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I'm coming to you from World Government Summit this week, which is a conference dedicated to ideas and technologies to make government work more effectively. It's sort of a cross between TED talks and Davos. You have people like Neil deGrasse Tyson discussing government's role science research, fancy displays of drone technologies, and virtual reality stations. But you also have UN Deputy Secretary General Jan Elliason discussing the SDGs and international superstars like Mary Robinson and Mohammad Yunus keeping in real by maintaining a focus on harnessing these technologies and ideas in service of humanity at large.
It's been an interesting few days, and I two interviews from the summit for you, which reflect the dual tracks of this conference. First up is Princess Sarah Zeid, who is a long time UN employee and humanitarian worker (whose spouse is the Jordanian diplomat and royal and current UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.) She is spearheading efforts in the UN system and beyond to sharpen the international community's focus on providing maternal and reproductive health in humanitarian emergencies. Up to now, this is not something that the international community has done very well, for reasons she explains. And she discusses candidly the very personal reason that she decided to take on this cause. Next up, i speak with Justin Hall Tipping, a venture capitalist who is investing in nano-technology in the clean energy space. We have a discussion about the potential of nano technology to revolutionize things like access to clean water and clean energy, and what it will take to realize some very promising scientific discovery So, like I said, two somewhat different issues, but all under the rubric of this confernece and both interesting. Have a listen!Michelle Mays is a nurse with Doctors without Borders, better known of course as MSF. She has worked in conflict zones, post conflict zones and generally very intense situations around the world to deliver health care and other services to vulnerable people. MSF has a reputation in the humanitarian community for being the first to arrive and last to leave often times dangerous situations, and its been in the news recently for the fact that its hospitals have been bombed in Yemen, by Saudi forces and Afghanistan by Americans.
Michelle started her career as a nurse in Baltimore with an itch to work globally. We discuss some of her deployments in recent years, including to Haiti after the earthquake and to a remote part of India. We kick off discussing her most recent deployment to South Sudan.
The United Kingdom plays host to a major conference this week intended to raise money and political support for the Syrian humanitarian disaster. There are now over 4.6 million Syrian refugees who have fled abroad, mostly to surrounding countries and 7.6 million people displaced inside the country. In all the UN estimates that there by the end of 2016, there will be 18 million people in need of some sort of humanitarian relief, thins like food aid, shelter, medicines.
And that is going to cost a great deal of money. About $9 billion to be exact. And the way that money is raised is through appeals to donors--basically like a charity whose major contributors are governments around the world. On the line today to discuss this London conference and the major global challenge of mounting an appropriate humanitarian response to this overwhelming crisis is the UK's deputy ambassador to the United Nations, Peter Wilson. We discuss some specific aspects of the humanitarian response to this now 5 year old crisis, like, for example providing access to education for displaced children and opportunities for employment for refugees abroad. We also discuss the larger challenge of mounting a humanitarian response when so many of the belligerents are ignoring basic tenants of the laws of war, and we also discuss the current political peace process underway in Geneva.Raymond Baker was a newly minted Harvard Business School graduate working in Nigeria in the 1960s when he discovered that foreign businesses were nefariously sneaking money out of the country. After years of working in Nigeria and then internationally as businessman and consultant, Baker founded the NGO Global Financial Integrity to fight what he's termed illicit financial flows out of economies in the developing world.
This is a fascinating conversation about an interesting, though little appreciated aspect of the global fight against corruption. We kick off discussing the problem of illicit financial flows more broadly and one big cause of this problem more specifically, which is what he terms "mis-invoicing." You'll learn a lot about the history of the fight against global corruption from listening to this episode.Earlier this week the World Health Organization warned that a mosquito borne viral disease known as Zika was fast spreading throughout the Americas. That includes the United States, which it will likely reach sooner rather than later.
On the line to discuss Zika and its larger public health implications is one of the world's leading experts in tropical diseases, Dr. Peter Hotez. He is the Dean for the National School of Tropical Medicine Baylor College of Medicine in Houston; The's the Endowed Chair in Tropical Pediatrics Texas Children's Hospital and President of the Sabin Vaccine institute, the work of which we discuss in this conversation.
This is an absolutely fascinating conversation about a topic that is clearly on many people's radars right now. We discuss how and why this disease is spreading, the lessons drawn from the ebola outbreak that can be applied to this situation, and how poverty and inequality in the USA might exacerbate the Zika outbreak?Elizabeth Economy has for decades studied something that used to be considered somewhat obscure, but today is very much in vogue: the relationship between Chinese politics and economy to climate change and the natural world. She is now a Senior Fellow and director for Asia studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, and she's written a number of books and influential papers examining China and climate change.
She's had a fascinating career. She started out specializing in Soviet studies and took a turn working as an analyst in the CIA before getting her PhD and launching her career studying china and the environment. We kick off this conversation discussing China's decision to join the consensus at the Paris Climate Talks, and we have an extended conversation about some pressing, yet under the radar ecological and environmental challenges that China is struggling to deal with.Drone strikes are an increasingly common feature of modern warfare; and there have been numerous discussions in the academic literature and beyond about the effectiveness of drones strikes, the morality of the policy, and the larger implications of the United States' growing reliance on drone strikes as part of a broader counter-terrorism strategy. But for all this debate, there has been very little research into the psychology that surrounds drone strikes. Now, two academics out of George Washington University are compiling some exceedingly interesting and politically relevant research into the psychological forces that are shaping America's drone policy. Julia McDonald and Jacqueline Schneider recently published a fascinating paper in the Journal of Conflict Resolution that examines the relationship between a president's tolerance for risk and his (or possibly her) preference for using drones. They are also in the midst of research into why soldiers in combat prefer, or not, manned vs unmanned air support; and the conditions under which the general American public is more or less likely to support drone strikes. It's cutting edge and cross disciplinary research and just fascinating stuff. On the line with me to discuss this research and its broader implications is the co-author of these studies, Jacqueline Schneider, a pHD candidate in residence at the institute for conflict and security studies at George Washington University. Enjoy!
Dan Byman was fresh out of school when he took a job as an analyst for the CIA. Byman was a generalist, and they put him on a backwater Persian gulf desk in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Then Saddam invaded Kuwait and the US led a massive military operation to evict the Iraqi army from Kuwait. His memos suddenly had an audience at the highest reaches of government.
That experience led Byman to a career studying the Middle East and global terrorism. He's the author of numerous books on international terrorism and is Director of Research at the Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. But most importantly for me, he was the director of the Security Studies program at Georgetown University eight years ago when I was a student there. We have a great conversation about his fascinating career in and out of government, which includes serving on the 9-11 Commission. We also discuss terrorism more broadly and the international relations of the Middle East. We kick off with a brief discussion about what seems to be the weakening alliance between Saudi Arabia and the USA.The journalist Anjan Sundaram is the author of the new book Bad News: Last Journalists in a Dictatorship. The book details how the creeping authoritarianism of the Rwandan government has silenced the free press, even as that government is treated as a darling of the international community for its impressive economic gains following the genocide.
In 2009, Anjan took a job teaching journalism in Rwanda. He soon saw that something was amiss. His students were harassed, beaten and one colleague murdered. Other journalists were simply co-opted into the state propaganda machine. After speaking with Anjan for this interview, it's hard not to conclude that suppression of dissent in Rwanda is putting that country on a very dangerous path.
This is a fascinating conversation and I suspect that this book will get a great deal of attention in foreign policy and human rights circles. We kick off discussing the history of President Paul Kagame, and his recent controversial decision to amend the constitution to permit him to stay in office, theoretically until 2034. I have a link to the book on GlobalDispatchesPodcast.com, so do check that out.Marcy Hersh recently returned from a research trip to the Balkans, where she followed refugee women and girls as they made their way through Europe. Marcy is a senior advocacy officer with the women's refugee commission, and we kick off our conversation discussing what she witnessed on that trip and the broader struggles that are unique to female refugees around the world.
Marcy has had a long career in humanitarianism. Including a stint in Haiti just after the earthquake. But she started off as an english teacher abroad. We discuss what compelled her to teaching, to international affairs, to feminism And how reading Simone de Beauvoir on a desolate outer atoll of the Marshal Islands gave her a new perspective on her life and career.
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