Cooper UNion

For 30 years, Simon Billenness, director of the Campaign for a New Myanmar and former head of the Free Burma Coalition, has turned consumer boycotts, shareholder resolutions, and bipartisan lobbying into real pressure on Myanmar's military junta. He traces the coup history, from the 2015 NLD election win under Aung San Suu Kyi to the 2021 military takeover, then walks through the campaigns that pu...

We are all aging, every day, yet older people are the one group without a binding UN human rights treaty to protect them. Sylvia Beals unpacks why: ageism keeps the issue invisible, treated as charity rather than rights, even as the world now holds more older people than children under five. She debunks the myths still slowing a UN Convention on the Rights of Older Persons — that aging means decli...

Frustrated that a city's mandated hazard-mitigation meetings were reaching no one, Baja, Co-CEO of Embodied Ecosystems and the Resilience Hub Collaborative, spent a year listening in Baltimore neighborhoods before landing on the answer: communities need a trusted, self-determined place of belonging. Thirteen years later, that idea has spread worldwide as resilience hubs: community-run spaces built...

ER physician Ira Helfand, co-founder of Back from the Brink and a leader of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, lays out just how close the world has already come to nuclear war, and how much closer it is getting. He walks through today's flashpoints, from Ukraine and Iran to India-Pakistan and the Koreas, the physical reality of a single detonation, an...

Fresh from the 20th annual Human Rights Summit, hosted by Timor-Leste at UN headquarters, Demme Durrett, co-director of Youth for Human Rights USA, and Emma Ashton Sims, executive director of United for Human Rights and Youth for Human Rights International, unpack why human rights education drives their work. They discuss Article 29 of the Universal Declaration, the flash mobs and peace walks thei...

More than a century after the 1904–1908 genocide scattered the Nama people across Namibia and Botswana, their descendants are demanding a seat at the table in the ongoing reparations talks between Namibia and Germany. Nicodemus Cooper of Botswana's Namakhoen Network of Heritage Advocacy, Bhibo Maruping-Kgari of the San community's Indigenous Women's Rights Advocacy, and Jennifer Isaacks of Namibia...

Long before they're old enough to vote, hundreds of young people across Hawaii are drafting testimony, coordinating campaigns, and pushing lawmakers toward climate justice through the Climate Future Forum. Three of the mentors behind that work — Kawika Kahiapo, who leads food-systems advocacy connecting food, ʻāina, and policy; Debbie Milliken, Director of Sustainability Programs at Punahou School...

For more than three decades, Rodion, an Udege leader from Russian Siberia, has fought to protect his community's ancestral forest from industrial logging. That fight led to a landmark win: UNESCO World Heritage status for the Bikin River Valley, one of the last untouched forests on Earth and home to the Amur tiger. Now director of the Center for Support of Indigenous Peoples of the North (CSIPN) a...

In this episode of Cooper Union, Em Haley, a Māori spoken-word artist, scholar, and human rights advocate from Waikato-Tainui, Aotearoa, discusses the fight to protect Māori language, land, and self-determination under a government rolling back Treaty of Waitangi protections. She reflects on the historic Toitū Te Tiriti march, her interventions at the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, and h...

In this episode of Cooper Union, Sarah, a community organizer and researcher in Utrecht, and Morten, a longtime human rights advocate from Denmark, discuss UCLG's new Global Charter-Agenda for Human Rights in the City, just adopted by 250,000 cities worldwide. They unpack the charter's 37 rights across seven clusters, from essential services and the right to food to digital rights, climate justice...

In this episode of Cooper Union, recorded at the UN Human Rights Council's 62nd session in Geneva, Salma of the International Service for Human Rights (ISHR) offers an insider look at the Council on its 20th anniversary. She reflects on two decades of progress — from setting international standards to responding to atrocities in Sudan — while candidly addressing key challenges: budget crises, thre...

In this episode of Cooper UNion, Joshua Cooper speaks with Jackie Cabasso and John Burroughs — long-time nuclear disarmament advocates working through the Western States Legal Foundation, Lawyers Committee on Nuclear Policy, and global networks calling for the elimination of nuclear weapons. The conversation explores why nuclear abolition is not only an international security issue but also a huma...

In this episode of Cooper UNion, Joshua Cooper speaks with Dwayne Mamo, Documentation and Communications Manager at the International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs (IWGIA) and General Editor of The Indigenous World, about one of the most important annual publications documenting the realities of Indigenous Peoples worldwide. Recorded during the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, the conv...

In this episode of Cooper UNion, Joshua Cooper speaks with Viro Xulue, human and Indigenous rights advisor to the Drehu Customary Council, about Indigenous rights, decolonization, and self-determination in Kanaky/New Caledonia. The conversation explores the Kanak people’s struggle for recognition, justice, and cultural survival, including Indigenous identity, youth leadership, and dialogue during...

What if destroying nature became an international crime? In this episode of Cooper UNion, Joshua Cooper speaks with Lauren Banham, Anna Maddrick, and Rodrigo Lledó about the growing global movement to recognize ecocide — severe and widespread environmental destruction — as a crime under international law. The conversation traces the origins of the concept, its connection to human rights, climate j...

In this episode of Cooper UNion, recorded during the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, Joshua Cooper speaks with Dr. Richard Grounds about the power of Indigenous languages as a foundation of identity, knowledge, culture, and human rights. The conversation explores how languages carry ancestral wisdom — from relationships with the land and stars to ceremonies, histories, and ways of underst...

Welcome to Cooper UNion — a peacecast exploring the future of global cooperation, human rights, sustainable development, and the people working to shape a more just and connected world. Hosted by Joshua Cooper, Cooper UNion brings together activists, researchers, UN practitioners, policymakers, artists, and grassroots voices for thoughtful and accessible conversations on the defining challenges of...