Global Dispatches -- World News That Matters

I met the Foreign Minister of Kosovo Behgjet Pacolli in a hotel lobby not far from the United Nations where the foreign minister had spent several days during the UN General Assembly last week.    I was interested in learning from the foreign minister both some of the substantive issues on his plate--that is, what are Kosovo's foreign policy priorities today, and also just what life is like during...

If you want a glimpse of a dystopian future in which authoritarian leaders harness the power of social media to carry out human rights abuses and suppress their political opponents, you need to look no further than the Philippines today.   There are few countries in the world as hyper connected on Facebook as the Philippines. And here, President Rodrigo Duterte and his allies are using Facebook to...

Every year during UN Week there are a number of substantive and important issues discussed, new initiatives launched and new partnerships formed, typically around some big important global issues. It is a week in the diplomatic calendar in which a lot of problem solving gets done. The problem is, this aspect of UN Week rarely gets covered by the mainstream media, which so often chases the big head...

  All eyes turn to the New York and the United Nations as world leaders gather for the opening of the United Nations General Assembly, better known UNGA. This is always the busiest week of the diplomatic calendar and on the line the help make sense of it all is Richard Gowan . He is a Senior Fellow at the UN University Centre for Policy Research, and a fellow at the European Council on Foreign Rel...

In this special episode of Global Dispatches Podcast we are bringing you the story of how UN Peacekeepers partnered with the people and government of Liberia to help transform the country from one of the bleakest places on the planet, to one of the more hopeful today. When peacekeepers were first deployed to Liberia in 2003, the west African country had just experienced a devastating civil war. Fi...

My guest today, Anand Giridharadas, is the author of the new book Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World. The book is a piercing examination of how the global elite have co-opted our mechanisms of social change. This trend manifests itself in many ways, including the belief that market forces are more important than government in affecting change. The book is an extremely challe...

The world is experiencing a dam building boom. According to research by my guest today David Hulme there are plans underway around for the construction of over 3,700 new dams around the world. And this explosion in dam building comes after a period in which there was a lull in the construction of new dam projects.   So what accounts for this new interest in dams? Where are these new dams being bui...

1.5 million Syrian refugees are in Lebanon today. But as the fighting quells in areas of Syria, some of these refugees are considering returning home.    Who gets to return, the places to which they will return, and the circumstances under which refugees move back to Syria are intensely political decisions. As journalist Charlotte Alfred explains, the return of refugees, albeit in small numbers, h...

In mid-August a UN human rights body called the Committee for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination said that up to 1 million ethnic Uighurs in China were imprisoned in massive internment camps.    Subsequent reporting in places like the Wall Street Journal offered a degree of confirmation that Uighurs were being rounded up, seemingly at random, and sent to "re-education" centers where they are...

Ambassador Princeton Lyman passed away on August 24th at the age of 83.  In January 2017, he came on the podcast to discuss his remarkable life and career, which included serving as the US ambassador to South Africa during the end of apartheid and transition to democracy. We listen back to that interview. 

The Syrian war may be entering its final phase. Rebel fighters, from various factions, are now concentrated in Idlib, in northern Syria.  Idlib is the place to which civilians and members of armed groups were permitted to escape as part of evacuation deals from places like Aleppo and Eastern Ghouta as they fell to government forces. Millions of displaced Syrians and some armed groups are now conce...

On March 21, 2020 North Korea shoots down a South Korean civilian airliner, mistaking it for a US bomber. This sets off a series of events that leads to the launching 13 nuclear armed ballistic missiles towards the United States. Several of these missiles miss their target. But not all. One bomb levels Manhattan, another hits Northern Virginia and a third lands near Mar a Lago, in Florida. 1.4 mil...

Dr. Vanessa Kerry is the Co-founder and CEO of Seed Global Health. This is an international NGO that works in five sub-Saharan countries to bolster the education of medical professionals.    We kick off discussing the newest ebola outbreak in the DRC. This is a very alarming outbreak for the fact that it is occurring a region of the DRC that is very much a hot conflict zone.  We then have a broade...

On August 19th 2003 the United Nations headquarters in Iraq at the Canal Hotel in Baghdad, was hit with a truck bomb. At least 22 people lost their lives in this attack, including the UN's top official in Iraq, Sergio Vieira de Mello.  In subsequent years, August 19th has been commemorated at the United Nations as World Humanitarian Day, in which the sacrifices of humanitarian workers are honored....

In 2014, I spoke with New Yorker writer Robin Wright about her life and career as a foreign affairs journalist.  

On August 7th, 1998 my guest today John Lange was the acting United States Ambassador to Tanzania when a truck bomb exploded outside the embassy in Dar es Salaam. He did not know it at the time, but this bombing was part of a coordinated attack on US embassies in the region. Minutes early in Nairobi, Kenya the US embassy was bombed as well.  Al Qaeda was responsible for the attacks that killed ove...

Michael Scott Moore spent 977 days as a hostage of Somali pirates. He is a journalist and in 2012 he set out for the Somali coast on a reporting trip when he was kidnapped. What followed was a two and a half year ordeal that he masterfully recounts in his new book: "The Desert and the Sea." The book is beautifully written-- it's a page turner and he really puts you in his shoes as he struggles to...

David Kaye, is the author of the UN's first ever report on the regulation of user generated online content. That is, how governments and companies like Facebook and Twitter police their users.  David Kaye is the UN's special rapporteur for the freedom of expression and a law professor at UC Irvine, and in our conversation he explains how human rights principles can inform debates about how to appr...

Ivan Duque won a run-off election on June 17th to become the next president of Colombia. Duque is a right of center politician who has been a sharp critic of the peace deal negotiated by president Juan Manuel Santos that ended a half century long conflict with the FARC rebels.    Duque will be sworn in on August 7th, and that of course raises the question: what happens to this peace deal now that...

The year is 1985. Ronald Regan is president. Margaret Thatcher is prime minister of the United Kingdom. Michael Jackson, White Snake and George Michael are dominating the billboard charts. Back to the Future is a smash hit at the box office. And scientists have just discovered a giant hole in the ozone layer above Antarctica. Scientists were warning that if left unchecked, this hole in the ozone w...

At the United Nations in mid-July officials gathered for an annual checkup on progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals. The SDGs, as they are known, are a set of 17 anti-poverty, health and environmental goals that in 2015 the world agreed to achieve by 2030.  We are now two and a half years into these goals, and this gathering at the United Nations, which is known as the High Level Poli...

Sunitha Krishnan literally rescues girls from sex slavery. She is the founder of the Indian NGO Prajwala which both physically removes girls from sexual bondage and provides social, medical and psychological support for their rehabilitation.  She's been beaten. She's been jailed. But nevertheless she persists.  And as she tells me in our conversation what motivates her in this dangerous work is an...

Nicaragua is in the midst of a deepening political and security crisis. Over the last three months the government has been increasingly violent in its response to a growing protest movement.  Over 240 people have been killed since April, when protests against a social security reform measure began. Those protests have morphed to a broader political challenge against the longtime Sandinista leader...

Parfait Onanga-Anyanga is the Special Representative of the Secretary General in the Central African Republic. This makes him the top UN official in CAR, which includes overseeing a UN Peacekeeping mission of over 14,000 personnel.     That mission is known as MINUSCA and in recent weeks it has suffered a series of casualties as armed groups vie for control of the country's natural resources.    T...

The World Health Organization estimates that around 7 million people die every year from the air they breathe. Air pollution is a major killer around the globe and one that disproportionately affects low and middle income countries.    There are two kinds of air pollution. The first is called ambient air pollution, and that is basically the air we breathe when we are outside. The second is called...