Global Dispatches -- World News That Matters

World leaders gather at the United Nations this week for the annual summit at the United Nations General Assembly. This is always one of the big highlights of the international diplomatic calendar and it will be all the more interesting this year for the fact that President Trump is making his UN debut. So what should expect from Trump at UNGA? What are some of the big issues on the diplomatic age...

Nearly 400,000 ethnic Rohingya have fled Myanmar across the border to Bangladesh. By the time you listen to this, that number will almost surely be much higher.  Since late August, security forces from the government of Myanmar (also called Burma) have attacked villages and towns in a seemingly coordinated fashion to create a massive displacement crisis. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights h...

John Shattuck is the former US Ambassador to the Czech Republic, former President of the Central European University, and served as the Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy Human Rights and Labor During the Clinton administration.  He is currently a professor at Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts John was deep in the policy debates over the US response to the Rwanda genocide and e...

With Houston still reeling from Hurricane Harvey, Irma causing massive havoc in the Caribbean, and more storms on the way, I thought it would be timely and interesting to speak with my guest today, Maria Ivanova Maria Ivanova is an academic who straddles the university and policy worlds to help think through the connections between human security, environmental stresses and global governance--that...

Helene Cooper is the Pentagon correspondent for the New York Times. She is also the author of the new book "Madame President: The extraordinary journey of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf" which is a biography of the Liberian president and nobel peace prize winner was was Africa's first female head of state.  Helene was born and raised in Liberia. Her family fled to the United States in 1980, when she was 13...

My guest today, Hillary Matfess of Yale, has discovered that there is a link between bride prices and violent conflict.     She is the co-author of a fascinating new paper that appears in the current, Summer 2017 issue 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...

In Kazakstan this week, the international atomic energy agency is opening a new facility that will serve as a bank for low enriched uranium.    This facility is known as the LEU fuel bank and its opening is the result of over a decade of work by my guest Senator Sam Nunn.    Now the idea behind the, bank which Senator Nunn explains in detail is basically this. countries that want to use civilian n...

Poland is in the midst of a democratic backslide. The country's politics is dominated by the far right Law and Justice Party, which has embarked on a series of moves to curb the independence of the judiciary and free press. This has put Poland on a collision course with the European Union, of which it is a member. It has also earned the government the praise and support of Donald Trump--indeed Tru...

Tensions are very clearly escalating on the Korean Peninsula, with the North making unrelenting progress on their nuclear and ballistic missile programs, and the United States president now overtly threatening a new war.    In the meantime, the United Nations Security Council, which of course includes China, the United States and Russia, passed a new round of sanctions on North Korea intended to f...

After receiving dozens of emails from podcast listeners asking for career advice, I decided to put together this special episode in which your questions are answered. On the line are Paul Stronski and Alanna Shaikh, two individuals who have had varied careers in world affairs. Paul is a senior fellow with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and Alanna is a consultant who has worked with...

Somalia is ground zero for an emerging trend in global affairs-- the nexus between climate change and conflict. My guest today, journalist Laura Heaton  spent years reporting on how climate change and conflict feed off each other in profoundly destabilizing ways in horn of Africa.  She's the author of a feature story in Foreign Policy magazine that uses the work and life story of  a British Scient...

On July 17 a very rare thing happened in the world of humanitarian relief. Eight organizations that typically compete for donor dollars joined forces to launch a joint appeal to raise funds and awareness around a global food crisis. Some 20 million people in four countries— South Sudan, Yemen, Nigeria and Somalia — face acute food scarcity. South Sudan even experienced a famine for a period of tim...

On June 27th, FARC rebels turned over the last of their weapons to the United Nations in a ceremony attended by both the leader of FARC and President Juan Manuel Santos. This officially marked the end of a over 50 year civil war that killed hundreds of thousands and displaced millions more.  So how did we get to this point? And what are some of the big challenges that lay ahead for Colombia as pea...

Wendy Pearlman is an academic who studies the Middle East, but also writes popularly focused narratives that examines everyday life of people caught in the chaos of the region. Her latest book,  We Crossed a Bridge and it Trembled: Voices from Syria,  is a collection of interviews of Syrians displaced by the war. That book was published by Harper Collins in June, but she used some of the research...

Eric Schwartz served as the top refugee policy official in the Obama administration as the Assistant Secretary of State for Population, Refugees and Migration between 2009 and 2011. He was recently appointed the president of Refugees International, an advocacy organization in Washington, DC. We kick off this conversation discussing US refugee policy in the wake of President Trump's attempts to sha...

Conflict is escalating in one region of the Democratic Republic of Congo and this conflict  has the potential to become one of Africa's next big crises.    At issue is a brewing situation in a region of DRC called Kasai. Now, if this is unfamiliar to you, it is with reason. This was not a region heretofore that had experienced much violence or conflict that caught international attention. (Indeed...

  The Supreme Court has issued a preliminary decision on Trump's travel ban–and this decision could have a profound impact on refugees around the world. The court upheld key portions of the travel ban pending a final ruling by the court in October. This includes a 120 day ban on all refugees coming to the United States from everywhere in the world — though with some exceptions. On the line with me...

My guest today Jeffrey Smith helps topple dictators for a living. His organization, Vanguard Africa, is very new but they already have one success under their belt--the peaceful transition of power from The Gambia's longtime ruler. He now has his sites set on Africa's second longest ruling leader, Paul Biya of Cameroon. We kick off with a discussion of the situation in Cameroon and have great digr...

Pop Quiz: do you know how many people are in the world right now?    The answer is 7.6 billion.    That data point and much more are contained in a report called "World Population Prospects: The 2017 Revision," which was recently published by the UN. The report contains all sorts of facts and figures that are both interesting on its own, but also extremely consequential to understanding the future...

Gregory Stone once lived underwater for 30 days. He is an ocean scientist and author who has spent a career studying and advocating on behalf of our oceans. He's now with an executive vice president with  Conservation International  and is one of the world's leading authorities on ocean health and ocean conservation.   We caught up just as a big UN conference on oceans was wrapping up in New York....

Marietje Schaake was under 30 years old when she first joined the European Parliament as a representative from the Netherlands in 2009. She candidly discusses the kinds of challenges she faced as a young woman navigating what was then--and still is--mostly and old mens club.  We caught up shortly after a series of consequential elections in Europe, including the victory of Emmanuel Macron in Franc...

Hans Binnendijk is a senior fellow at the Center for Transatlantic relations and a longtime DC foreign policy insider. He served in top posts in the Clinton administration, including in the National Security Council and he was the founding director of the Center for Technology and National Security Policy at National Defense University.   Hans is a senior foreign policy hand who has collected  man...

There is yet another crisis in the middle east. This week, Saudi Arabia and its close allies in the region moved against Qatar, cutting off sea and air travel and moving to isolate their fellow sunni Gulf country.  Like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, Qatar is a member of the Gulf Cooperation Council, a regional group of erstwhile allies that coordinate security policies against Iran an...

Donald Trump has pulled the United States out of the Paris Climate Agreement   In the wake of this decision, I wanted to get a sense of the consequences of this decision to both the climate change goals embedded in the Paris Agreement and also to the wider diplomacy and geopolitics that surrounds global climate change.    I bring you two perspectives on these very timely questions. First, I speak...

One overlooked aspect of the global conversation on conflict, disaster and humanitarian affairs is internal displacement and the plight of internally displaced people, or IDPs. Like refugees, IDPs have been forced from their home by conflict or disaster. But unlike refugees, they have not crossed an international border and are not afforded the kind of legal protections embedded in widely adopted...