Friends of Europe podcasts

In today's episode of Policy Voices, Luke O’Callaghan-White, program manager for Climate, Energy and Sustainability at Friends of Europe, speaks with Mekala Krishnnan, partner at the McKinsey Global Institute, about the report "An affordable, reliable, competitive path to net zero". Although there has been meaningful momentum, the world is not on track to achieve the goal enshrined in the Paris Ag...

As part of the work to design a renewed social contract for Europe, Debating Europe is embarking on a crucial exploration of the challenges facing liberal democracies in the 21st century. In an era dominated by global issues such as climate change and the rise of artificial intelligence, the traditional decision-making tools inherited from the past two centuries are proving to be inadequate. All o...

This week on Keeping an Eye on the Geopolitical Ball, Jamie Shea, Senior Fellow at Friends of Europe, analyses what the 2023 United Nations Climate Conference in Dubai achieved and what should follow next. After two weeks of negotiations between almost 200 countries, a final COP text was adopted to begin reducing global fossil fuel consumption and thereby avert the worst consequences of climate ch...

Argentina is celebrating four decades of uninterrupted democracy at the same time it elected a far-right politician as president. Javier Milei was inaugurated as Argentina's president on Sunday and the negotiations of the EU-Mercosur agreement have now been put on hold. Speaking before these last developments took place, Atilio Berardi, Argentinian Ambassador to the European Union, was hopeful tha...

Never try to beat the far-right in their own game. This was the lesson painfully learned by the VVD on 22 November. The game was the manipulation of migrants and asylum seekers and the PVV proved to be the master and succeeded in getting the most votes in the latest Dutch elections. Kirsten van den Hul, Director of DutchCulture, a former member of the Dutch Parliament, and a European Young Leader,...

This week on Keeping an Eye on the Geopolitical Ball, Jamie Shea, Senior Fellow at Friends of Europe, examines the longer-term strategic implications for the broader international community of nearly two months of crisis between Israel and Hamas. Jamie reflects on whether the humanitarian pause will continue, Israel’s military objectives, as well as the future of Gaza. The larger question looming,...

Today's episode is all about evasion of sanctions. Host Catarina Vila Nova is joined by Oksana Antonenko, visiting fellow at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, and Paul Taylor, senior fellow at Friends of Europe, to discuss how Russia has been able to evade sanctions and whether sanctions have been able to seriously target the Russian economy.

Ahead of COP28 in Dubai, the stakes have never been higher and the expectations never lower. In two days, 70,000 people will be descending in Dubai and we spoke with one of them. Sandrine Dixson-Declève, President of the Club of Rome, makes the case for why we need to move beyond the business that has to happen and frames success as a pledge around fossil-fuel phase-down. Dixson-Declève is joined...

This week on Keeping an Eye on the Geopolitical Ball, Jamie Shea, Senior Fellow at Friends of Europe, examines where Kyiv and Moscow stand nearly two years after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. With winter approaching, a growing ‘Ukraine fatigue’ in Europe and the United States, and attention being diverted to other conflicts such as in Gaza, it is now more vital than ever for the West to uphold sup...

Polish propaganda against the LGBTQ+ community during the rule of the Law and Justice Party was compared to the Nazi propaganda orchestrated by Joseph Goebbels. The eye-opening statement was made by Michał Olszewski, Deputy Mayor of Warsaw, in this week's Policy Voices where he was joined by Bart Staszewski, Founder and CEO of the Basta Foundation. Together, they call for quick and overarching cha...

In this week’s episode of Keeping an Eye on the Geopolitical Ball, Jamie Shea, Senior Fellow at Friends of Europe, discusses the implications of the European Commission’s 2023 Enlargement Package adopted last week. The report recommends to open membership negotiations with Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, as well as continue negotiations with existing candidates such as Turkey...

Hanna Liubakova is a Belarusian journalist in exile. After the government’s crackdown of the protests that followed the elections of 2020, Liubakova had to flee because her country was not safe for her anymore. She was later detained in a country which she is not disclosing and ultimately let go without being extradited to Belarus. However, it was during her detainment that Liubakova found out tha...

On this week's Policy Voices, host Catarina Vila Nova speaks to Kim Smouter, director of the European Network Against Racism, following the release of the report "Being Black in the EU" by the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights. Smouter details how people of color living in Europe face discrimination on an almost daily basis in all walks of life. He advocates for holistic solutions to ta...

Friends of Europe's Dharmendra Kanani is joined this week by Maria Elena Scoppio, Director for Indirect Taxation and Tax Administration at DG TAXUD. Fresh out of the EU Tax Symposium, Scoppio lifts the veil on what was discussed, sharing that, for the first time in the symposium, a psychologist was invited, which goes to show the importance of behavioural taxation. Given that tax is one of the mos...

In this week’s episode of Keeping an Eye on the Geopolitical Ball, Jamie Shea, Senior Fellow at Friends of Europe, reflects on the world’s first ever Artificial Intelligence Safety Summit convened near London. The Summit saw the three blocks, the EU, US and China, come together, with participation from European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, US Vice President Kamala Harris and China’s...

In today's episode of Frankly Speaking, host Catarina Vila Nova speaks with Rachel Rizzo from the Atlantic Council and Paul Taylor from Friends of Europe about the latest developments in the international stage. With the US still recovering from weeks without a Speaker and the EU divided over how to respond to the latest crisis in the Middle East, will Putin use this focus shift to his advantage i...

Tune in to the first episode of Policy Voices to find out the secret recipe to make a success story out of implementing artificial intelligence in health. Nina Rawal, partner and co-head at Trill Impact Ventures, and Ricardo Baptista Leite, CEO of HEALTH.AI, share their expertise and tell us why we should not be afraid of the incredible potentials of using artificial intelligence to improve our he...

In this week’s episode of Keeping an Eye on the Geopolitical Ball, Jamie Shea, Senior Fellow at Friends of Europe, discusses the importance of the 2024 United States presidential election. With two Republican Party candidates - Donald Trump and Vivek Ramaswamy - advocating for the US to withdraw from NATO and the UN, Jamie assesses what these elections mean both for the United States and the rest...

In this week’s episode of Keeping an Eye on the Geopolitical Ball, Jamie Shea, Senior Fellow at Friends of Europe, looks at last Sunday’s national elections in Poland. Despite populists having achieved great electoral success as of late, such as Slovakia’s Robert Fico for SMER and Germany’s far-right AfD in two regional elections, Poland’s opposition unexpectedly won against the ruling Law and Jus...

In the aftermath of the Hamas attack on Israel, host Catarina Vila Nova interviews foreign affairs commentator Anchal Vohra on the repercussions that this event had inside and outside its borders. The European Union and United States are the usual suspects but also the role of Russia and China is analysed in this episode of Frankly Speaking.

In this week’s episode of Keeping an Eye on the Geopolitical Ball, Jamie Shea, Senior Fellow at Friends of Europe, analyses Saturday’s attacks by Hamas on Israel. Constituting Israel’s worst intelligence and security failure in decades, Jamie unpacks the two main questions that arise, namely why Hamas attacked at this particular point in time and why Israel was taken by surprise. The strategic con...

In the return of Frankly Speaking podcast after the Summer break, our senior fellows for Peace, Security and Defence, Jamie Shea and Paul Taylor, weigh in on the Ukrainian counter-offensive. What is the minimum benchmark for success? Is the West up for the challenge? Tune in to find out what they had to say.

This week on Keeping an Eye on the Geopolitical Ball, Jamie Shea, Senior Fellow at Friends of Europe, reflects on the 78th Annual Session of the UN General Assembly in New York. Jamie describes the mood at this week’s summit as particularly gloomy, pointing to the 4/5 missing Security Council members, the very slow international humanitarian response to the flooding disaster in Libya, as well as t...

This week on Keeping an Eye on the Geopolitical Ball, Jamie Shea, Senior Fellow at Friends of Europe, looks back on von der Leyen’s State of the Union speech that focused on the achievements of her Commission. However, according to Jamie, von der Leyen has omitted one vital topic, namely that of security and defence. Indeed, security and defence have been at the core of recent EU politics with man...

This week on Keeping an Eye on the Geopolitical Ball, Jamie Shea, Senior Fellow at Friends of Europe, focuses on what happened this Summer, especially the consequences of climate change that have been observed this summer. He details the dramatic temperature “records” reached in many parts of the world, for instance in the UK, but also the floods and forest fires happening in other parts of the wo...