Global Dispatches -- World News That Matters

Ambassador Susan Jacobs is the Special Advisor for Children's Issues at the State Department. She has the distinction of being the first sitting US government official to be Mark's guest. Ambassador Jacobs describes her office's work on inter-country adoptions and custody disputes and when these issues rise to the level of high diplomacy. Ambassador Jacobs was one of the very first married women t...

The Boko Haram insurgency is intensifying precisely as Nigerians prepare to go the polls in hotly contested elections. Earlier this month, the group pulled off their deadliest attack to date (though the media was consumed by the Charlie Hebdo attacks). So why is Boko Haram stepping up their attacks now? What effect might it have on the prospects of another term in office for President Goodluck Jon...

Trita Parsi is the founder of the National Iranian American Council. He tells Mark the story of his family's escape from Iran to Sweden during the revolution, and how he eventually came to Washington, D.C.  Parsi is a scholar, activist, and media personality who has written extensively on middle east affairs. In this episode, he discusses some of the domestic barriers to a nuclear deal facing Iran...

President Obama visits India this week. This means that for the first time in history, a US President will visit India twice while in office. Tanvi Madan of the Brookings Institute discusses the symbolic importance and concrete policy outcomes that this trip may bring. She argues that Obama's decision to travel to India for its Republic Day celebrations could lift a profound  psychological  barrie...

In September delegates at the United Nations will decide upon a set of Sustainable Development Goals to replace the Millennium Development Goals, which are expiring. The SDGs will almost certainly set an audacious goal: to totally of eradicate extreme poverty by 2015. Is that even possible? And what will it take to get there? In this episode, host Mark Leon Goldberg gets two distinct perspectives...

2015 will be a big year for the United Nations. Richard Gowan of New York University and host Mark Leon Goldberg discuss the debates, events, and ideas that are going to drive the agenda at the United Nations this year. Some of these are predictable (Syria!) others probably under the radar, but will still shape international diplomacy in the coming year. If you are interested in learning what will...

This is a special edition of Global Dispatches Podcast for the holidays! Leave me a voicemail at 202 780 5166 and tell me what book about the world inspired you the most? What book shaped your worldview or informed how you understand international relations, foreign policy or world affairs? Leave me a message at the number above or click on the widget on GlobalDispatchesPodcast.com  and I will pla...

Pope Francis and the Vatican played a key role in brokering the historic resumption of diplomatic relations between Cuba and the United States. This was high diplomacy, Vatican style. Father Thomas Reese of the National Catholic Reporter walks through the play-by-play that lead to the Pope playing a central role in the USA-Cuba deal. He also discusses the Vatican's robust history of diplomacy and...

Aaron David Miller has been at the center of nearly every major Arab-Israeli peace initiative since the late 1980s. The historian and Middle East expert discusses what drew him to study the politics of the Middle East and US foreign policy. Miller and host Mark Leon Goldberg have an extended conversation about Israeli politics, what has made Israeli leaders seek peace in the past, and what can be...

Time Magazine named Ebola Fighters as their 2014 Persons of the Year. Mark spoke with one of these health care workers, Dr. Joia Mukherjee of Partners in Health, literally as she was en route to Sierra Leone. They discuss why ebola cases are on the decline in Liberia, but not seemingly in Sierra Leone; why the fear of ebola is still much deadlier than the disease itself; why we need to invoke huma...

Dr. Samantha Nutt is the founder of War Child, a group that  assists  children and their families in conflict affected countries around the world. Prior to founding War Child, Samantha Nutt was a humanitarian worker and researcher in places like Somalia, Burundi and Iraq. She pioneered a kind of gender study in war zones and her research on the  deleterious  humanitarian effects of economic sancti...

Delegates from around the world are in Lima, Peru for the latest round of international climate talks, known as "COP20." The climate change conference is not getting a tremendous amount of media attention, but it's tremendously important. Mark speaks with Eliot Diringer of the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions about the big issues on the table, the big points of contention, and how these tal...

The journalist Howard French spent a career covering West Africa and China for the  New York Times.  He stumbled into journalism somewhat accidentally while living in the Ivory Coast and has reported from the Liberian civil war, conflict in DR Congo, and covered social upheavals in China.  Now out with  a book  about China's complex relationship with Africa, Howard sits down with Mark to discuss h...

The USA and Iran may remake the geopolitics of the Middle East with a successful outcome of a nuclear deal. Failure to reach a nuclear agreement between the USA and Iran will come with its own set of profound consequences. I speak with Alireza Nader of the Rand Corporation about the regional and global implications of both failure and success in reaching a nuclear deal with Iran. We discuss the po...

Kori Schake is a Republican foreign policy advisor who served in various positions in the George H.W. Bush, Clinton and George W. Bush Administrations before joining the McCain-Palin campaign in 2008. Now  ensconced  in academia, she is working on a book about American foreign policy in the 19th Century. She discusses being mentored by  Condoleezza  Rice, her regrets about the Iraq War, and why sh...

The Rohingya are a religious and ethnic minority in Myanmar that faces horrid abuse and discrimination by Burmese authorities. As the politics of Myanmar lurches toward representative democracy, this group is still excluded from sharing even basic rights of citizenship. Even the lauded Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi is shamefully silent about their situation. On the eve of President Obama's secon...

Tom Hart was at the center of the biggest international development debates of the last 15 years. Now serving as the US Director of the ONE Campaign, Hart lobbied for forgiving the debt of the world's poorest countries in the late 1990s, and in the early 2000s he helped pass the world's largest program to combat HIV/AIDS. In this episode. Hart tells the genesis story of the Jubilee Campaign, the P...

The foreign policy implications of the U.S. midterms could be profound. How might Republican control of the U.S. Senate affect the on-going and sensitive nuclear negotiations with Iran? How would it impact President Obama's Foreign Affairs budget requests, and what does the election results say about foreign policy debates within the Republican party? Here with me to discuss these questions and mo...

Erica Chenoweth is a pioneering academic whose ground breaking study on strategic non-violence demonstrated that movements that use non-violent tactics when  fighting for the over-through  of a regime are twice as likely to succeed as movements that use violence as a tactic. Her book, Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Non-Violence, co-authored with Maria J. Stephan, provides an au...

The ebola outbreak and its importation to the United States has unleashed a wave of panic in the United States that reveals the paucity of Americans' knowledge and understanding of Africa. I speak with Laura Seay of Colby College and the Washington Post who is one of America's premier Africanists. She discusses how ignorance breeds discrimination and policy responses that undermine the effort to c...

The Millennium Development Goals are expiring in 2015 and they will be replaced by the Sustainable Development Goals. This is a big year for international development--and humanity -- as complex diplomacy is underway at the United Nations to finalize what's called the "Post 2015 Development Agenda."   Here with me to discuss the process of creating the Sustainable Development Goals, the substance...

For the first time in the history of the world, a sitting head of state is attending his trial for crimes against humanity. The head of state is Kenya President Uhuru Kenyatta. The venue is the International Criminal Court. The stakes are high, but the case against him is troubled. Mark speaks with Mark Kersten of the LSE and SOAS, and author of the blog Justice in Conflict about the case against...

Scott Guggenheim is the most influential development expert that you've never heard of. The writer Rebecca Hamilton sits in for Mark today and interviews Guggenheim about his pioneering model of community driven economic development. This model has critics, but it was proven effective -- of all places -- in Afghanistan in the height of the insurgency. Guggenheim tells Hamilton how this model works...

Somaly Mam is on the line today. She is the Cambodian anti-sex trafficking activist who came to prominence a few years ago as celebrities in the west rallied around her and her organization. That all came crashing down this year when Newsweek  published a cover story calling into question the credibility of her amazing personal story, which includes escaping from the sex trade herself. She was ous...

The Security Council will hold an extraordinary meeting on Wednesday, chaired by President Obama, dedicated to stemming the flow of foreign fighters to the Syrian battlefield. The meeting demonstrates that the United States believes the United Nations has an important role to play in the global fight against terrorism. But what, exactly, does that mean? Here to discuss the Security Council meeting...