Global Dispatches -- World News That Matters

Priscilla Clapp had a 30 year career in the state department, which ended in 2002 as the top US official in Burma. She also served in top positions in South Africa in the early 1990s during the transition from Apartheid and in Japan and Moscow.  Clapp is the co-author with Mort Halperin of what I consider one of the most important books you can read about US foreign policy. It's called Bureaucrati...

If you follow US politics even just slightly you will probably be surprised to learn that Congress actually did something last week. And deeper still, the action they took was broadly in the service of humanity.   Just after the July 4th holiday Congress passed the Global Food Security Act, which was a piece of legislation that will inform how the US government fights hunger worldwide.    My guest...

Lauren Wolfe is an award winning journalist who covers sexual violence in conflict. She's the director of the Women Under Siege project, which is a journalistic endeavor founded by Gloria Steinem as part of the Women's Media Center to investigate how rape and gender based violence are used as tools of conflict.  About a week before we spoke Lauren wrote an article in the Guardian about a Congolese...

On July 9, South Sudan commemorates its 5th independence day. And I say "commemorates" and not "celebrates" because there is not a whole lot to celebrate. The country has been mired in conflict since late 2013, when a political dispute between president Salva Kiir and his deputy Riek Machar devolved into an armed battle and then full blown civil war.   The consequences of this war for the people o...

Both the European Union and the United Kingdom are important players in international development. In fact the EU is the single largest foreign aid provider; and the United Kingdom's own aid programs, run by the Department for International Development, or DfID, are considered some of the more innovative programs in this space. Also, the UK is one of just a few countries to actually have met a com...

Stewart Patrick is an international relations scholar with a background in studying human evolution. As you might imagine, that combination makes for some fascinating conversation. Stewart is a Senior Fellow and Director of the International Institutions and Global Governance Program at the Council on Foreign Relations. He's a Rhodes scholar who has studied the intersection of the evolution of cul...

You've probably heard about the dispute in the South China Sea. And if you have heard about it, you are probably vaguely aware, as I was, that it involves disputed territorial claims between China and its neighbors, and that in defense of American allies in the region, the US navy is positioning military assets in the area.  On this episode we go a bit deeper into this dispute, its origins, and br...

I caught up with my guest today, Arms Control Association president Daryl Kimball from his hotel in Vienna. Daryl, along with hundreds of diplomats around the world were gathered for the 20th anniversary of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.   This is a treaty that bans the testing of nuclear weapons and establishes a global monitoring system to ensure that no one can secretly test a nuclear bomb....

If you follow the Middle East at all, you've probably read the works of my guest today, Marc Lynch.   Marc publishes widely and in a wide variety of mediums. He's got a high volume Twitter feed under the handle @AbuAardvark and writes regularly for the Monkey Cage blog at the Washington Post.    He is a professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University, and t...

The Gambia is a tiny country in western Africa. It's a narrow sliver on the ocean, surrounded by Senegal. It has a population of under 2 million, and according to my guest today, Jeffrey Smith, it is the worst dictatorship you have never heard of.  Smith is a human rights researcher, now a consultant to human rights activists in Africa through his firm Vanguard Africa. In this conversation he desc...

In her new book The Fires of Spring my guest today Shelly Culbertson travels to six countries in the Middle East and North Africa to describe for readers how each of these countries are managing the political, economic and social challenges of the post Arab Spring era. Through interviews and drawing on her own expertise as a longtime analyst, Culbertson explains why some countries in the region ma...

Over the past week, a number of scientists and bio-ethicists expressed deep concern that holding the Olympics this summer in Rio de Janeiro could enable the Zika virus to spread far and wide.    I caught up with one of the world's leading experts on Zika, Dr. Peter Hotez and put the question to him. Dr. Hotez has a lot of credentials. Among other affiliations, he is dean of the National School of...

Venezuela is on a rapid and precipitous decline. You might even say, as my guest today Francisco Toro wrote in a recent piece in the Atlantic that Venezuela is falling apart. Between food, fuel, medicine and commodity shortages, corruption and rampant crime, this one-time middle income country is struggling mightily. There's an incipient humanitarian crisis and instability of Valenzuela could effe...

Jennifer Harris has devoted much of her career to studying what she calls "geo-economics," -- the  ability of countries to shape world politics, diplomacy, and global affairs more broadly through the deployment of economic means. She's a Council on Foreign Relations Fellow and co-author, with Robert Blackwill, of the new book War By Other Means: Geoeconomics and Statecraft. Jennifer grew up near a...

Senator Chris Murphy wants to change a bedrock relationship in US foreign policy.  In April this year he introduced legislation to restrict arms sales to Saudi Arabia over that country's conduct in the war in Yemen. The Saudi-led air campaign is both causing inordinate civilian casualties in Yemen and not doing much to counter the active ISIS or Al Qaeda branches in the country. Senator Murphy dis...

Calestous Juma is a prolific author who focuses on the intersection of society, science and international development.    He is a professor and director of the Science, Technology and Globalization project at the Belfer Center for Science and International affairs at Harvard.    Calestous grew up in flood prone village on the shores of Lake Victoria in Kenya and in this episode he describes how hi...

The international humanitarian system is stretched beyond capacity. In fact, it's fair to say it is broken. The inability of the international community to confront multiple manmade and natural disasters, like the crisis in Syria, Iraq, South Sudan, ebola in west Africa and the earthquake in Nepal is a profound contributor to insecurity around the world. There are more people displaced around the...

I caught up with my guest today, The US Secretary of Agriculture, Tom Vilsack just after he left the stage at the Climate Action Conference in DC. This was a two day UN backed conference with representatives from local and national governments, the business sector, civil society, NGOs and philanthropies gathered to discuss strategies to implement the Paris Agreement.    Some quick background: the...

Paul Niehaus is undertaking a radical experiment. His organization, Give Directly, wants to find out would happen if people living in extreme poverty were offered the guarantee of a basic income for ten to 15 years. They plan on launching an experiment in East Africa in which 6,000 people would be given, with no strings attached, enough money to pay for their basic needs over a long period of time...

Tom Nagorski is a longtime TV editor reporter and producer for ABC news and is currently an executive vice president at the Asia Society.   Tom's career as a journalist spans some of the major world events of the last three decades, including the dissolution of the Soviet Union and its aftermath, the first Gulf War, the war in the Balkans, Somalia, the second Gulf War, and many many other events....

On the island of Hispaniola, which is shared by the Dominican Republic and Haiti, there is an ongoing and overlooked human rights and humanitarian catastrophe. In recent years, the government of the Dominican Republic has taken measures to essentially strip ethnic Haitians of Dominican citizenship. New legal statutes have the potential to render about 500,000 people stateless. (For context and com...

Kevin Rudd is the former prime minister of Australia who knows China far better than most western leaders. He served from 2007 to 2010, and then again in 2013. These days, among other things, he's president of the Asia Society Policy Institute.  I got to know the prime minister a little bit earlier this year when he moderated a panel on which I was a speaker. The panel was for the Independent Comm...

My guest today Srgjan Kerim is a diplomat with the soul of an artist, who wants to become the next UN Secretary General. Karim is the former foreign minister of Macedonia, was an official in the Federal government of the former Yugoslavia and also served as president of the UN General Assembly back in 2007-8.  He's a self described citizen of the world. He was born in Macedonia, but spent much of...

Vesna Pusic is the former foreign minister of Croatia and a candidate to become the next UN Secretary General. She's a sociologist by training. Politician and diplomat by practice and I caught up with her one day after she participated in hours of questioning by UN member states  in what was essentially a very public job interview for the position of Secretary General Pusic grew up in Zagreb in a...

Something extraordinary took place at the United Nations this week. For twenty hours, over three days, each candidate in the race to become the next UN secretary general submitted themselves to hours of questioning by member states and civil society. This was a radical departure from how things were done previously. For the past 70 years, the Secretary General was picked pretty much behind closed...