Global Dispatches -- Conversations On Foreign Policy And World Affairs

My guest today, Kumi Naidoo, is Secretary General of Amnesty International. He's a longtime activist and civil society leader who joined the anti-apartheid movement as a teenager and for many years lead Greenpeace.  In September, ahead of the UN Climate Summit, Amnesty International conferred its highest honor, the Ambassador of Conscience Award, to Greta Thunberg and the Friday's for the Future Movement. In this conversation I sought to draw out Kumi Naidoo's perspective as a longtime activist on this burgeoning transnational youth climate movement. That is the focus of much of our conversation in this episode.  We met in Amnesty's offices across the street from the United Nations, where days earlier hundreds of young people gathered for a Youth Climate Action summit.  From a UN perspective, this was a pretty interesting and unique event. And Secretary General Antonio Guterres was very transparent that he sought this kind of youth engagement as a means to pressure government to take more meaningful action on

Around the United Nations you will often see CEOs of major companies participating in meetings and events around sustainability. Meaningful corporate participation is fairly commonplace at the United Nation these days. But this was certainly not the case ten years ago and more, when I'd regularly see Hans Vestberg around the United Nations as one of the very few corporate leaders engaging on development and sustainability issues. Hans Vestberg is the CEO of Verizon and he is on the Global Dispatches podcast to discuss the role of 5G technologies in advancing the Sustainable Development Goals. We kick off with a discussion about what exactly 5G is, and how it can be used to advance sustainable development. We then have a discussion about his own commitment to sustainability issues and how Verizon has integrated the Sustainable Development Goals into its corporate strategies.

  The United Nations General Assembly, better known as UNGA, kicks in New York this week.  Hundreds of heads of state, business and civil society leaders and dignitaries of all stripes will descend on the UN for a week of events, meetings, and of course speeches. UNGA is the single most important and action-packed week on the diplomatic calendar -- a behemoth of diplomatic events. On the line with me to preview the big stories that will drive the agenda at UNGA this year is Margaret Besheer, the UN correspondent for Voice of America, and Richard Gowan, the UN director of the International Crisis Group.  We discuss a key youth summit on climate, the UN Climate Action Summit, how tensions between the United States and Iran may shape events at UNGA, and many other key moments, events, and ideas to watch during UNGA.   If you have 25 minutes and want to learn the storylines that will drive the agenda at UNGA this year, have a listen.   https://patreon.com/GlobalDispatches  

United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres discusses climate change in this special episode of the Global Dispatches podcast.  On Tuesday, September 17th Antonio Guterres sat down with Mark Hertsgaard of The Nation and Mark Phillips of CBS News for an interview conducted on behalf of Covering Climate Now. This is a global collaboration of over 250 news outlets, including the Global Dispatches Podcast and UN Dispatch, to strengthen coverage of the climate story. The interview with Antonio Guterres was conducted on behalf of all participating members of this coalition and I am glad to be able to present the podcast version of it to you.   If you are listening to this episode contemporaneously, I'd encourage you to check out the episode I posted earlier this week that gets into a little more detail about the UN Climate Action Summit; and later this week, I will have an episode that previews all the big stories that will drive the agenda around the UN Week in New York.  After the interview concludes, I'l

  The UN General Assembly convenes at United Nations headquarters in New York next week. As in every year, UNGA is an annual opportunity for heads of state to come to the United Nations to meet each other and address the world.   What distinguishes the UN General Assembly this year is a series of key events and meetings focused on climate change.   Of these events and meetings the most high profile is what is known as the UN Climate Action Summit. This will take place on Monday the 23rd of September, and will include top government officials, business leaders, and civil society members bringing to the table concrete action plans to accelerate progress on addressing climate change.    Today's episode of the Global Dispatches podcast is dedicated to explaining just what that Climate Action Summit entails and what to expect from this major climate meeting at the United Nations.     On the line with me to discuss the significance of this summit and what it hopes to achieve is  Cassie Flynn, she is the strategic

In late August it appeared that the United States was very close to an agreement with the Taliban that would see US troops withdraw from the Afghanistan. Leading the negotiations on the US-side was Zalmay Khalilzad, a widely respected former US Ambassador to the UN who is an immigrant to the US from Afghanistan.  He also served as US Ambassador to Afghanistan shortly after the fall of the Taliban.  Significantly, these negotiations did not include the Afghan government, rather they were direct negotiations between the US and the Taliban.  By early September it appeared that the two sides had reached a deal. Then, on September 7th Donald Trump appeared to upend the deal in a tweet suggesting that a planned meeting between the US and Taliban at Camp David had been cancelled, apparently ending these talks. But then, days later, he fired National Security Advisor John Bolton who had largely opposed negotiating with the Taliban in the first place.  So where does this leave the peace process and negotiations for a

Tanzania has long been recognized as stable country, generally more advanced in its democracy than many other countries in East Africa. To be sure, democracy in Tanzania was certainly imperfect and flawed. But there did exist a degree of press freedom, a robust civil society, and multiple political parties. Over the last few years, elements of Tanzanian democracy have been curtailed. The country is now in the midst of what scholars would call a democratic backslide. This occurs when the state uses its power to weaken institutions that sustain democracy, like civil society and a free press.  A key inflection point in this process was the 2015 election of President John Magufuli. Magufuli is very much a populist -- his nickname is "The Bulldozer." He came to power on a pledge to stamp out corruption but has also shown himself to be increasingly intolerant of dissent.  Since taking office he has enacted laws to severely restrict press freedoms; many journalists have been arrested, and political opponents silence

Japan and South Korea are in the throws of a dispute - and its getting worse. What was a trade war escalated to the security realm last month when the South Korean government announced that it was pulling out of a key intelligence sharing agreement with Tokyo. This agreement enabled the real-time sharing of key intelligence as it related to common threats, including from North Korea.  Needless to say, amid a growing threat from North Korea, which is regularly testing missiles that could reach both countries, this dispute between South Korea and Japan poses a big risk for international security.  So why are two key US allies that share a common adversary at such loggerheads? And what does a frayed relationship between Seoul and Tokyo mean for regional security and international relations more broadly? On the line with me to answer these questions and more is Andrew Yeo, associate professor of politics at the Catholic University of America. We kick off talking through the World War Two era origins of this conf

Greg Stanton has spent a career researching and fighting genocide. He speaks candidly about the psychological toll of this line of work and managing the PTSD which he confronts to this day.  Stanton is a descendent of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and as you'll learn from this conversation, the human rights gene runs strong in this family. His father was a liberal preacher and civil rights activist, and Greg tells me the most dangerous place he's ever worked, to this day, was registering black voters in Mississippi in the 1960s.    Greg is the founder of the NGO Genocide watch. His career as a genocide scholar and activist began in the 1980s as an humanitarian worker in Cambodia, and he recounts collecting evidence of war crimes committed by the Khmer Rouge. Greg served for many years in the State Department as well, including in Rwanda to help establish the war crimes tribunal following the 1994 genocide. We kick off discussing an ongoing genocide against the Yazidi people in Iraq and Syria.   The subject matter of

Fires raging in the Amazon have captured the world's attention and put focus on the policies of the Brazilian government.  The true extent of the fires is not yet known--but most sources suggest that the scale of the fires and deforestation underway is much greater than that of previous years. The reason for that is the permissive policies of the Jair Bolsonaro government. Bolsonaro is a rightwing firebrand who was elected to office in 2018 following major scandals implicating more left wing parties. As my guest today Rebecca Abers explains, once in office Bolsonaro quickly enacted policies that reversed years of progress against forestation of the Amazon. Rebecca Abers is professor of political science at the University of Brasilia in Brazil. And in this conversation, she describes the bureaucratic maneuvers engineered by Bolsonaro to undermine protections against de-forestation. We also discuss how and why international pressure, including an upcoming major UN Summit on Climate Change is impacting domestic

About 75% of the world's population live in societies that practice of form of dowry payment. This is also known as brideprice and it is essentially wealth that a potential husband must pay to the family of his would-be wife. But in this way, brideprice acts as a kind of regressive flat tax that younger, and generally poorer men must pay to wealthier, older men. Hilary Matfess, a PHD candidate at Yale University, undertook a wide study of the impact of fluctuations in brideprice on broader issues related to conflict. She found that there is a positive correlation between changes in brideprice and the outbreak of violent conflict. In other words, when the cost of getting married increases, so too does the probability of armed conflict. Hilary Matfess published her findings a paper published in the 2017 issues of the academic journal International Security. In it, she and her co-author Valerie Hudson identify how the cost of getting married can lead to the outbreak of violent conflict and war. Anyone who has

The fish you eat may have been caught by slaves. Most Thai fishing boats operating in the South China Sea are dependent on migrant labor. But many of those vessels are essentially floating slave ships in which migrant workers are forced into a kind of debt bondage from which they cannot escape.  Journalist Ian Urbina covered this issue for years as a reporter for the New York Times. He reported from land and sea to offer a first hand account of both the conditions on these ships and the broader economic, political and environmental forces that propel slavery on fishing boats in the South China Sea.   Ian Urbina is on the podcast today to discuss his reporting on this issue, which is included in his new book the Outlaw Ocean: Journeys Across the Last Untamed Frontier. We kick off discussing the plight of these debt-bonded laborers before having a broader conversation about the issue of slavery at sea.  Support the show! https://www.patreon.com/GlobalDispatches   

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC, released a report in August demonstrating the harmful relationship between climate change and how we humans are using land for food and agriculture.  The warnings are dire. Agriculture and deforestation account for nearly a quarter of all human made greenhouse gas emissions -- and big changes in how we produce and consume food need to take place if we are to curb the worst effects of climate change. At the same time, the world population is increasing and poverty is declining, meaning food consumption patterns, particularly around meat, are changing.      Big changes in how we produce and consume food need to take place if we are to curb the worst effects of climate change. On the line with me to discuss how we can feed the world without destroying the planet is Timothy Searchinger. He' s a research scholar at Princeton University and fellow with the World Resources Institute. He was recently the lead author on a report by WRI Creating a

In August 2017, hundreds of thousands of ethnic Rohingya muslims from Myanmar fled across the border to Bangladesh. The Rohingya are a minority population that have long faced discrimination by the Buddhist Burmese majority. In the summer of 2017, things got very bad, very quickly.  A Rohingya militant group attacked some police outposts in Myanmar. The government and military responded by attacking Rohingya towns and villages, unleashing massive violence against a civilian population. This drove over 600,000 Rohingya to refugee camps in a region of Bangladesh known as Cox's Bazar. Some 700,000 Rohingya refugees remain there, to this day.  The violence that drove these people from their home was certainly a crime against humanity -- a UN official called it "a text book example of an ethnic cleansing."  And maybe even a genocide.  That of course demands the question: who will pay for these crimes. What does accountability look like in a situation like this. And can perpetrators of these crimes even be brought

In the summer of 2014, ISIS forces swept through parts of Iraq that were home to the Yazidi people. This is an ethnic minority that has lived in Northwestern Iraq for centuries -- and suddenly they were under attack.  What transpired was a genocide. Men and boys were murdered for being Yazidi; women and girls were kidnapped and taken as sex slaves for ISIS fighters.     At the time, my guest today Emma Beals was reporting from Erbil, a city in the Kurdish region of Iraq near to where these atrocities were taking place. She was reeling from the news that a fellow journalist, James Foley, had been brutally murdered when she received a call from a human rights organization asking her to investigate rumors of a massacre in the Yazidi town of Kocho.  Emma Beals describes whats next in a series of powerful essays, titled Kocho's Living Ghosts.There were 19 surviving men from the town's original population of 1,888. In our conversation Emma Beals recounts the massacre through the testimony of the survivors she inter

When Ben Rhodes first met Aung San Suu Kyi she exuded the all traits that made her such an international icon for human rights and democracy. It was 2012, and Ben Rhodes, who was the deputy national security advisor, was accompanying Barack Obama in an historic visit to Myanmar. As he puts it, this meeting was the high water mark for her moral authority. There was a hopefulness, surrounding her, he says. Now seven years later, she has stripped of many international accolades, honors and prizes.  At issue is the fact that as the most powerful civilian leader in Myanmar she refused to intervene against, or even publicly condemn, a genocide committed by the government against a religious and ethnic minority.  Some 700,000 ethnic Rohingya have fled Myanmar amid what a UN official has called a textbook example of ethnic cleansing. All the the while, Aung San Suu Kyi was silent.  So what happened to Aung San Suu Kyi? How did a Nobel Peace Prize winner who spent decades under house arrest in an elegant pursuit of de

  The Horn of Africa region, which includes parts of Somalia, Kenya,  Ethiopia, is experiencing a severe drought. This region has been particularly vulnerable to droughts in recent years--but the situation this summer has become increasingly dire and is raising the prospect of a widespread humanitarian emergency.  A little background: In the summer of 2011, there was a similar drought in the region. But warnings about the humanitarian consequences of this drought went largely unheeded until the drought lead to a famine -- the first of the 21st century. Over the subsequent weeks and months over 260,000 people died, making this famine one of the worst mass atrocities of this decade. That was 2011. In 2017, there was another drought. But this time, the international community and governments in the region responded with urgency. They were able to provide humanitarian assistance and other aid and interventions that prevented the tragedy of 2011 from being repeated. This brings us So that is all some recent histor

Ethiopia is in the midst of a fairly remarkable democratic renewal. Since taking office in April 2018, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed has accelerated a process of political opening, including a greater freedom of press, the release of political prisoners, a detente with Eritrea, and other meaningful reforms.  But Ethiopia's transition to a liberal, open and multi-party democracy has faced some significant challenges in recent weeks. On June 22, an a general tried to orchestrate a coup attempt, which resulted in two high profile assassinations. That coup attempt, which failed, came on the heels of inter-communal clashes that forced nearly 3 million people from their homes.  Now, the transition underway in Ethiopia is very much being challenged.  On the line to help explain why Ethiopian politics is at such a pivotal moment right now William Davidson, senior Ethiopia analyst with the International Crisis Group. He offers listeners some helpful context and background for understanding the current situation, including

One of the largest cities in India is running out of water. Is this our climate future? Monsoons typically provide the bulk of water for Chennai, which is one of the largest cities in India. It is on the south eastern coast of the country, in the Tamil Nadu province which is an area that relies on seasonal monsoons to supply the bulk of water.  But last year's monsoons were exceptionally weak, causing aquifers and other water sources to run dry.  Now, in some neighborhoods if taps run at all, only a trickle comes out. Many neighborhoods are reliant on water trucks-- if they can afford it. Meanwhile many people are fleeing the city while this crisis persists. The proximate cause of this crisis is poor rains. But according to my guest today, Meera Subramanian, deeper political and social factors have exacerbated this crisis. This includes poor city planning and a focus on massive infrastructure projects of limited utility.  Meera Subramanian is a freelance journalist and independent author. She is the author of

Since taking office the Trump administration has taken unprecedented steps to sharply reduce both the number of refugees who are resettled in the United States and also the number of people who can claim asylum. This has included significantly lowering what is known as the "ceiling" on refugee admissions to the smallest number ever and placing onerous restrictions on exactly who can be admitted as a refugee. Meanwhile, the administration is implementing several policies of dubious legality that would effectively make it impossible for people entering the southern US border to claim asylum. The Trump administration's restrictive policies toward refugees and asylum seekers are reaching a new phase. In this episode one of the world's leading experts on refugee and asylum policies is on the line to both discuss the mechanics of what the Trump administration is doing. Eric Schwartz is the president of Refugees International and also served as Assistant Secretary of State for Population, Refugees, and Migration in