Global Dispatches -- Conversations On Foreign Policy And World Affairs

The Liberal party in Canada, lead by Justin Trudeau, son of Pierre, shocked the world with a big, big win in hotly contested national elections. The Liberal ascent ends a near decade in power for the conservative Stephen Harper and has the potential to fundamentally re-balance Canada's relationship with the world, so says my guest Janice Stein who is the founding director of the Munk School of International Affairs at the University of Toronto. We spoke the morning after the elections and have a great and truly interesting conversation about the discrete changes we can expect in Canadian foreign policy -- and how those changes may affect international relations and global affairs more broadly. We discuss what's called "Middle Power Diplomacy" in academic circles, Canada's role in Climate politics, and why Washington, DC may be none too pleased with some of the changes to come.     This is a timely and interesting conversation. Enjoy! 

  Felice Gaer has served on the UN Committee Against torture since 1999, making her the longest serving American elected to a UN Human Rights body. Though there is little power vested in the independent experts who staff treaty organizations, Gaer has been able to move the needle on human rights cases worldwide through creatively deploying the little power she has. This was an lesson she first learned while investigating the disappearance of the soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov in the early 1980s.    Felice has had a very long career in human rights, and we trace the origins of her commitment to human rights from an early age, and more recently to her work on the Committee Against Torture. We kick off our conversation with about a 15 minute conversation about the UN's evolving posture on women's rights and LGBT rights. Gaer tells an interesting story about how an early bureaucratic decision about the structure of the UN's Economic and Social council enabled the integration of women's rights into the broader U

So we had a scare. But all ends well.    This episode is in two parts. First, you'll hear directly from my amazing wife about giving birth in our family car. It's a crazy story. Then, I speak with Dr. Luc de Bernis Senior Maternal Health Advisor at the UN Population Fund who puts our experience in a larger global health context. We discuss various interventions to reduce maternal and newborn mortality around the world, including the deployment of what the World Health Organization calls "Skilled Birth Attendants."     I've reported on health systems and maternal and new born health for years and visited clinics and hospitals in Bangladesh and several countries in sub-saharan Africa, but it wasn't until my wife gave birth in our old car that I truly appreciated the role of a skilled birth attendant in ensuring the safety and health of mother and child. 

Christine Fair is a respected scholar of South Asian politics and security. But her career path has been tough, with unnecessary obstacles in her way. In this episode, she speaks candidly about overcoming sexual harassment in graduate school and facing threats of sexual violence by the very subjects she studies as an academic. 

The Nobel Peace Prize is announced on October 9. In March this year, Victor Ochen was nominated for the 2015 prize by the same organization the nominated previous laureates, Martin Luther King, Jr, Desmond Tutu, Jimmy Carter and Dag Hammarskjold Victor Ochen may not be a household name. But that may soon change. He is the founder of the peace and reconciliation NGO African Youth Initiative Network, which is active in Northern Uganda. He was the first Ugandan and youngest African ever nominated for the prize.  Victor has a powerful personal story. He grew up in IDP camps fleeing LRA violence and even lost his brother to the LRA. But throughout it all he maintained a commitment to peace and justice. In this episode, Victor discusses his nomination, tells stories from a childhood in conflict, and explains why he started an NGO.  This is an edited repost of Episode 53

Andrew Young is a civil rights icon who was with his friend Martin Luther King Jr when Dr. King was assassinated in 1968. In this interview, Young traces his a lifelong commitment to non-violence from his childhood in New Orleans, to his civil rights work in the 1950s and 1960s, to becoming Jimmy Carter's ambassador to the United Nations and long-serving Mayor of Atlanta, Georgia.  This is a re-post of Episode 32, published last year. 

UN Week kicks off on a high note on Friday, with the opening of a special summit on the Sustainable Development Goals. Pope Francis will be one of the first to address the summit on Friday morning. President Obama is helping to close the session on Sunday. In between are over 150 speakers, mostly heads of state.  The SDG summit is a very big deal for the United Nations, and quite possibly for all of humanity. It is the culmination of over two years of negotiations over what should replace the Millennium Development Goals, which expire at the end of this year.   The SDGs — or, the “Global Goals,” as the advocacy community has taken to calling them — are an aspirational set of 17 goals and 169 targets that every country on the planet is pledging to work toward from now until 2030. The top goal is nothing less than the total eradication of extreme poverty (as defined by people living on $1.25 per day), and each of the goals have embedded in them principles of environmental sustainability.  It’s a massively ambit

The UN Summit kicks off next week in New York! This is always the most exciting time of year for us UN nerds. And between the Pope and Putin, this UNGA promises to be a very interesting one.   Here with me to break down what to expect at the UN in the coming weeks and how make sense of it all is Richard Gowan. We discuss the big stories, the overlooked stories, and political intrigue that will accompany the 70th UN General Assembly.   Gowan is a fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations and also with the Center on International Cooperation, where he was previously research director.  He is a columnist for World Politics Review, which is sponsoring this episode. World Politics Review provides uncompromising analysis of critical global trends to give policy makers, business people, and academics the context they need to have the confidence they want. The good people at World Politics Review are offering Global Dispatches Podcast listeners a two week free trial and then a 50% discount on an annual s

Elmira Bayrasli is the author of the new book "From the Other Side of the World: Extraordinary Entrepreneurs, Unlikely Places." She is also the co founder of Foreign Policy Interrupted, which seeks to amplify the voice of female foreign policy experts-- and she's a former assistant to Madeleine Albright.   We kick off discussing the new book, which transitions nicely to a conversation about her experience growing up the child of Turkish immigrants and how she got her start working in foreign policy.   If you are a regular listener to the podcast--thank you! Our community of listeners has been growing pretty dramatically in recent weeks, I think largely due to word of mouth--so thank you again for spreading the world. And As always, feel free to reach out to me via twitter @MarkLGoldberg or you can send me an email via GlobalDispatchesPodcast.com. And if you are new to the podcast, welcome! We post one of these longer interviews with foreign policy thought leaders every monday. Go to the website to check out o

Why do countries build fences and walls at their border and under what conditions are those walls and fences likely to work as intended? These questions are obviously topical right now, with the US-Mexico border a hot button issue in the US presidential election; and the Syrian refugee crisis dominating discussion the Europe   But fences and their effectiveness have largely remained off the radar of any rigorous academic study. Until now. In the most recent edition of the journal International Security, political scientists Ron Hassner and Jason Wittenberg of UC Berkeley compiled what is the first-ever dataset of what they called "fortified boundaries" constructed between countries since 1945.    Ron Hassner is on the line with me to discusses their study and the implications of some of their key findings, including the fact that we are in the midst of a fortified boundary building boom and why the religion of a country seems to make a difference in whether or not the country decides to build a border fence.

When Jina Moore was in Middle School she became intensely curious about the Holocaust, reading about everything she could on the subject. That curiosity improbably led a girl from a small town in West Virginia to become pen pals with the woman who hid Anne Frank.  These days, Jina is based in Nairobi, Kenya and is the the international women's rights correspondent for Buzzfeed, where she's covered key stories, including the ebola outbreak. On a personal note, she is someone whose reporting I've come to rely on to have a deeper and more textured understanding of important global issues.    I love this episode and I think you will too. Her own story is just so fascinating and I encourage you to follow her work on Buzzfeed. As always, you can go to globaldispatchespodcast.com to peruse our archives where we have lots of great conversations like the one you are about to hear. You can also send me an email or hit me up on twitter @MarkLGoldberg; love hearing from you guys--keep the emails coming.   

The Syrian refugee crisis has finally made it to Europe's doorstep. Over the past several weeks, masses of refugees have made their way to southeastern Europe, mostly en route to Germany and other countries in northern Europe. After four years of conflict, the Syrian refugee crisis is suddenly a crisis for Europe.   Here with me to discuss the implications of this refugee flow is Ellen Laipson of the Stimson Center. We have a fascinating discussion about how the conflict in Syria and Iraq is manifesting itself on the streets of Europe and how the scale of the outmigration from the middle east to Europe resembles the wave of Irish escaping the potato famine to the USA in the 1850s This episode is being brought to you by World Politics Review, which provides uncompromising analysis of critical global trends to give policy makers, business people, and academics the context they need to have the confidence they want. The good people at World Politics Review are offering Global Dispatches Podcast listeners a two w

My guest today, Juliana Barbassa is a journalist and the author of the new book Dancing with the Devil in the City of God: Rio di Janeiro on the Brink.  We have a great conversation about the current political upheaval in Brazil; how preparations for the 2016 summer Olympics are changing the character of Rio; and why corruption in Brazil's political system is seemingly so endemic.   Juliana had a nomadic upbringing. She is Brazilian, but spent much of her childhood overseas in the middle east and Texas, where she developed a bug for journalism. We discuss her life and career, including her time covering key immigration debates in the USA in the 1990s and 2000s; and her writing of this interesting new book about Rio.    If you want to learn more about the most important city in one of the most interesting countries on earth, have a listen.   

Earlier this week the UN Security Council did something it's never done before: it held a meeting specifically focusing on violence directed against LGBT people. The council called two witnesses, both of whom are gay men caught up in the conflict in the Middle East. The first witness was an Iraqi who spoke to the Council by phone. He spoke anonymously and from an undiclosed location because he was marked for death by ISIS. The second witness was Subhi Nahas, a gay Syrian refugee now living in the USA. A day after addressing the Security Council, Subhi spoke with me.    The episode you are about to hear is in two parts. First, you'll hear Subhi's story and how he fled Syria once Al Qaeda's affiliate, Jabat al-Nusra, took over his town. Next, you will hear from Neil Grungras, the founder of the Organization for Refuge, Asylum and Migration, which happens to employ Subhi. Neil helps put the situation of LGBT refugees and asylum seekers in a broader global context.    This is a powerful episode, and a profound re

"Worm Wars" is shorthand for an ongoing scientific debate about the efficacy of de-worming programs; that is, programs supported by governments and non profits to stop the transmission of parasitic worms. This debate has become exceedingly heated in recent weeks after new research called into question old research about a key claim that de-worming programs increased school attendence.   This largely academic debate offers key insights into the role of research in influencing international development and global health agendas.     The debate gets very complicated, very quickly. Here to help me make sense of it all and explain its larger relevance to international development is my old pal Tom Murphy. Tom is a correspondant for the website Humanosphere and also the co-founder along with...me of DAWNS Digest.      

There is a new ebola vaccine. And it works spectacularly well. A recent paper in the Lancet demonstrated of the 7,600 people in Guinea who received the vaccine, not one person contracted the virus. This 100% effectiveness rate is unheard of.    Dr. Jeremy Farrar is on the line to discuss the implications of this vaccine for the fight against ebola.  He is a professor of tropical medicine and director of the Welcome Trust, a philanthropy that supports medical research. We discuss how the vaccine trial was conducted, how the results can be analyzed and what an effective vaccine might mean for the global fight against ebola. Dr. Farrar has also very prominently called for the creation of a global vaccine fund to spur the development and deployment of vaccines to counter fast emerging epidemics. And we have a lively conversation about this proposal.

The FARC Insurgency in Colombia has been raging for fifty years. And now, after a long peace process, it may soon be coming to a formal end. But even though a peace deal may be signed, whether or not that results in a meaningful improvement for the lives of people in rural Colombia is a key determinant of whether or not peace can be sustained.  That is the argument of my guest James Bargent, a freelance journalist in Colombia who has a piece in World Politics Review discussing the prospect of a peace dividend in poor, rural outposts of Colombia over which FARC has historically exerted a great deal of influence. We have a very interesting conversation about the history of this insurgency, the peace process, the challenge of coca eradication and the complex relationship between impoverished farmers, FARC guerrillas and the government.    This episode is being brought to you by World Politics Review, which provides uncompromising analysis of critical global trends to give policy makers, business people, and acad

South Sudan is in a tailspin. On July 9, the country commemorated its 4th anniversary of independence but it was hardly a celebration. Since December 2013 the country has been in a freefall stemming from when a political dispute between President Salva kiir and his rival Riek Machar turned into open conflict and civil war. Millions have been forced from their homes, a famine might loom over the country, and there is no end in sight.  Here to help explain how things went so badly, so quickly for this young country is Rebecca Hamilton. She's the author of the book Fighting for Darfur and professor at Columbia University's Law School.  Rebecca does a great job explaining the wider regional context of this conflict; and also showing how a government that was once championed by the USA fell out of favor with the Obama administration.     

Jessica Jackley co-founded Kiva and revolutionized micro-lending. Her new memoir Clay, Water, Brick tells the story of the founding of Kiva and her own personal journey from a religious family in Pittsburgh to becoming a successful social entrepreneur. This is a great conversation about personal development, entrepreneurship, starting Kiva--and then figuring out how to handle its explosive growth.  Also: a podcast milestone! Jessica, and her husband Reza Aslan, have become the first wife and husband team to appear independently on this show. My conversation with Reza is episode 64.

This is a special bonus episode of Global Dispatches. Mark speaks with Prof Laura Seay about the implications of President Obama's decision to visit Ethiopia, and what it says about US policy toward Africa.