona in 2018, the bisexual former anti-war activist had long ago left behind her progressive crusading, carving out a niche in Washington as a bipartisan negotiator. She spearheaded bills on everything from infrastructure to same-sex marriage, which often required compromising on liberal priorities. She also held up key aspects of President Joe Biden’s legislative agenda, including his $3.5 trillion “Build Back Better” bill.

Her iconoclasm infuriated colleagues in Washington and former supporters back home, some of whom famously chased her into a bathroom last year. “People worked very hard to get her elected and they feel betrayed,” says Sacha Haworth, Ms. Sinema’s 2018 campaign communications director, who is now senior adviser to a super PAC focused on ousting her in 2024. 

In raw political terms, Ms. Sinema’s defection allows her to avoid what would almost certainly have been a difficult primary fight, forcing Democrats to decide instead whether to field a candidate in a three-way race that could give Republicans an edge. Still, the Arizona senator casts herself as not a spoiler but a trailblazer – a politician who is actually responding to voters’ very real fatigue with partisanship, and providing, as she put it, a “place of belonging” for them. 

In some ways, the numbers back her up. Independent voters now constitute the biggest political bloc in the United States, and they have a particularly strong presence in Arizona, where the share of active voters who don’t identify with either party has grown nearly every year since 2000, from 18% to 32%. By stepping outside the two-party system, Senator Sinema could resonate with the rising number of voters who feel politically homeless. 

J. Scott Applewhite/AP

Senator Sinema, flanked by Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin (left) and GOP Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, speaks to reporters following Senate passage of the Respect for Marriage Act, at the Capitol in Washington, Nov. 29, 2022.

“Voices that don’t feel that they fit in one party or another are still valuable voices,” says Clarine Nardi Riddle, former chief of staff for Sen. Joe Lieberman, the onetime Democratic vice presidential nominee who lost his Connecticut primary in 2006 and went on to win reelection as an independent. “Independent voices can help with problem-solving. They can bring different perspectives – and consensus perspectives,” Ms. Riddle adds. 

Democratic frustration

Many Democrats, including in Arizona, see “consensus” as a euphemism for selling out. They are frustrated that at a time when their party held the presidency and controlled both chambers of Congress, one enigmatic senator from Arizona was able to “sabotage” key provisions they believed would help support working families and shore up voting rights. They accuse her of protecting wealthy investors while torpedoing universal child care; one group, the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, mocked her as leaving the Democratic Party “to spend more time with her Wall Street family.”

Some are also furious that she – together with West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin – refused to end the filibuster, which effectively allowed the GOP to hold the party’s agenda hostage. In a Senate divided 50-50 over the past two years, the filibuster meant Democrats needed the support of 10 GOP senators to advance most legislation, rather than being able to use Vice President Kamala Harris’ tie-breaking vote to pass bills with a simple majority. 

Supporters counter that the main reason Senator Sinema was able to get elected as a Democrat in the first place is that she already had a track record of working across the aisle. After an unsuccessful first year as a legislator in Arizona’s Statehouse, she changed tack, as she explained in her 2009 book, “Unite and Conquer.” 

“I’d spent all my time being a crusader for justice, a patron saint for lost causes, and I’d missed out on the opportunity to form meaningful relationships with fellow members in the legislature, lobbyists, and other state actors,” she wrote. “I hadn’t gotten any of my great policy ideas enacted into law, and I’d seen lots of stuff I didn’t like become law.”

She went on to form broad coalitions to defeat a same-sex marriage ban by engaging not only LGBTQ activists but also teachers and older unmarried couples whose domestic partners stood to lose their benefits. She also got a law passed to prevent mothers from being kicked out of public areas for breastfeeding, by framing it around motherhood rather than women’s rights, which engaged more conservative women who lobbied their representatives.  

The Arizona senator has always done a good job of “reading the room,” says independent pollster Mike Noble. “Democrats couldn’t win statewide in Arizona for the life of them until Sinema came along and said, ‘Hey, this is how you win.’” 

Since then, however, Democrat Mark Kelly has won election to the Senate twice – once in a special election, and again this fall, by a relatively comfortable 5 percentage points. 

“Mark Kelly just proved that you can run as a Democrat and win,” says Ms. Haworth, Senator Sinema’s former campaign communications director. “You don’t have to be some fake independent.”

Senator Kelly is also far more popular, enjoying 89% favorability among Democrats – nearly triple Senator Sinema’s rate, and he polls 8 points higher than her among independents, at 50%.

A growing number of independent voters

Still, the independent voter trend is real. Thom Reilly, co-director of Arizona State University’s Center for an Independent and Sustainable Democracy and co-author of the recently released book “The Independent Voter,” says Senator Sinema is reflecting the views of a lot of Arizonans as well as a national trend of voters leaving the two-party system. Some 42% of Americans now identify as independents, giving them a double-digit edge over Democrats and Republicans, according to Gallup polling earlier this year.  

“Sinema is responding to a large number of individuals that are increasingly frustrated with the parties,” Professor Reilly says. 

In the Senate, Ms. Sinema joins Sens. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Angus King of Maine, both of whom are independents but caucus with Democrats. One of the more elusive members, Senator Sinema rarely attended Democratic caucus meetings even as a member of the party, so it’s unlikely she will now. But Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said she would retain her committee assignments. 

Ms. Riddle, Senator Lieberman’s former chief of staff who is now chair of government affairs and strategic counsel practice at Kasowitz Benson Torres LLP, says Senator Sinema’s new affiliation could help her former party bring others under their umbrella.

“She has the ability to help broaden the party,” says Ms. Riddle, a co-founder of No Labels, an advocacy group that encourages bipartisan cooperation. 

In an op-ed for The Arizona Republic explaining her decision, Senator Sinema implied her track record of bipartisan legislation shows she prioritizes problem-solving more than many of her colleagues in Washington.

“When politicians are more focused on denying the opposition party a victory than they are on improving Americans’ lives, the people who lose are everyday Americans,” she wrote. “Arizonans – including many registered as Democrats or Republicans – are eager for leaders who focus on common-sense solutions rather than party doctrine.”

Andrew Harnik/AP/File

Senator Sinema speaks with GOP Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah, as she walks out of the Senate chamber to return to a private meeting with West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, the other Democratic holdout vote on President Joe Biden's domestic agenda, at the Capitol in Washington, Oct. 27, 2021.

A small club

The Senate has seen its share of mavericks over the years, most of whom were content to buck their party from within. One of the most prominent was the late Sen. John McCain. The Arizona Republican challenged his own party’s orthodoxy on everything from immigration to campaign finance reform; Senator Sinema has called him a “personal hero.” 

But independents have been relatively rare in the Senate, with Ms. Sinema becoming just the 14th in history. 

In the 1950s, liberal Republican Wayne Morse fell out of favor with the GOP and declared himself an independent, pulling his chair into the center aisle of the Senate to make a point. He later became a Democrat, but retained an independent streak; he was one of only two senators to oppose the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, which gave the president authority for escalating U.S. military involvement in Vietnam. 

Half a century later, Jim Jeffords of Vermont upended the chamber when – frustrated with President George W. Bush, who took office in 2001 after a disputed election that ended with Supreme Court intervention – he left the GOP to become an independent and caucus with Democrats. His move gave Democrats the majority overnight, and all the newly appointed Republican committee chairs had to step down. 

“It was like an earthquake,” recalls former Senate historian Donald Ritchie. “People were very upset.”

But Democrats would have their own challenges a few years later, when Senator Lieberman got reelected as an independent. Though he caucused with Democrats, he now represented a broader cross section of voters and leveraged his status to extract concessions. 

Ross Baker, a Rutgers political scientist who spent time as a scholar-in-residence in Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid’s office, said the Connecticut senator “was always a pain in the neck” for Democratic leadership.

“Placating Joe Lieberman to pick up a vote was a very painful thing for Reid to have to do,” he says, recalling in particular protracted negotiations over the Affordable Care Act with the senator from Connecticut, home to large health insurance companies. 

Senator Sinema’s legacy as an independent will be up to her, says Professor Baker. 

“She can basically support Democratic positions on most major issues, and on occasion march to her own drummer,” he says. But, he adds, “if she becomes kind of defiant about her independent status, that’s different.”

When it comes to the workings of the Senate, Mr. Ritchie, the former Senate historian, says if they were all independents, the place wouldn’t work. But having a few can make for a healthy mix.

He compares it to seasoning. “If you’re making something and you leave out the red pepper, it’s going to be too bland,” he says. “If you put too much in, it’ll be inedible.”

Kateryna Hryshyna said goodbye to her husband, Sasha, three days before the Russian army invaded Ukraine, as he left to join his unit. “This is probably the last time we see each other,” the beekeeper-turned-soldier told her. He said it with such calm certainty it triggered a torrent of tears.

That sense of foreboding proved well founded. Sasha barely survived the cataclysmic battle for Mariupol in May. “At one point he told me he is going crazy, that he couldn’t take the sight and smell of dead bodies anymore,” recalls Ms. Hryshyna as her son and daughter play in a chilly city park. “The shelling was constant. Dogs were eating bodies.

“Then he just disappeared.”

To the best of her knowledge, he is now a prisoner of war held in the Russian-occupied east of the country. He telephoned her once from the infamous Olenivka prison camp, where Ukrainian fighters who surrendered in Mariupol had been taken. His photo was published later on a Russian social media platform.

Piecing together what becomes of prisoners of war is a difficult endeavor, requiring patience and dogged perseverance from Ukrainian officials. The process consumes the days and nights of families whose first priority is to establish that their loved one – initially classed as “missing” by the authorities – is indeed alive and in captivity.

Sharing is central to that process. Prisoners’ relatives associations use closed groups on social networks like Facebook to pass sensitive information gleaned through rare calls from prison, or through the testimony of former detainees who have made it home thanks to one of the many prisoner exchanges that Moscow and Kyiv have arranged since the start of the war. 

Relatives regularly comb through anonymous Russian-language channels on the messenger app Telegram, which post pictures of Ukrainian soldiers recently captured or killed, along with the occasional detainee list. And they turn to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), which can sometimes confirm that their loved ones are being held.

Numbers unclear

Under the 1949 Geneva Conventions, the ICRC has a mandate to visit prisoners of war and check on their conditions. But that is contingent on access. The organization faced many calls to visit Olenivka, where 50 Ukrainian prisoners were killed in July in a mysterious explosion, but could not go because the Russian authorities denied it access to that camp.

Nor does the group have an accurate idea of how many POWs each side is holding, though the total is thought to run into the thousands.

“We keep asking for access to all prisoners of war in all places of detention ... because we see that the suffering that this is imposing on families is just unbearable,” says Achille Després, spokesperson for the ICRC in Kyiv.

Dominique Soguel

Kateryna Hryshyna shows a photo of her husband, who is being held as a prisoner of war by Russia, in happier times, in Kyiv, Ukraine, Oct. 22, 2022.

Last week the organization announced that it had been able to visit more Ukrainian and Russian prisoners of war, without specifying where or how many. Its teams are now providing relatives with updates, short notes of love, and personal news, as well as requests for cigarettes, socks, and sweets.

“We are bringing some temporary relief,” says Mr. Després. “Many homes have empty spaces as a result of people going missing. When we can bring news to families that are worried about their loved ones, that is just as important as making sure that prisoners of war are treated with dignity.”

The ICRC has delivered more than 2,000 letters from Ukrainian prisoners of war to their loved ones and provided information to families on both sides of the conflict over 4,000 times, he says. A tracing department in Geneva fields hundreds of calls daily. He declines to say how many prison visits have been conducted in Ukraine, Russia, or Russian-occupied Ukrainian territory.

“We don’t want to give any number that could be used by either party to compare each other as to how well they’re complying with international humanitarian law, or become some sort of a scorecard of war,” explains Mr. Després.

Both Ukraine and Russia are party to the 1949 Geneva Conventions, which lays out the legal standards for humanitarian treatment in wartime. Yet reports of ill-treatment, humiliation, and torture of prisoners of war in this conflict are widespread. In November, the United Nations Human Rights Monitoring Mission gave a grim overview of the situation.

The mission said it had conducted interviews with 159 Ukrainian prisoners of war who had been held by Russia or affiliated armed groups, and 175 Russian prisoners of war. Ukraine allowed investigators to conduct confidential interviews, but Russia did not, so researchers based their findings on interviews with released Ukrainian prisoners.

Their report pointed to “patterns of torture and ill-treatment” of POWs held by Russia and affiliated armed groups. They included beatings, the use of attack dogs, and electric shocks to extract military information or testimony for trial. Violations committed by Ukrainian forces against Russian prisoners of war included punching, stabbing, and electric shocks – practices especially prevalent during the initial stages of detention.

The majority of prisoners on both sides are held in conditions that violate international humanitarian law, according to the U.N. mission. “Prisoners of war must be treated humanely at all times from the moment they are captured,” the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, Volker Türk, said last week, at the end of a visit to Ukraine. “This is a clear, unequivocal obligation under international humanitarian law.”

Shattered hopes

Olha Khidchenko fled with her 3-year-old son from Mariupol last March, when Russian forces there were hunting for anyone with a link to the Ukrainian army. She was a soldier on parental leave; her husband, Oleksandr, was fighting.

“I knew they were searching for me,” she recalls in a phone interview. “It was impossible to stay there.”

The last time she spoke to her husband as a free man was in April. Then a terrible silence fell. A list of prisoners of war she saw posted on Telegram suggested he had been transferred to Olenivka. The July 29 blast there – which killed at least 50 prisoners of war – left her, like Ms. Hryshyna, with the burning question: Did he survive?

The answer came only in September, when he was allowed a short phone call. “It was not the voice of a commander anymore, but the voice of a tired and weak man,” she says. “He said he was sure not all of them would survive – not just because of the lack of food and water, but also the lack of hygiene.”

The Geneva office of the ICRC was only able to confirm he was in captivity, says Ms. Khidchenko. “Most of the information I get comes from the Russian Telegram channels,” she says. “I know he was in the Olenivka camp and then he was transferred to Russia.” She learned that from the testimony of a female prisoner released by Russia on Oct. 17.

The hopes that Ms. Khidchenko and Ms. Hryshyna nurse are shattered with each prisoner exchange that fails to bring their husbands home, most recently last Tuesday. “I tell my son that Dad will be home soon, that he loves him – what else can I say at that age?” says Ms. Khidchenko. “My hope is just to see my beloved again. The Ukrainian government probably has a plan, and it is probably moving forward but not as fast as we want.”

“Realizing that you may never see your loved one again has been the hardest thing,” says Ms. Hryshyna. “There have been times I had to go to a psychiatric unit. But I have to keep myself strong for the simple reason that he is going through harder things.”

Oleksandr Naselenko supported reporting for this article.

Sebastian Castaneda/Reuters

Demonstrators gather in Lima, Peru, on Dec. 11, 2022, demanding the dissolution of Congress and democratic elections following the ouster of Peruvian leader Pedro Castillo.

Last Wednesday around noon, Nicol Sarmiento was working at her office job in Lima when a co-worker told her the president was closing Congress.

The move by Pedro Castillo, a leftist former schoolteacher who took office just 16 months earlier, was widely condemned as an attempted coup. By the time Ms. Sarmiento took her lunch break, Mr. Castillo had been impeached and arrested, and an hour later, his vice president took office to replace him.

“It happened so fast,” says Ms. Sarmiento. “We were all in shock.”

But it wasn’t an entirely new sensation. Over the past five years, Peru has had three Congresses and six presidents, including its newest leader and first female president, Dina Boluarte, an attorney and former civil servant whose government is looking to be short-lived. There have been seven impeachment attempts since 2016. A flood of corruption scandals have tainted the political class, landing three former presidents in pretrial detention, leading a fourth to kill himself to avoid arrest, and fueling endless power struggles between the legislative and executive branches.

Ms. Sarmiento, who is 21 years old, says she has no memory of a politician inspiring hope in Peru: “I’ve only read about it because of history.”

Celebrated early this century for ending the dictatorship of former rightwing strongman Alberto Fujimori, Peru has more recently lurched from crisis to crisis, testing the limits of its young democracy. The latest drama raises big questions: Is the repeated political and constitutional upheaval a sign that Peru’s system of governance needs a major overhaul – or is it somehow evidence of a healthy democracy? For now Peru’s democratic institutions have withstood the pressures, but citizens and analysts vent frustration at a political system and the leaders it engenders who could undermine stability in the future.

Guadalupe Pardo/AP

Lawmakers celebrate after voting to remove President Pedro Castillo from office in Lima, Peru, Dec. 7, 2022. Peru's Congress voted to replace him with the vice president shortly after Mr. Castillo tried to dissolve the legislature ahead of a scheduled vote to impeach him.

“This means a democracy, for sure, but a democracy of a very low level,” says Eduardo Dargent, a political scientist at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru. “You don’t see any political capacity in the state to help address a series of problems, so I think it is little consolation to say that we’re fine.”

The system “needs a transformation, of course, but a transformation whose diagnosis is complicated.”

“Fragile” democracy

In many ways, Peru is a microcosm of the problems dogging democracies around the world: entrenched corruption and inequality have deepened distrust in institutions, growing tribalism has led to gridlock, historic social divisions have resurfaced, conspiracy theories have created confusion, and amid the chaos, politicians with authoritarian tendencies try to get an edge.

The closest Peru has come to a blatant break with democracy since it was restored in 2000 was last week during Mr. Castillo’s attempted self-coup. He made a televised address to the nation, outlining plans to rule by decree until new legislators could be elected to write a new constitution, a nighttime curfew, and the “reorganization” of the judiciary and prosecutor’s office, where he is a suspect in multiple criminal probes. His announcement on Dec. 7 was strikingly similar to one delivered by Mr. Fujimori 30 years earlier, marking the start of his autocratic rule.

Mr. Castillo had, ironically, beat Mr. Fujimori’s daughter Keiko Fujimori in last year’s runoff election by capitalizing on fierce opposition to the Fujimori political dynasty. A union activist and farmer from a poor Andean village, Mr. Castillo unexpectedly surged ahead in the first-round election after promising radical change to empower poor, working-class, and Indigenous Peruvians.

Instead, Mr. Castillo failed to propose any significant reforms and faced a constant wave of corruption allegations, leading to a third impeachment motion that was scheduled for a vote hours before his failed power grab. “Castillo’s presidency was a sad spectacle of corruption and political incompetence,” says Julio Carrión, a Peruvian political scientist at the University of Delaware. “His ineptitude extended to trying to be an authoritarian president.”

Martin Mejia/AP/File

Former Peruvian President Pedro Castillo gives a press conference at the presidential palace in Lima, Peru, in October. On Dec. 7, 2022, Mr. Castillo faced a third impeachment attempt by Congress and made an announcement closing the legislature, which many interpreted as an attempted "self-coup." He's now in prison.

Unlike Mr. Fujimori’s self-coup of 1992, Mr. Castillo was met with opposition from every institution in Peru, most crucially the armed forces. As ministers in his cabinet resigned en masse and he tried to reach the Mexican Embassy to seek asylum, Mr. Castillo was arrested by officers in his own security detail. Prosecutors promptly charged him with rebellion, and he is now detained at the same prison where Mr. Fujimori is serving a 25-year-sentence for human rights violations and corruption.

“Few will dispute that Peru’s democracy is fragile, but recent events show that institutions can still pose a barrier to open authoritarianism,” says Mr. Carrión.

But many political analysts wonder if history would have played out differently if Mr. Castillo had been more popular or politically connected. Peru has one of the highest levels of tolerance for radical measures to address deep-seated problems in Latin America, such as a military coup or the dissolution of Congress to control corruption, or an end to elections in exchange for a basic income and services, according to surveys by the Latin American Public Opinion Project at Vanderbilt University.

Peru’s electoral institutions this century have proved to be strong, says Adriana Urrutia, a political scientist who heads the pro-democracy Peruvian organization Transparencia. For example, they withstood Ms. Fujimori’s attempt to overturn last year’s election based on unfounded claims of electoral fraud. But elected officials themselves continue to disappoint, focusing narrowly on their own gains while neglecting the country’s most pressing problems. 

“There are no political actors on the horizon capable of building a slightly more solid system,” says Mr. Dargent, the political scientist, who sees that as the chief obstacle to sorely needed reforms. 

“The rules of the game in place favor dynamics of private and not collective interests,” Ms. Urrutia says. Electoral laws lead to weak party discipline and a prohibition of the immediate reelection of officials, removing healthy incentives, she says. “A national debate over reforms to change the rules of the game is urgent.” 

Martin Mejia/AP

Peru's new President Dina Boluarte walks to her car after speaking to the press in Lima, Peru, on Dec. 8, 2022. Peru's Congress voted to remove President Pedro Castillo from office Wednesday and replace him with the vice president, shortly after Mr. Castillo tried to dissolve the legislature ahead of a scheduled vote on his impeachment.

Unattended demands

It is unclear however, if Peru will get the chance for such a debate. On her sixth day in office, President Boluarte continued to struggle to contain a wave of protests that have grown larger and increasingly violent. Protesters have demanded immediate new general elections and the closure of Congress, and some want a new constitution and the release of Mr. Castillo from jail. Police crackdowns on protesters have been criticized by human rights groups as disproportionate and abusive, and only seem to energize demonstrators more. 

After two teenagers were killed in clashes with police in a highland city on Sunday, Ms. Boluarte announced she was sending Congress a law to create a legal path for elections in 2024, two years before her term ends. On Monday, a dozen road blocks by protesters were in place and a second regional airport was taken by demonstrators. Several groups of protesters declared themselves in a state of insurgency.

While Mr. Castillo was unpopular, with an approval rating that ranged from 19% to 31% this year, just 8% of Peruvians thought the opposition-run Congress was doing a good job, according to polls by the Institute of Peruvian Studies. Ms. Boluarte’s Cabinet picks, announced on Saturday, appear aimed at pleasing centrist and right-wing lawmakers, not angry protesters. 

In the meantime, far-left politicians have portrayed Mr. Castillo not as an attempted coup-monger but as the victim of a right-wing conspiracy. A lawmaker who served as his first prime minister claims Mr. Castillo was drugged into reading his message to the country, with no evidence other than his shaky delivery.

Some who voted for Mr. Castillo find the conspiracy theory credible. “They never wanted to let him work,” says Julio Fernandez, a farmer from Mr. Castillo’s home region of Cajamarca. “The Congress and the media and economic powers never accepted him.”

“Right now what’s most worrisome is this escalation of violence,” says Ms. Urrutia. President Boluarte, she says, needs to quickly find a way to “channel different demands and tend to the crisis.”

As presidents have come and gone over the years, calls for change have been repeatedly ignored, especially in rural Peru, says Ms. Urrutia, where the poverty rate is twice as high as in cities and access to basic public services is limited.

“The demands are still there, unattended. They’re still growing,” she says.

But Victor Salinas, a young motorcycle deliveryman who migrated here from Venezuela in 2018, says at least Peru still has the opportunity to elect better leaders in the future.

“From as long as I can remember our president was [Hugo] Chávez,” says Mr. Salinas. “People voted for him, and then when they looked again he’d turned into a dictator.”

Mr. Castillo “wanted to stage a coup to turn into a dictator here, but thank God it didn’t happen,” he says. 

“Viva el Peru!”

Erika Page/The Christian Science Monitor

Valmik Prabhu poses for a photo in downtown Berkeley, California, Nov. 30, 2022. As an effective altruist, Mr. Prabhu has pledged to donate at least 10% of his lifetime income to charities he sees as the most effective.

A trend-setting movement in philanthropy is undergoing an earthquake of criticism and self-examination because of something that on the surface seems wholly unrelated: the crumbling of a cryptocurrency exchange. 

What links the two stories is Sam Bankman-Fried, who co-founded the exchange (FTX), grew rich, and was committed to giving money away under a philosophy known as effective altruism. When the company collapsed into bankruptcy amid allegations of misusing customer funds, questions of business governance were joined by ones of charitable philosophy. 

The question in short: Does the imploding fortune of Mr. Bankman-Fried – the movement’s wealthiest known figurehead, who was arrested Monday in the Bahamas – tarnish the reputation of one individual or undercut the credibility of a whole movement he represented?

Effective altruists are devoted to a brand of philanthropy that aspires to be both expansively generous and rigorously intellectual. They are united in their commitment to a basic maxim: Do the most possible good with the resources you have. The philosophy rests on the premise that all lives are valued equally, and each of us has a responsibility to improve the lives of others if we can. While the concepts are not exactly new, the movement has attracted tens of thousands of followers, and mobilized billions of dollars for charity, since its intellectual birth at Oxford University a decade ago. 

For the rest of society, qualms about effective altruism have raised worthwhile questions about how to do good responsibly. 

Generosity is generally considered a virtue, especially when intentions are pure. But the case of Mr. Bankman-Fried suggests that generosity on its own is not enough, requiring a backbone of ethical integrity. The movement’s focus on quantifiable cost-benefit analysis may need to be matched with less measurable values, like intellectual humility and pluralism. Meanwhile, concerns about how “good” itself is defined and measured are rising to the surface. Some critics say that, for all its efforts at rigor, effective altruism hasn’t lived up to the standard of moral integrity.

“It’s initially attractive,” says Alice Crary, a philosopher at the New School for Social Research in New York. But she worries the impact is illusory, given what she sees as a narrow, oversimplified, and even arrogant approach to the world’s problems. “It focuses on improving benchmarks in systems that often do great harm without challenging the systems themselves.”

FTX/Reuters/File

Sam Bankman-Fried, shown in this photo as CEO of FTX, wears a T-shirt symbolizing his affiliation with the effective altruism movement. FTX operated a cryptocurrency exchange, but fell into bankruptcy this year amid allegations of misusing customer funds.

Quantitative mindset

That’s a criticism effective altruists are used to hearing. Valmik Prabhu even thinks it’s a valid one. 

“I’m friends with a lot of social justice people, and it can feel like the thing they want to do is so big, and they have no idea how to do it,” he says at a cafe located blocks from where he was introduced to effective altruism as a student at the University of California, Berkeley, and near the house he lives in now with 11 other effective altruists. Systemic change is important, he says, but “there are a lot of problems where money can do good.”

A vegan and animal welfare activist before learning of effective altruism, Mr. Prabhu had read Peter Singer, the famed philosopher and intellectual father of the movement. He’s famous for the drowning child thought experiment: If you would rescue a drowning toddler from a nearby pond, you are similarly responsible for saving the life of someone in a poor part of the world if you have the resources.

Effective altruists take that responsibility seriously. It also means every dollar counts.

“It’s applying the same sort of quantitative mindset that I use in the rest of my life to doing good,” Mr. Prabhu explains. He points out that people go to great lengths to optimize trivial decisions, such as which product to select on Amazon, but don’t bother to apply that same rigor to their generosity. 

Mr. Bankman-Fried, currently being investigated for fraud, was effective altruism’s highest-profile champion. After graduating from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2014, he was encouraged by one of the philosophy’s founders, Will MacAskill, to “earn to give,” one way effective altruists seek to do good. He took the advice to heart. This year alone, the fallen luminary had committed some $50 million to effective altruism-aligned organizations through FTX Foundation’s Future Fund, the charitable branch of FTX.

Most effective altruists – sometimes referred to as EAs – have condemned any immoral or illegal actions taken by Mr. Bankman-Fried, as well as the idea that a theoretically positive outcome from philanthropy could have justified mismanaging customer funds. Many have revised statements heralding his success as a model to follow. The Future Fund team quickly resigned. According to one organizer, the movement as a whole has lost about one-third of its funding. 

At the same time, many devotees like Mr. Prabhu are unfazed by Mr. Bankman-Fried. “People trusted him because he shared our values,” says Mr. Prabhu. “A lot of EAs definitely felt very betrayed.” While he’s concerned about the influence of large, single funders, he points out that Mr. Bankman-Fried wasn’t an intellectual contributor to the movement.

He and others in his co-op have signed on to the Giving What We Can pledge, promising to donate at least 10% of their lifetime income to highly vetted charities as part of an initiative launched in 2009 by the founders of effective altruism. 

His roommate Richard Yannow signed the pledge in 2014 when he took his first job after college as a software engineer at Google. Living frugally, he ramped up his contribution to 50% of his salary. That’s over $100,000 each year, which he divides among a handful of organizations recommended by the effective altruism organization GiveWell, working in malaria prevention, direct cash transfers, and animal welfare. 

Some charitable organizations have long been criticized for addressing the symptoms of complex political and economic problems, rather than root causes. 

“That can often be a false dichotomy,” says Mr. Yannow. “It can be the case that giving people more material resources on the margin can change the political balance.” With more immediate needs met, he says marginalized individuals are better positioned to advocate for their wider interests. In recent years, some effective altruists have turned their attention to structural solutions like prison reform and YIMBYism. And he appreciates the movement’s willingness to revise its positions on certain issues when needed. 

Since the collapse of FTX, he says he’s been impressed with the amount of “criticism and earnest self-reflection from within the community.”

Whose metrics? 

Earnest self-reflection is exactly what some in the social impact realm think the effective altruism movement could use more of.

Effective altruism evaluates causes using three lenses: impact, tractability, and neglectedness. GiveWell chooses a handful of top charities each year based on the organizations that “save or improve lives the most per dollar.” Malaria nets, for example, are estimated to save lives at $5,500 per life. 

But critics point out that no quantitative valuation is free from human bias. Take the GiveWell calculation of cost-effectiveness. Parameters such as costs, expenses, and certain measurable outcomes are combined with normative parameters, called “moral weights,” to reach the evidence-based conclusions it promises. While GiveWell has at times conducted surveys to ask beneficiaries for input on the relative values of different program outcomes, moral weights are heavily informed by the values of staff members. 

“Who gets to determine what is logic and what is reason? Who gets to determine the metrics and how you’re measuring impact?” asks Rodney Foxworth, CEO of the nonprofit Common Future, and a leader in community investing in Baltimore. “It diminishes other cultural ways of knowing and making determinations.” 

The most recent demographic survey found that the effective altruism movement is 76% white, less than 1% Black, 2% Hispanic, and 0% Indigenous, and 71% male. Most attended some of the most prestigious universities in England, the United States, and Australia.

That homogeneity may have something to do with the circles in which the movement got its start. It’s also possible the highly analytical and quantitative framework is particularly attractive to a specific, yet unrepresentative, portion of global society, akin to what anthropologist Joseph Henrich calls the WEIRD minority – those raised in Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic places who tend to be unusually analytical, individualistic, and concerned with personal responsibility. 

The wider ethical framework of utilitarianism, which informs effective altruism, has long been influential in realms from philanthropy to public policy, but it can also be controversial. Doing the “greatest good for the greatest number” can be a challenge without running afoul of hubris, naiveté, or ends-justify-the-means thinking – an attitude some critics suspect may be at the center of Mr. Bankman-Fried’s debacle at FTX.

And there are some things humans care about – think freedom, justice, or beauty – that are difficult, if not impossible, to measure with abstract quantitative tools.

At best, the effort to scientifically determine the impartial “highest good” is confused. At worst, it’s reminiscent of a “colonizing logic,” says Professor Crary, whereby wealthy individuals use their own rationale and metrics to determine the fate of those less fortunate. She and two colleagues are editing a forthcoming book on effective altruism called “The Good It Promises, The Harm It Does: Critical Essays on Effective Altruism.” She says a better approach for young people who want to make a difference is to start from a position of immersion and appreciation of local values. 

Evolving and revising 

Rockwell Schwartz disagrees with the portrayal of effective altruism as insular and narrow-minded – a “feel-good pet project based on a techno-elitist subculture,” says the director of Effective Altruism NYC.

After the initial shock of the FTX collapse, Ms. Schwartz stopped worrying about what Mr. Bankman-Fried might have been thinking. Like others, she is pushing for stronger checks, balances, and governance structures. “How do we have a community that has infrastructure in place so that it doesn’t matter what is going on in one individual’s head?” she says. 

She’s glad her community has “an active, built-in desire for adaptability in the face of new information.” That includes some of the group’s fundamental premises. “People are thinking about these things deeply and willing to really engage in conversation to improve their own thinking as part of improving their world.” 

Those arguments may lead to unfashionable conclusions, such as the shift in recent years to a focus on “longtermism,” a controversial strand of effective altruism that revolves around the (very) long-term future of humanity. But one prediction made by Toby Ord, co-founder of the effective altruism movement, in his 2020 book on longtermism, “The Precipice,” rings eerily true:

“A single person acting without integrity could stain the whole cause and damage everything we hope to achieve.” 

Sarah Matusek/The Christian Science Monitor

The Museum of Friends in Walsenburg, Colorado, holds a collection of some 1,600 artworks, many of which were donated by artists. “We build community,” says co-founder Brendt Berger. “We try to do it in a personal way that acknowledges the uniqueness and the richness of each human being.”

In Walsenburg, a former coal mining town in southern Colorado, tumbleweeds tangle with leaves on the sidewalk. Winds of change have also swept through a century-old brick building on Main Street that for decades housed a JCPenney. Today, a pair of East and West Coasters has transformed it into a contemporary art museum, its walls a crisp gallery white.

Artists Brendt Berger and Maria Cocchiarelli-Berger traipse through their Museum of Friends (MoF), where artworks hang cozily close, floor to ceiling, salon-style. In this memory palace of their making, each piece conjures reflections of the artist – many of whom have donated their work. On their umpteenth tour, they’re still kids in a candy shop. 

“The ones that have the story” are favorites of Ms. Cocchiarelli-Berger, who gushes about a colorful painting hung up high. It recalls a friend’s view of the Brooklyn waterfront, since obscured by a seafood eatery. Mr. Berger zooms in on a line drawing of straight, meditative marks.

“It like breathes, the lines do,” he says, fingers hovering above them.

The couple held a grand opening for MoF in 2007, shortly after their marriage that followed a yearslong friendship. The nonprofit, a self-described counterculture art museum, prizes freedom of expression and inclusive community, and has works by Dennis Oppenheim and Yoko Ono along with those by local artists.

MoF sets itself apart from the larger art world by erasing money as an arbiter of worth, says Mr. Berger. Rather than the economic value of an artwork, the founders embrace its “soul value.”  

“We build community,” he says. “We try to do it in a personal way that acknowledges the uniqueness and the richness of each human being.” 

Sarah Matusek/The Christian Science Monitor

Maria Cocchiarelli-Berger and Brendt Berger tour the second floor of their Museum of Friends in Walsenburg, Colorado, Nov. 8, 2022. Ms. Cocchiarelli-Berger and Mr. Berger, who are artists and educators, held the grand opening of their nonprofit art museum in the former coal mining town in 2007.

Avoiding the “gallery system”

Walsenburg, a town of some 3,000 residents backdropped by the Spanish Peaks, has tried to rebrand in recent years, reports Colorado Public Radio. The museum is part of that transformation, linked to a regional renaissance of art enclaves. State-certified “creative districts” include Trinidad to the south and La Veta to the west, where Mr. Berger and Ms. Cocchiarelli-Berger reside. The state is also one of the nonprofit’s grant funders.

This isn’t the first time Mr. Berger has tried to sidestep money’s traditional role in the art world.

In the late 1960s, Mr. Berger, a Californian, visited Libre, a southern Colorado artist community co-founded by his friend Dean Fleming. Beyond working as an artist and teacher, Mr. Berger organized artists “to circumvent the gallery system,” which tends to focus on pieces that will sell. He also lobbied for a federal art bank that would support creators by buying or leasing their work. Though the art bank never materialized, he sees MoF as an “extension of a lot of those ideas.”

The pair met in New York City through an art show in the ’80s, then reunited there in the early 2000s. A mutual friend suggested she reach out to Mr. Berger for some repairs on her mother’s house.

“I picked him up with his little toolbox, because he didn’t have a car,” she recalls. “The rest is history.”

Brooklyn-born artist and educator Ms. Cocchiarelli-Berger, a bundle of energy with close-cropped red hair, is the executive director and tackles the planning and fundraising. She’s also the head chef at home. 

Mr. Berger, of more West Coast tempo, sports an electric-blue shirt. As president of the board of directors, he oversees curation and correspondence. At home, says his wife, “he cleans up after me.”  

Several hundred works of art received from artist friends over the years helped establish a permanent collection, which now totals some 1,600 pieces. The ground floor has a Made in Walsenburg gift shop, changing exhibitions, and space for education programs. Upstairs is more intimate and painting-packed, a series of rooms that open onto other rooms. One brims with artifacts linked to Mr. Berger’s Hawaiian ancestry.  

Sarah Matusek/The Christian Science Monitor

Ray Espinoza sits in his studio at his daughter's house in Commerce City, Colorado, Nov. 29, 2022. The artist has work displayed at the Museum of Friends in Walsenburg. "I'm one of the sons of Walsenburg, and I wanted to have something there for posterity," he says.

A support to the local community

The museum, which holds tours for a suggested donation of $8 for adult nonmembers, has received around 3,000 visitors this year. And despite its focus on “soul value,” MoF brings money into the town. Ms. Cocchiarelli-Berger says museum visitors help enliven the economy of Huerfano County, whose median household income of $45,724 is a little over half that of the state. Event guests seek lodging, she says, and the museum’s artists-in-residence buy groceries.

“My philosophy is not that capitalism is bad,” she says. “The arts are an incredible economic driver.”

“They do a fantastic job,” says Nancy Lave across the street at her shop, Main Street Antiques. “They’re really into what they’re doing and they love it.”

For Denver area artist Ray Espinoza, having work hang in his hometown is meaningful.

“I’m one of the sons of Walsenburg, and I wanted to have something there for posterity,” he says. The Marine veteran is a self-described “all-around artist,” whose work spans sculpture, paintings, music, poetry, and protest posters for the Chicano movement. 

The founders plan to hold onto MoF for only so long. They hope another entity will have taken over by 2027 – perhaps a university, philanthropist, or another museum. “We would like to be able to make art again,” Ms. Cocchiarelli-Berger says.

Till then, the art of friendmaking continues. After a November interview, Mr. Berger followed this reporter out the door. He offered to photograph me in front of the museum – not on his camera, but mine. 

Why not, I thought. A moment worth collecting.

Reuters/Leonardo Fernandez Viloria

Jose Félix Lafaurie, representative of the Colombian livestock sector, attends a news conference after renewed peace talks between the government and the National Liberation Army rebels opened in Caracas, Venezuela, on Nov. 21, 2022.

When Gustavo Petro became Colombia’s president in August, his promise to end the violence that has traumatized his country for more than half a century brought both hope and skepticism. Four months later, hope has the edge.

That marks a sharp turn after the past four years, when Colombia’s security crisis flared defiantly under the hard-line tactics of Mr. Petro’s predecessor. The new president has started with a different approach: listening to the communities torn by conflict and illicit trade. Last week, the government concluded the last of 54 public meetings across the country. Although billed as part of Mr. Petro’s “total peace” initiative, the dialogues canvassed a wide range of social, economic, and environmental issues.

“People participated actively, and seriously believe that for the first time there is a government in Colombia that listened to them,” Wisne Hinestroza, a resident of the seaport city of Buenaventura who participated in one of the meetings, told the news website La Silla Vacía. 

Mr. Petro’s plan is ambitious. Instead of pursuing peace one by one with dozens of guerrilla factions and drug cartels, he seeks to engage them simultaneously through what he calls “multilateral cease-fires.” He has promised to revive a landmark 2016 peace accord derailed by his predecessor. A broader, comprehensive peace will require complex agreements on disarming irregular factions, balancing forgiveness and punishment for groups implicated in drug trafficking or civilian massacres, and finding accord with neighboring states that have given them harbor.

But the foundation of the new strategy, said Danilo Rueda, Mr. Petro’s high commissioner of peace, is human dignity – a conviction that peace depends on rebuilding communities on the basis of equality and justice rooted in reconciliation. 

There are early signs of progress. In September, Congress authorized Mr. Petro to negotiate with armed and criminal groups. Since then, 23 factions have agreed to join the process. An initial round of dialogue with the largest remaining paramilitary faction, the National Liberation Army, launched last month.

Even before any agreements are signed, however, a potent shift already underway may be in the expectations of ordinary Colombians conditioned over generations by cycles of conflict.

“We trust that this path undertaken will continue to show the Colombian people and the world that peace is possible, that we deserve a country without more death or war, where we promote and build social and environmental justice, reflecting a consciousness of true democracy shared by every Colombian,” said We Are Genesis, a network of more than 180 communities that have suffered violence by irregular groups, in a September statement. An Invamer Poll in October found that 61% of Colombians support the government’s approach to peace.

“We cannot see each other as enemies,” said Pablo Beltrán, head of the National Liberation Army delegation, before sitting down with government negotiators last month. One reason Colombia’s armed factions are bending toward reconciliation may be that the public’s desire for peace is turning into a stronger adhesive: an expectancy of good.