Trending Globally: Politics and Policy

In the 1970s in Nicaragua, left-wing rebels, calling themselves the Sandinista National Liberation Front, fought to overthrow their country’s dictator.  It worked. The Sandinistas led a coalition that took over the government in July 1979, in what became known as the Sandinista Revolution.  However, within a few years, the Sandinistas faced a violent backlash, which pushed the country in...

Here’s a depressing fact: it takes longer to travel from Boston to Los Angeles today than it did 50 years ago. Getting to the airport, getting through the airport, the flight itself — just about every part of the process takes longer than it once did.   According to New York Times senior writer David Leonhardt, this is just one example of the stagnation defining so many aspects of Americ...

The last decade has seen the growth of two political movements that appear diametrically opposed: the Black Lives Matter movement and the rise of Donald Trump.  But as our guest on this episode explains, these two movements are linked, and can only be understood together.  On this episode, Dan Richards talks with political scientist Juliet Hooker about how these movements are just the mo...

We’ve got a lot of exciting new Trending Globally episodes coming up in the next few weeks and months, but this week we’re sharing an episode of another podcast from the Watson Institute: Mark and Carrie.  The show is hosted by political economist Mark Blyth and political scientist Carrie Nordlund. On each episode, they discuss, debate and, occasionally, make fun of the biggest headlines of t...

February 24, 2024, marks two years since the beginning of the War in Ukraine.  In the war’s first year, Russia’s assault on Ukraine shook the West, while Ukraine's defense of the territory captivated the world.  While no less deadly or consequential, the war's second year has looked very different. The war has become a stalemate on the battlefield, altering the politics in Kyiv, the Krem...

In the United States, inequality along the lines of race in education is such a persistent issue that it often fails to make headlines. COVID-19 brought it back to the front of the nation’s consciousness as evidence mounted that nonwhite students were experiencing roughly twice as much learning loss as their white counterparts.  Yet, as our guest on this episode explains, if history is any gu...

Backlash is hardly a new political force — since America’s founding, change has often been driven by citizens mobilizing in opposition to policies, programs, or social movements.  But recently, as our guest on this episode explains, backlash movements have come to dominate our politics in unprecedented ways. He argues that to build a more stable and healthy politics, we need to better underst...

Trending Globally will be back with all new episodes soon, but in the meantime we’re rereleasing some of our favorite episodes from 2023. We hope you enjoy – and have a great start to 2024! *** The beginning of 2023 saw a disturbing milestone: the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the ‘Doomsday Clock’ forward to 90 seconds to midnight – the closest it’s been to ‘Doomsday’ since the clock was...

“Trending Globally” will be back with all new episodes soon, but in the meantime, we’re rereleasing a few of our favorite episodes from 2023. We hope you enjoy — and have a great start to 2024! *** In 2007, Watson Professor John Eason moved with his family from Chicago to Forest City, Arkansas. At the time Eason was getting his Ph. D. at the University of Chicago, and he moved to Forest City to le...

This December marks four years since the first confirmed case of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China. On this episode of Trending Globally, Dan Richards speaks with two experts from the Pandemic Center at Brown University’s School of Public Health about the ways our society’s approach to public health has changed since 2019.  They discuss how we should be thinking about COVID-19 in our daily lives, the...

On this episode, political economist and Watson professor Mark Blyth talks with Nobel Prize-winning economist Sir Angus Deaton about his new book, “ Economics in America: An Immigrant Economist Explores the Land of Inequality .”  You may not know Angus Deaton by name, but you probably know a phrase he helped to make famous: “deaths of despair.” In 2015, Deaton and his wife and research partne...

How do our individual experiences shape our political views? What role do our own stories and memories play in how we think about the world around us? How can we use our memories — even our most painful ones — to help build a more peaceful politics?  These are complicated questions, and not of the variety we often ask on this show. But historian Omer Bartov thinks that trying to answer them i...

Last year, President Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act into law. Considered by many to be the biggest climate and energy bill ever passed, the IRA included roughly $370 billion to help shift the U.S. to cleaner forms of power. And it was just one of three laws passed by the administration that will play into the United States’ move away from fossil fuels.  The impact of these policies,...

In 1982, Mumia Abu-Jamal was sentenced to death for the murder of a Philadelphia police officer. An ex-Black Panther, he had no prior criminal record. Amnesty International investigated his case and found in many ways that it "failed to meet minimum international standards.” He’s been incarcerated for more than 40 years. Over those decades, Abu-Jamal has become a leader of the anti-death penalty m...

One day in the year 2000, in the midst of the Second Congo War, Honoria* fled her home in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and never returned. After 16 years in a refugee camp in Uganda, she relocated to Philadelphia, where she became one of the roughly 80,000 refugees who entered the U.S. that year.  Honoria’s family was one of the dozens that Blair Sackett, a sociologist and postdoctora...

Imagine if, when you were in middle school, an Ivy League professor came to your school and told you that you were going to be part of an experiment. You were going to get to decide how the money in your school was spent.  What would you want to spend it on? How would you convince your classmates that your idea was best? Furthermore, would you even believe what this professor was telling you?...

This summer, military forces in the West African country of Niger pushed the country’s president, Mohamed Bazoum, out of power. This was not the first coup in Niger’s history, or in the recent history of the Sahel region of Africa. In the last few years there have been coups in multiple countries in the region, including Burkina Faso and Mali.  But this one has put the West especially on edge...

On August 23, at least 5 GOP hopefuls for the party’s presidential nomination will take to the stage in Milwaukee for their first primary debate. In other words, the 2024 election is about to get real. In this episode, Dan Richards talks with Wendy Schiller, professor of political science at Brown University and director of the Watson Institute’s Taubman Center for American Politics and Policy, ab...

In the last year, programs like ChatGPT, Dall-E and Bard have shown the world just how powerful artificial intelligence can be. AI programs can write hit pop songs, pass the bar exam and even appear to develop meaningful relationships with humans.  This apparent revolution in AI tech has provoked widespread awe, amazement — and for some, terror.  But as Brown Professor of Data Science an...

In May, Nigerian political veteran Bola Tinubu was sworn in as president of the country. The outcome was predictable, but that doesn’t mean there were no surprises in this year’s election. The biggest, perhaps, was the national rise of progressive politician Peter Obi. Obi galvanized young people around issues of government accountability, transparency, and generational change. In the process, he...

On May 14, 2023, Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan faced the most challenging test of his political career from a multi-party coalition led by social democrat and reformer Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu. The diverse coalition Kılıçdaroğlu represents, known as the Table of Six, is united by one cause: removing Erdogan from power and ending the country’s authoritarian turn.  The challengers were opti...

This Spring, visiting professor at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs’ China Initiative Lyle Goldstein made his first trip to China in five years. He met with military strategists, government officials and scholars to try to better understand China-Russia relations in the wake of the war in Ukraine.  He left more concerned about another part of the world just 100 miles...

You’ve seen it in the headlines, and maybe you’ve felt it in your own life: over the last few years, cyber attacks have become more frequent and more damaging. They can also vary widely in nature, ranging from minor nuisances to national security crises. Is there anything we can do to secure ourselves – as individuals, and as a society – from these attacks? Is there any way to get ahead of the pro...

There are some ideas that inform so much of our thinking about the world that we tend to take them for granted. One example: the idea of the “free market.” Whether we’re talking about income inequality, climate change, or the future of U.S.-China relations – even if it doesn’t come up explicitly, the idea of the free market informs how we think about all of these topics and more.  But despite...

Every minute, roughly 20 people in America (mostly women and children) become victims of domestic violence. The effects of these crimes ripple out to families and communities in every corner of the United States. Yet, despite this, policymakers have failed to address domestic violence in a consistently meaningful way.  In this episode, political scientists Wendy Schiller and Kaitlin Sidorsky...