Notes from the World

Fereshta Abbasi is a Researcher in the Asia division of Human Rights Watch, focusing on research and documentation of ongoing abuses in Afghanistan, where she has documented the human rights situation for a number of organizations for the last decade. She holds a Master of Laws in International law and Strategic Studies from the University of Aberdeen, has been recognized as a Rising Leader by Asp...

The Guyanese politician and diplomat Carl Greenidge has had a varied career in that South American nation’s political sphere over the years, serving as Minister of Foreign Affairs, Minister of Finance and Secretary General of the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) group.  Today, he joins us in his capacity as Agent for the government of Guyana before the International Court of Justice (ICJ), whe...

Julia Gaffield in an Associate Professor of History at William & Mary College in Williamsburg, Virginia. Having identified the only known official copy of the Haitian Declaration of Independence during her archival research in 2010, she is the author of two books, Haitian Connections in the Atlantic World: Recognition after Revolution, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2015, a...

Jhanisse Vaca Daza is the co-founder two organizations: Ríos de Pie, a non-violent citizen movement focused on human rights and environmental rights in Bolivia, and the Jucumari Foundation, whose goal is to contribute to humanitarian and environmental efforts across Latin America. Currently serving as the activism outreach specialist and manager of the Freedom Fellowship programme at the Human Rig...

Jess DiPierro Obert is a writer, photographer and filmmaker who splits her time between Brooklyn and Haiti, where she has worked since 2016. Her work has appeared in the Guardian, the New Humanitarian, Buzzfeed, The Economist’s 1843 Magazine, PBS Newshour and other outlets. Her new film, Kouri Pou Lapli, or Run from Rain, is a short documentary that tells the story of 16-year-old Macul Nelson, who...

Eduardo González Cueva is a Peruvian human rights consultant and sociologist specializing in transitional justice. He participated in Peru's Truth and Reconciliation Commission at the end of its 20 year internal armed conflict and provides technical and strategic advice connected to the establishment and operations of truth and reconciliation processes in a number of countries around the world. We...

For this week’s episode of Notes from the World, we had the great pleasure of speaking with the United States-born, British-based record producer Joe Boyd, who has helmed some of the most important recordings of some of the most influential musicians of the last sixty years, including Nick Drake, Pink Floyd, Richard and Linda Thompson, Vashti Bunyan, Toots and the Maytals and R.E.M. He is also the...

Oksana Lutsyshyna is a Ukrainian author and translator who currently serves as Associate Professor of Instruction in Ukrainian Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. A native of Uzhhorod in Western Ukraine, she is the author of, among other works, the novels Ivan and Phoebe and Love Life as well as  the poetry collections Persephone Blues and Felicity's Poems. She has been the recipient of...

Dalia Alahmad is a writer and podcast producer from Jenin, now based in Ramallah, who works at the Palestine office of the Institute for Middle East Understanding (IMEU) as an outreach coordinator, though she is speaking here in her capacity as a private citizen. Notes from the World spoke to her about daily life in the West Bank and some of what the media coverage misses about Palestinians and th...

Tesla Takedown is a protest movement that grew out of the fury at the actions of Tesla CEO Elon Musk. Musk, the world’s richest man, gave Donald Trump and Republican Party $290 million for the 2024 election cycle, thus becoming the largest individual donor during that election. Adam Sheridan is the volunteer Lead Organizer for Cooper River Indivisible, an affiliate chapter in southern New Jersey o...

Jared Olson is a writer and independent investigative journalist covering extractivism, organized crime and state violence in Honduras and Mexico. Based between Mexico City and San Pedro Sula, Honduras, his work has been published in The Baffler, The Nation, Foreign Policy, The New Humanitarian, Al Jazeera and elsewhere. He joined us on Notes from the World to discuss the current state of the Cent...

Steven Dudley is the co-founder and co-director of InSight Crime, a think tank and media organization that seeks to deepen and inform the debate about organized crime and citizen security in the Americas. He is the author of two books, MS-13: The Making of America’s Most Notorious Gang (HarperCollins, 2020) and Walking Ghosts: Murder and Guerrilla Politics in Colombia (Routledge 2004). He has repo...

Rafael Trelles was born in the Santurce neighborhood of San Juan in 1957 and began studying painting at the age of eleven under the instruction of Catalan painter Julio Yort. In 1980, Trelles graduated from the Universidad de Puerto Rico with a degree in Fine Arts, magna cum laude. In 1983, he pursued graduate studies at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). His work has been exhibit...

Rayhan Asat was born in Ürümqi, the capital of Xinjiang, referred to by China, the political entity that governs it, as an autonomous region. Since 2014, the Chinese government has committed a series of ongoing human rights abuses against the Uyghurs - a Turkic Muslim ethnic group in Xinjiang - that have been documented to include mass arbitrary arrests and detention, torture, mass surveillance, c...

Ewald Scharfenberg is the founder of the Venezuelan investigative website Armando. Info. For more than a decade, the site has provided readers with a unique window into the workings of Venezuela's authoritarian regime and the toll its activities and abuses have taken on the country's population. Scharfenberg, editor Roberto Deniz, and two other Armando Info journalists fled Venezuela after the gov...

As we mark the 15th anniversary of the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti, this week on Notes from the World we speak with Louino Robillard, a Haitian social activist who was born in Saint-Raphaël, in Haiti’s north, and raised in Cité Soleil, one of the most populous neighborhoods of Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, and also one of its most deprived. The driving force behind a number of organization...

On this week’s episode of Notes from the World, we speak with David Frum, a Canadian-American political commentator and writer for The Atlantic, about what we can expect from the impending second presidential term of Donald Trump. A former speechwriter for President George W. Bush, Frum is the author of several books, including Trumpocalypse: Restoring American Democracy and Trumpocracy: The Corru...

On this week’s episode of Notes from the World, we speak to Sarah Hunaidi, a Syrian writer and human rights advocate, about the fall of the dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad and what may lie ahead for that country. Sarah's work has been published by Foreign Policy, the Independent, Chatham House, Buzzfeed, and the New Arab among other publications. She provides political analysis and commentary on r...

On this week’s episode of Notes from the World, we speak to Philip Obaji Jr, a Nigerian journalist who currently serves as correspondent for The Daily Beast covering sub-Saharan Africa. In recent years, his work has focused on the activities in the region of the Russian state-funded private military company the Wagner Group and its successor, the Africa Corps, whose abuses against civilian populat...

This week on Notes from the World, we discuss the current situation in Afghanistan with Roqia Samim, the Program Director for Research and Policy at the Klau Institute for Civil and Human Rights at Notre Dame Law School. Roqia obtained her law degree from the Law and Political Science School of Herat University and also holds an LL.M degree in international human rights law from Notre Dame Law Sch...

This week on Notes from the World, we speak with Michela Wrong, a British journalist and author who has spent three decades covering Africa and who is the author of, among other books, In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz: Living on the Brink of Disaster in the Congo, I Didn't Do It for You: How the World Betrayed a Small African Nation (about Eritrea) and Do Not Disturb: The Story of a Political Murder...

This week on Notes from the World, we speak to author Sarah Gerard about her new book, Carrie Carolyn Coco, which recounts the brief life of writer Carolyn Bush, the problematic leadership at my alma mater Bard College, the changing face of her native Florida and the geographies of grief.

For this week's episode of Notes from the World, I spoke with Michael Pierse, a Senior Lecturer at Queens University Belfast, about post-Brexit Northern Ireland, the recent far-right agitation there, the global actors helping to stir it & the possible political trajectory on both sides of the border. Go raibh maith agat, Michael. [Note: I had some challenges splicing the two dialogue streams toget...

We speak to the noted historian Manisha Sinha as we tackle the aftermath of the U.S. Civil War, the class elements of white reaction against Reconstruction, the role of Southern elites, the presidency of Ulysses S. Grant, the so-called Compromise of 1877 and the Wilmington Coup of 1898. A fascinating and very relevant discussion. Manisha Sinha is the James L. and Shirley A. Draper Chair in America...

Jasmin Muyanović is a political scientist and policy specialist focusing on southeastern Europe. Born in Sarajevo, he is currently a Senior Non-Resident Fellow at the Newlines Institute, a member of the Advisory Council of the Nationhood Lab at Salve Regina University's Pell Center for International Relations and an Advisory Board member of the Kulin Initiative, which focuses on political, economi...