On Friday, Alabama officials unveiled statues of two indomitable native daughters – civil rights activist Rosa Parks and disability pioneer Helen Keller.

The move, unanimously approved by the state legislature in 2019, makes Ms. Parks and Ms. Keller the first women to be depicted among the many monuments on the Capitol grounds in Montgomery.

And it underscores how, in overcoming limitations, both women overturned restrictive societal views and values about individual ability and worth. While they faced vastly different challenges, their lives are entwined by a common thread of quiet determination and dignity.

Ms. Keller (1880–1968) was born as Jim Crow racial segregation was taking root in the southern United States. Her white family had sufficient means to find help when she lost both sight and hearing after a childhood illness. Ms. Parks (1913–2005) grew up in poverty on a farm where her grandfather often kept watch all night, rifle at hand, to fend off the Ku Klux Klan.

Eventually, Ms. Keller learned to communicate through a combination of Braille and lipreading. She graduated from Radcliffe College and became an inspiring advocate for individuals with disabilities. She also co-founded the American Civil Liberties Union and supported the NAACP.

Ms. Keller exuded vitality and optimism, according to a New York Times report. “My life has been happy” with friends and “interesting work,” she said. “I seldom think about my limitations, and they never make me sad.”

Ms. Parks, who earned a high school diploma and worked as a seamstress, was an active member of the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP well before her iconic act of protest. In December 1955, she defied local laws and refused to give up her bus seat to a white passenger. And it wasn’t because she was worn out and wanted to rest her feet.

“No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in,” Ms. Parks wrote in her autobiography. Her arrest sparked the yearlong Montgomery bus boycott by Black residents. In November 1956, the U.S. Supreme Court declared segregation on public transport unconstitutional. But, unable to find employment, Ms. Parks and her husband moved to Detroit.

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Through their trials, both women drew on a higher faith. “I believe that all through these dark and silent years, God has been using my life,” Ms. Keller said.

As for Ms. Parks, “God did away with all my fear,” she wrote in 1995. “I am thankful to him every day that he gave me the strength not to move.”

Wars often do not end on the battlefield but from a desire for peace in the hearts and minds of a people. In Russia, nearly four years into a faltering invasion of Ukraine, the people might soon determine how that war ends.

Only 27% of Russians support the war, down 13 percentage points from a year earlier, according to an August poll by the Levada Center, Russia’s only independent pollster. Meanwhile, the number of people saying the war had personally “affected them a lot” keeps rising. Gasoline prices, for example, are up nearly 10% this year, a result in part from recent Ukrainian attacks on Russian oil refineries. Up to 30% of Russians have had a relative, friend, or acquaintance killed in the war.

“People want to breathe freely, and not have to fear another military mobilization,” Denis Volkov, director of the Levada Center, told the Monitor’s Fred Weir.

For now, Russian President Vladimir Putin appears firmly in power to continue the conflict. Yet, on Wednesday, the United States took a critical step that could undercut Mr. Putin’s popularity by bringing the war closer to home. For the first time in his second term as president, Donald Trump put sanctions on Russia’s two largest oil companies, Lukoil and Rosneft, which account for almost half of the country’s crude oil exports. Rosneft is the world’s second-biggest petroleum producer.

The sanctions are a direct hit on the Kremlin’s budget for the war. Mr. Trump also threatened financial penalties for both countries and businesses in places like China and India that now buy much of Russia’s oil. The U.S. move came as Britain and the European Union also imposed greater sanctions on Russia’s petroleum industry in recent days, including on ships that bypassed previous oil sanctions.

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“I think it’s an important sign of strength that we are aligned here,” said EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas. For his part, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said, “We waited for this. God bless, it will work.”

Whether the tougher sanctions drive Mr. Putin to make concessions at the negotiating table and end the war remains to be seen. But if more Russians experience higher prices and long lines at gas stations, and global demand for the country’s oil shrinks, a desire for peace among Russians might finally end what has become the most critical war of the 21st century.

Medgar Evers was 37. The NAACP’s first field secretary in Mississippi was grasping a handful of shirts that said “Jim Crow Must Go” when he was shot in the back in 1963.

Maceo Snipes was also 37. When the World War II veteran cast his vote in the Georgia Democratic primary on July 17, 1946, he was the only Black man in Taylor County to do so.

One day later, he was shot in the back.

Why We Wrote This

The context of why civil rights activists like Medgar Evers and Maceo Snipes were murdered has been lost in the current conversation about the Voting Rights Act at the Supreme Court.

Last week, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments on a Louisiana redistricting case asking whether using race as a factor in congressional voting maps is unconstitutional. The Trump administration and the state of Louisiana contend that using race to draw the maps is discriminatory in and of itself. Considering the lives of Mr. Evers, Mr. Snipes, and others who died in the name of civil rights and voting rights, the irony is loud.

Albeit, not as loud as a gunshot.

It is unfathomable that the context of why those civil rights activists were murdered has been lost in the current conversation about the Voting Rights Act. The “race-based” elements designed to protect marginalized voters did not appear from thin air. They are the fading vanguard standing against generational violence and voter intimidation.

In another twist, it was one of the founders of the Republican Party who authored a bill in the name of civil rights. Charles Sumner, a former U.S. senator and abolitionist lawyer from Massachusetts, crafted principled legislation to protect Black people from discrimination in public transportation and other venues. While it fell short of protecting African Americans in economic and social life, Sumner’s posthumous bill became the Civil Rights Act of 1875.

The following year, an ideological rebuke of Sumner’s policy violently progressed through the South. In an effort to intimidate Black voters and eliminate the gains of Radical Republicans during Reconstruction, the Hamburg Massacre kicked off a series of white mob violence that ultimately reinstalled legal segregation and the fascism of Jim Crow. In 1883, the Civil Rights Act of 1875 was deemed “unconstitutional” by the Supreme Court during the Civil Rights cases.

Jim Crow rule lasted for almost a century, until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act were passed – not that legislation prevented political and social brutality. Martin Luther King Jr., another champion for civil and voting rights, was assassinated in 1968. In the decades to come, Southern strategists such as Lee Atwater and Republican-led entities would continue to chip away at seemingly impenetrable voting rights legislation by manufacturing “culture wars” designed to focus resentment on progressive gains.

Even as statues to the likes of Rep. John Lewis have been raised in Georgia and the legacy of “Bloody Sunday” is still common knowledge, that history has not translated into the conscience that preserves and strengthens voting rights for all Americans. That collective failure presented itself during the Obama administration in 2013, when Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act took a big hit from the Supreme Court in the name of “preclearance.”

In short, the section was an acknowledgment of the dark recesses of American history – of those pockets and municipalities where it was a death sentence to vote. “Prior to 2013, Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act required states and localities with an extensive history of racially discriminatory voting practices to submit any changes in their election laws and policies or electoral district maps to the federal government for advance review before putting them into effect,” writes the Brennan Center for Justice.

In the Shelby County v. Holder decision, a majority of Supreme Court justices ruled that the formula used to determine which states and sites were under preclearance was no longer needed. “The Voting Rights Act of 1965 employed extraordinary measures to address an extraordinary problem,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority, ”an insidious and pervasive evil which had been perpetuated in certain parts of our country through unremitting and ingenious defiance of the Constitution.” Then Chief Justice Roberts wrote that those measures were no longer necessary in today’s South.

The ruling can be seen as an allegory for how much our collective conscience has flinched away from regarding the horrors of the 1960s and 1970s.

The Supreme Court didn’t throw out Section 5 entirely. But modern efforts to restore preclearance standards, such as the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, haven’t passed. The House passed the Lewis Act in 2021, but it fell short of the 60 votes needed in the Senate.

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Now, Section 2 hangs in the balance at the high court. While it’s unlikely that the entire section will be deemed unconstitutional, it’s likely that the protections against gerrymandering and mapmaking that dilute Black voting power will be dissolved. It’s a reminder that politics extend beyond the voting booth, but impact every aspect of our lives.

“What then does the Negro want?” Mr. Evers asked in a May 20, 1963, speech on Mississippi radio. “He wants to get rid of racial segregation in Mississippi life. ... The Negro citizen wants to register and vote without special handicaps imposed on him alone.”

More than three weeks into the federal government shutdown, Democratic and Republican leaders still refuse to talk to each other about how to end it. That impasse is reflected in a recent poll that found 2 out of 3 Americans do not trust the U.S. political system to solve the country’s divisions.

Despite that popular view, many people are still finding ways to work together, exercising local agency to address pressing community issues. One example is the case of Three Rivers, Michigan, where Monitor staff writer Scott Baldauf found that shared concerns over contaminated water are helping dissolve partisan distrust. Similar “kitchen-table pragmatism,” as one source described it, is evident through much of small-town and rural America. Now, several mainstream philanthropies are supporting such efforts with the hope of creating new civic models.

Formed last year, the Trust for Civic Life charity has already awarded $17 million to 150 programs in rural communities and recently announced more grants. “We have to be in the communities that are polarizing ... to support them to understand what’s happening and how they can be successful,” Executive Director Charlie Brown told the site Inside Philanthropy.

At the state level, others are working to bridge urban and rural divides, which mirror the growing partisan gap, even though most Americans share similar priorities on the economy, education, and health care. Even the environment is a mutual concern, but rural residents and farmers believe their economic concerns are disregarded by activists.

Each year, Kentucky’s Rural-Urban Exchange brings together about 60 residents to cultivate common ground. Such “social infrastructure creates infrastructure for anything to happen,” co-founder Savannah Barrett told The New York Times. “But conversation can’t be about conversion,” she cautioned.

For the American Exchange Project, it’s about preventing polarization before it becomes entrenched, by arranging youth “exchange visits” across the United States. The project’s co-founder, David McCullough III, calls this “experiential civics.”

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Most high schoolers have “not run into people who are different enough from them,” Mr. McCullough wrote this week on the website The 74. As a result, the “muscles that help them navigate nuance ... and connect with people who might disagree with them are unexercised.” Since 2019, some 1,500 students have joined in more than 200 exchanges – venturing from Silicon Valley to Kansas to the East Coast.

Ultimately, joint action in local settings helps build “feelings of agency, social trust, and belonging,” a study by the Trust for Civic Life confirmed. Working on shared priorities – rather than talking politics – is “the best reference point. Community opens the door, but politics can close it.”

Despite being Asia’s oldest continuous democracy, Japan has been far behind the region’s other countries in electing a woman leader. That changed Tuesday when Takaichi Sanae, a conservative in Japan’s long-dominant party, became the nation’s first female prime minister.

Despite the ceiling-busting triumph, however, this former drummer in a heavy-metal band got off on the wrong foot with a comment that helps explain why so few Japanese women enter politics or buck a cultural norm that sees women primarily as caregivers.

In a speech, Ms. Takaichi asked everyone to “work like a horse,” and then added, “I myself will cast aside the idea of ‘work-life balance’. I’ll work, work, work, work, and work.”

While perseverance is a highly admired trait in Japan – and helped her in becoming head of the world’s fourth-largest economy – public reaction forced her to clarify that she was speaking only about members of the Liberal Democratic Party like herself. If anything, the new prime minister wants to assist homemakers, who are mainly women, and make it easier for them to balance homelife and work.

She pledges to designate homemaking services as an official occupation worthy of tax deductions. In addition, she wants to expand support for women’s health “so that men can properly understand when women are struggling, whether at school or in the workplace.”

In a country with a weak feminist movement, Japan has made only sporadic advances for women to enter politics since World War II. Leaders who have won women’s votes often found success by appealing to the everyday interests of women. A good example is the three-term governor of Tokyo, Koike Yuriko, who also served as Japan’s first female minister of defense. Her family-friendly policies, such as free day care for preschool children, helped elevate the number of women in the city’s assembly to 41 out of 127 in a June election. That is an unusually high proportion in any of Japan’s political bodies.

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When women take part in politics, Irie Nobuko, a Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly member, told Kyodo News, “Real-life concerns – such as childcare, nursing, and education – are brought to the forefront. A truly inclusive society must consider both male and female perspectives.”

For her part, Tokyo’s Governor Koike entered politics simply “because of my ideas and principles,” she wrote in a 2010 article for Harvard International Review. “We deal not only with women’s issues but also with defense and economics – all the topics that concern the administration of the nation, just like any male member of Parliament.”

It’s been a challenging year for the residents of Los Angeles. Destructive wildfires and political turmoil over the federal detention of unauthorized migrants have tested Angelenos.

But then there was Shohei Ohtani.

His exceptional performance for the Los Angeles Dodgers this season has helped the city rediscover joy and community. Perhaps most of all, people see the values of modesty and hard work in this Japanese athlete’s extraordinary talent in a quintessentially American sport.

Last Friday, Mr. Ohtani – who is both a top pitcher and batter, like Babe Ruth – struck out 10 Milwaukee Brewers players over six scoreless innings and hit three soaring home runs. That feat earned him the National League Championship MVP award and put baseball’s reigning champions into the World Series for the second consecutive year.

Baseball does not have salary caps, and Mr. Ohtani is one of the best-paid players on one of the sport’s best-resourced teams. Nevertheless, his athletic exploits and self-effacing demeanor send a message that goes beyond eye-popping dollar figures.

Over millennia, great athletes have helped “raise ... humanity out of itself, ... by doing something that teaches us again of how free from mortal constraints we can be,” former baseball commissioner and Yale University President A. Bartlett Giamatti said in 1988. Such an individual, he said, “deserves all the awe he or she can get.”

Awe has not been in short supply. In a headline, the normally sedate Wall Street Journal described Mr. Ohtani’s performance as “What May Be the Greatest Game of All Time.”

“That’s the single best performance in the history of baseball,” his teammate Max Muncy told Fox News, without equivocation.

Mr. Ohtani himself viewed it as a joint effort. “We won it as a team,” he said, adding, “This time around it was my turn to be able to perform.”

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For the Dodgers star, it’s a privilege rather than a personal achievement to deliver in demanding situations. After a game-winning home run earlier this year, he noted through his interpreter, “It’s actually an honor to feel the pressure because that means there’s a lot of expectations,” which he transforms into a positive impetus.

For Los Angeles, Mr. Ohtani’s “brilliance ... feels like a reset button” and a “reason to believe in the purity of sports as a uniter,” wrote commentator Erick Galindo in the local media platform L.A. Taco. “I hope this beautiful, messy team of Americans – Black, Brown and White, kids from the Midwest, South, the Caribe, Latin America’s finest, Japanese phenoms ... can do what it did last year: bring everyone together, at least for a few days.”

From the United States to Sweden, immigration has become the Western world’s biggest political fault line, dividing societies and fueling anger and mistrust. That fault line runs directly through Tam Hussein.

Mr. Hussein is Swedish, born and raised in a suburb of Stockholm, and like many Swedes, he has looked on the changes in his homeland during the past 10 years with shock.

Organized crime and gun violence exploded after the country took in some 160,000 migrants in 2015, and he says he sometimes has trouble fathoming how much his country has changed. “When I grew up, there was hardly any crime apart from bicycle-stealing, and that was scandalous,” he says. “When you see [what’s going on today], it does upset you. That’s not how Sweden should be.”

Mr. Hussein is the son of Bangladeshi parents and the child of a more global world. As a journalist, he has covered the Middle East, and other aspects of the new Sweden are not only familiar but also welcome. After living in Damascus, Syria, he found recent changes to the Swedish city of Malmö invigorating: authentic shawarma, street corner conversations in Arabic, startup newspapers in Bengali. “I loved it,” he says.

So often, politics sets up false choices. It turns complex issues into a simplified “this” or “that” with no space for anything in between. At best, this makes voters’ choices starker. At worst, it dehumanizes opponents and preys on fear.

But Mr. Hussein cannot choose “this” or “that” on the issue of migration in Sweden. He has to choose both, because he is both. In reporting my cover story this week, on how migration has shaped Sweden and Denmark, I saw clearly why such a mindset is important.

Two things stuck out about his approach. First was a deep and genuine sense of compassion. To varying degrees, those on either side of the migration issue expressed some exasperation at or contempt for those on the other side. But Mr. Hussein wouldn’t go there.

On one hand, he understands why migrants would feel so out of step with their new Swedish home. In Sweden, “you’re dependent on the state” to do everything, he says. But “imagine now you’re getting people coming in, and they don’t have any trust in the government. They’re going to look after their own.”

But he also has sympathy for native Swedes worried about the direction of the country. “I can understand that sentiment because Sweden has changed.”

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The second point is that Mr. Hussein understands the situation in a way that helped me really grasp what was going on. Although I didn’t quote Mr. Hussein in the story, subsequent reporting validated what he shared. Put simply, by seeing both sides honestly, he sees the situation most accurately.

Today, strong currents of thought encourage us not to do this. The umbrage engines of social media and politics work by simplifying and separating. But Mr. Hussein refused to be drawn in, and that compassion gave him not only decency and grace, but also clarity.

Now nine months into his second term, President Donald Trump may be setting a new norm in law enforcement. Under his watch, prosecutors in the U.S. Justice Department have indicted three people whom Mr. Trump believes have done him wrong: former FBI Director James Comey, current New York Attorney General Letitia James, and, on Thursday, his former national security adviser, John Bolton.

The courts may yet declare all three to be innocent of charges against them. Yet the possibility of prosecutorial misconduct, such as for vindictiveness, has supercharged efforts to reset the norms of integrity – that is, pursuing justice over “winning” – that most prosecutors have honored for decades.

For now, much of that norm-resetting is at the state level, where millions of felonies and misdemeanors are handled each year by more than 2,300 prosecutor’s offices. And it is in the states where much of the problem lies. In about a third of cases in which someone is exonerated, the reason is prosecutorial misconduct; yet only 4% of prosecutors who participated in a wrongful conviction have been disciplined, according to the National Registry of Exonerations.

Some legal experts want the American Bar Association to toughen its Model Rules of Professional Conduct, specifically Rule 3.8 that establishes obligations and discipline for prosecutors, the gatekeepers of the legal system. Many states have recently tweaked ethics codes for prosecutors, as well as for other government workers. This year, for example, New York State updated its ethics guidebook for prosecutors, titled “The Right Thing.”

“Defense counsel protect their clients’ interests and legal rights. Judges protect the parties’ rights and the public’s interest in the proper resolution of pending cases,” the handbook states. “But it’s not their job to find the truth, decide who should be charged, or hold the perpetrator accountable. Only prosecutors are given the freedom – and with it the ethical duty – to promote all these vital components of ‘the right thing.’”

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Two states, Georgia and New York, have recently set up special bodies to oversee the conduct of prosecutors. The two commissions are very different in the scope of their powers and their political purposes. While they represent a new approach to the problem of “rogue” prosecutors, both are not seen as bipartisan enough. And rather than assist prosecutors in acting better, they are largely investigative or regulatory.

“Ethical principles are the essence of criminal prosecution, not a burden upon it,” the New York handbook states. Helping prosecutors to act along those principles, either in the Trump Justice Department or in the local courthouse, is now on the docket in the United States.

As the world’s second-largest continent, Africa has more regional trading blocs than any other (about 30). In dollar value, two of the blocs are among the world’s top 10. Yet 80% of African exports flow not to neighboring nations but to countries elsewhere around the globe.

That’s changing. Especially as aid cuts and tariff increases by the United States have pushed many African governments to accelerate their economies and trade with each other. That has put a renewed focus on an ambitious continent-wide, free-trade agreement that’s been in the works for more than five years.

“Africa has learned to stand on its own two feet. ... We are learning to industrialise, to create jobs, to innovate,” said Jane Osei, head of the African Investment Network. Speaking to African Business magazine in Washington this week, she framed the rollback of aid and preferential trade as giving Africa a certain “independence” that provides “opportunity within the challenge.”

The African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) is helping unlock some of that opportunity. Since its 2019 launch, 54 countries have signed on. That’s double the European Union’s membership and almost four times the EU’s population. During a pilot phase of the pact, a few countries have traded manufactured items as well as raw materials, while working to align payment and customs policies. This month, Ethiopia shipped goods under the pact for the first time while Namibia did the same in June.

“These steps demonstrate a growing commitment to the vision of a single continental market,” states GIS, a European-based think tank, describing it as “a shield against external shocks” and “a vehicle for unlocking Africa’s full economic potential.”

Much of this potential lies in the size of Africa’s market (with a population of over 1.5 billion) and among the thousands of small businesses that form the backbone of its economies. Intra-African trade grew to $208 billion in 2024, up 7.7 %from the previous year. Small producers traded a larger share of their products within Africa than larger firms. Expecting continued growth, global shipping giant DHL announced this week that it will expand services across Africa.

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Kenyan statesman Raila Odinga, who passed away Wednesday, was a proponent for African self-reliance and economic integration. But he emphasized the need for transparent, democratic governance, which is still rare on the continent.

Ultimately, as AfCFTA Secretary General Wamkele Mene said on a Brookings Institution podcast this year, “We have to ... create the conditions for our development to take place. ... Nobody is going to develop our continent except ourselves.”

Every few years, the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences goes to thinkers who offer fresh insights on the sources of economic progress. A good example is this year’s award – or rather, awards – announced on Monday. They were given to three people: two with a theory about progress – “creative destruction” – and another who points to a “culture of growth.” Given this long record of Nobels, there appears no end to the idea that ideas on progress have no end.

One of this year’s winners, economic historian Joel Mokyr, even states that growth depends heavily on an infinite source – what people believe, or specifically, a societal perspective that not only expects more ideas to be discovered but also makes them practical. This facilitates a continuous flow of innovation – such as clean energy or regenerative agriculture – that can provide sustainable growth.

Dr. Mokyr’s work on the origins of Britain’s Industrial Revolution showed how a change of view in a country can unlock curiosity and creativity. By itself, material innovation is not the key but rather the surrounding culture – such as a tolerance for failure in research, rule of law to protect patents, or an appreciation for the scientific method. And progress is not always linear. Leonardo da Vinci, for example, designed an early version of a helicopter in the 15th century. Today, many experts claim artificial intelligence is more dangerous than it is transformative.

Yet a society that sees progress as natural will spur new inventions, including ones that fix problems caused by past inventions. “Openness is a driver of growth,” one of this year’s Nobel winners, Philippe Aghion, told reporters this week. “Anything that gets in the way of openness is an obstruction to growth.”

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Ingenuity is a bottomless trait, and yet its role in economic growth requires the right set of conditions: freedom, collaboration, equality, and a receptivity to challenging ideas. Future economists might posit different causes of growth. The field has had to broaden its scope to many areas, from religion to quantum mechanics.

One constant, however, is the boundless attempts to measure the immeasurable flow of inspiration that, despite fits and starts, uplifts humanity. “We consistently fail to grasp how many ideas remain to be discovered,” states a former Nobel winner in economics, Paul Romer. There might be no end to prizes for new theories of progress.

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New drivers of Middle East progress

President Donald Trump’s Gaza peace plan still has lots of details to be worked out. But its widespread support signals evolving priorities in the region – and ongoing hope.

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• By the Monitor's Editorial Board

Oct. 14, 2025, 3:40 p.m. ET

The last 20 living Israeli hostages abducted by Hamas two years ago are back home. The bombing in Gaza has stopped. And nearly 2,000 imprisoned Palestinians have been released by Israel.

For those reasons alone, many people might agree with what U.S. President Donald Trump told Israel’s parliament Monday: “Together, we have shown that peace is not just a hope we can dream about, it is a reality we can build upon.”

For Israeli peace activist Maoz Inon, whose parents were killed in the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack, hope itself “is an action,” an essential first step to creating a better future. And, even as analysts caution it’s premature to declare peace a “reality,” support for Mr. Trump’s 20-point plan to end the Israel-Hamas war is widespread. Its goals cut across sectarian and national boundaries – from Israel’s ruling coalition to its opposition parties, from the leaders of Arab Gulf states to those in Turkey and North Africa.

This range of support signals a turning away from the acceptance or expectation of ongoing conflict to a new calculus, one of collaboration and change. In May, the Monitor’s Taylor Luck described an emerging “axis of cooperation” among Arab states and Turkey, which were instrumental in pressing Hamas to accept the peace deal.

Popular demands for moderation and modernization are propelling this shift. Across the Middle East, young people are demanding greater opportunity and representation. Gulf states realize that regional stability is essential to economic growth and to moving beyond dependence on finite oil revenue. Other Arab countries are seeking trade and investment to spur job creation and combat climate change.

Arab countries that have normalized ties with Israel maintained those ties throughout the two-year war in Gaza. In early 2023, Sunni-majority Saudi Arabia and Shiite-led Iran announced “normalization” of relations. And earlier this year, Turkey reached an accord with the 50-year separatist Kurdish movement.

For Palestinians in Gaza, a consensus for cooperation and stability brings some hope for progress. The Trump plan would bring in peacekeeping troops as well as aid for reconstruction. Israelis, too, would benefit, with a break from war. Elections scheduled for 2026 offer an opportunity for them to take stock of political priorities.

It’s possible that skepticism about the deal may not be entirely warranted. As American poet Emily Dickinson wrote of hope, it “perches in the soul” – and never stops singing its tune.

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The winner of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize, Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado, has many striking similarities to two previous winners: Myanmar’s Aung San Suu Kyi and Iran’s Narges Mohammadi. Yes, all three are women. Yes, all are champions for democracy inside dictatorships. And all are either in prison or in hiding.

On those aspects alone, they are worthy of a Nobel and inspiring to millions of followers. Yet what really links them in a meaningful way is how they describe a mental strength that helps them stand for civic virtues such as individual freedom and democratic equality.

Perhaps Ms. Suu Kyi best describes how pro-democracy dissidents rely on each other for what she calls a spiritual freedom from fear. In 2011, she spoke of what helps sustain her during long confinements: “I felt almost as a physical force the strong bond that linked those of us who had only our inner resources to fall back on when we were most in need of strength and endurance.”

She tells the people of Myanmar to “live like free people in an unfree nation.” The winner of the 1991 Peace Prize said she has “always been free” in her own mind and finds no need to forgive the rulers who arrested her because, “I don’t think they really did anything to me.”

In Iran, Ms. Mohammadi wrote a two-part book on how women dissidents endure torture and other cruelties in prison. She found they turn humiliation into a “spiritual experience” to make themselves stronger. Some find “certainty in the ultimate victory of truth.”

“The Islamic regime cannot separate a woman from her love for her family, her fellow citizens, or her God,” she wrote.

In Venezuela, as the Nobel committee put it, Ms. Machado has kept “the flame of democracy burning against a growing darkness” under the 12-year rule of President Nicolás Maduro. She describes her efforts as a spiritual struggle that ensures “because truth persists until it prevails.” In the face of a regime that relies on fear and division, she says she does not divide people into friends or enemies. “They are all citizens,” she told Forbes.

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“This country is not polarized, it is profoundly united. In the pain that it feels, but also in hope. Our hope is certain, it is growing, and they will not stop it.”

Add humility to Ms. Machado’s traits. When told of winning the Nobel, she said it was the achievement of a whole society. “I am just one person. I certainly do not deserve this,” she said in a video message.

My cover story is a sequel, one that’s almost a quarter century in the making. In 2001, the Monitor reported a story about inmates performing Shakespeare plays in a Kentucky prison. It inspired filmmakers Hank Rogerson and Jilann Spitzmiller to create the hit 2005 documentary “Shakespeare Behind Bars.” In turn, they invited the Monitor to join them this summer in Louisville, Kentucky, for the filming of a sequel, “Shakespeare Beyond Bars.”

Staff photographer Melanie Stetson Freeman and I spent five days with Jerry Guenthner and Sammie Byron, pivotal figures in the earlier article and in the documentary. Both men had been imprisoned for murder.

After spending time with them, I reflected on how perilous it is to judge others.

“In the first film, they were people that were really working hard on transforming themselves through the power of art,” says Mr. Rogerson. “We can’t be defined by one action. We need to be defined by all of our actions.”

Jerry and Sammie now work at The Spot, an opportunity center for at-risk youth. We observed Jerry teaming with a young woman named Lia to perform a scene from “Julius Caesar” for a class. Earlier, Sammie imparted a life lesson to his students about how he maintains a relationship with his son, who he says is a drug dealer, by avoiding talking to him in a judgmental way. Where you start out isn’t always where you end up.

“When we put a label on someone or we put them in a box, we all miss out,” says Ms. Spitzmiller. “Culture has gotten so complicated that we’re trying to simplify things with stereotypes and labels and boxes more than ever.”

I’ll never forget watching a minor league baseball game with Jerry and Sammie. Over the crack of bats, the cheers of the crowd, and the crunch of Cracker Jack, they talked about how their postprison lives will never be fully normal. One example: They avoid the grocery store cereal aisle; after decades behind bars, they get overwhelmed by copious breakfast options.

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They hope other people will assess them on their efforts to steer others away from making the same mistakes.

“I’m very blessed to have the opportunity to show that everybody has a chance at redemption,” says Jerry, who was utterly entranced by the postgame fireworks display. “No matter what you’ve done in life, no matter what kind of prodigal son you’ve been, you can always return.”