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Named by The Guardian as “a podcast to make you smarter,” Global Dispatches is a podcast for people who crave a deeper understanding of international news.
The International Criminal Court is opening an investigation into war crimes and crimes against humanity in Israel and Palestine following the October 7 attacks and Israeli military action in Gaza. This may set into motion a process that leads to ICC indictments of Israelis and Palestinians. Joining me to explain what this investigation may look like and how it may unfold is Mark Kersten, Senior Consultant of the Wayamo Foundation and an Assistant Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of the Fraser Valley, in British Columbia.
The conflict in Israel and Gaza is escalating, but it has so far not spread in any major way across the region. But so long as the conflict persists, it could just be a matter of time until other fronts of this war open up. Middle East scholar Dalia Dassa Kaye explains how the Gaza war may ignite the entire middle east. She is a senior fellow at the UCLA Burkle Center for International Relations and a Fulbright Schuman visiting scholar at the Centre for Advanced Middle Eastern Studies at Lund University. We spoke on Tuesday, October 31 about a why a wider regional war is very much in the realm of possibility.
Today's episode was recorded as a live taping of the podcast, produced in partnership with CGIAR.
It is part of a series of episodes about the nexus between climate and security.
The episode kicks off with some opening remarks from, Shalini Roy, a Senior Research Fellow in the Poverty, Gender, and Inclusion Unit at the International Food Policy Research Institute, IFPRI. It then includes a moderated discussion featuring :
Dan Gilligan, Director of the Poverty, Gender and Inclusion Unit at IFPRI and Co-Lead of the CGIAR Gender Equality Initiative
Ana Solórzano, Social Protection Advisor for Climate and Resilience at the World Food Program
Zahrah Nesbitt-Ahmed, Research Lead at the Centre for Disaster Protection
Raashee Abhilashi, Regional Project Coordinator and Consultant, Climate Change Group, at the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED)
An opposition candidate named María Corina Machado overwhelmingly won a primary in October to challenge Venezuelan President Nicholas Maduro in presidential elections next year. Maduro was the hand picked successor to Hugo Chavez and has been in power since 2013, overseeing an economic freefall and social dislocation of a massive scale. All the while, Maduro has tightened his grip on power through authoritarian means.
Elections in Venezuala have not been free nor fair. But there was a significant political breakthrough this month that suggests things might be different this time. In negotiations in Barbados, the Maduro government agreed to allow competitive elections in 2024. In response, the United States lifted some key sanctions on Venezuela. For the first time in long time, there is a decent chance that Venezuela may move past Maduro.
On the line with me to help understand these key recent developments is Mariano de Alba, a senior advisor for the International Crisis Group. We kick off discussing the background of Maduro's main challenger, María Corina Machado, before having a longer discussion about what this agreement in Barbados means for Venezuela's political future.
China's economy has been exhibiting troubling signs. Property prices are falling, making households less wealthy and curtailing consumer spending. High government debt, a declining population, and America's policy moves are combining to pose Chinese policymakers a serious challenge.
How is Beijing navigating the country's economic slowdown? How will China's struggles impact the global economy?
For answers, watch FP's Ravi Agrawal in discussion with three experts: Economist Adam Posen; the Wall Street Journal's chief China correspondent, Lingling Wei; and James Palmer, author of FP's weekly China Brief newsletter.
This episode is a special cross promotion for FP Live, the flagship podcast from Foreign Policy Magazine, hosted by Foreign Policy Editor in Chief Ravi Agrawal. If you like Global Dispatches, you will certainly want to subscribe to FP Live.
President Biden wrapped up a brief visit to Israel on Wednesday. The trip was also intended to include a meeting in Amman, Jordan with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, King Abdullah of Jordan and President Sisi of Egypt. That leg of the trip was abruptly cancelled following the tragedy at the hospital in Gaza. Meanwhile, the humanitarian situation in Gaza is becoming increasingly dire. According to the latest reports from the United Nations, fuel is running out and water supplies are dangerously low. Some one million people are displaced and several hundreds of thousands have fled to southern Gaza near the Egyptian border in the hopes of finding some modicum of refuge and relief.
My guest Nancy Okail is President of the Center for International Policy, a think tank in Washington, D.C. She is also an Egyptian activist and scholar and in our conversation explains some of the political considerations that are driving Egypt's response to the unfolding crisis over its border. Moments before I caught up with her, President Biden had delivered a speech in Tel Aviv in which he announced an agreement from Israel's War Cabinet for the provision of humanitarian relief into Gaza, from Egypt. We kick off discussing President Biden's speech before having a longer conversation about what the Israel-Hamas war looks like from the perspective of the Egyptian government.
Since the early 2000s, Tobacco use has declined steadily and in some cases very sharply nearly everywhere in the world except China. According to the world health organization, Tobacco use for people 15 years or older declined globally from 34% in the year 2000 to 23% last year. But in China, tobacco use has remained relatively stable -- falling just 1%, from 27 to 26 percent in the last two decades.
A new piece of investigative journalism offers one key explanation of why China has been such an outlier to this global trend, namely the political influence of China's national tobacco monopoly.
My guest today, Jason McClure, a correspondent with The Examination, a new non profit investigative news agency focused on global health. He is one of the authors of the report detailing the ways in which the state-run China National Tobacco Corporation successfully undermined Tobacco use reduction efforts in China.
How China Became Addicted to its Tobacco Monopoly"
https://www.theexamination.org/articles/how-china-became-addicted-to-its-tobacco-monopoly
The crisis in Israel and Gaza--and Southern Lebanon and the West Bank -- is unfolding rapidly. Following the Hamas attacks on Saturday, Netanyahu promised to "return fire of a magnitude that the enemy has not known." Israel has already launched heavy airstrikes on Gaza and seems to be readying a ground invasion. Meanwhile, unrest in the West Bank has resulted in 11 Palestinians killed by Israeli soldiers, and in Southern Lebanon Hezbollah has been trading rocket fire with Israel.
Joining me to discuss this crisis is Daniel Levy, who is head of the U.S. Middle East Project and is a former peace negotiator under the governments of Israeli Prime Ministers Yitzhak Rabin and Ehud Barak. We kick off discussing why the Hamas attack happened when it did, the strategic logic underpinning Hamas' actions, Israel's likely response, the implications of this episode for Israeli domestic politics, and the prospect that this might devolve into a wider regional conflict.
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The World Bank and International Monetary Fund annual meetings are taking place in Morocco this month, and for the first time in a long time there is real momentum around enacting reforms to how these decades old institions operate. A big boost to a reform agenda came at the G-20 meeting in India in early September when President Biden backed a reform agenda to increase the World Bank's capacity to support low and middle income countries with better loans aimed at promiting sustainable development. He also announced he'd ask congress for an additional $25 billion for the World Bank.
This was significant for a number of reasons. First, it demonstrated a responsiveness to the criticism of developing world countries who have long sought better financing options for climate compliant economic development projects. Second, the US is the largest shareholder at the World Bank, so what the US president says carries a great deal of weight.
On the line to discuss some of the proposed reforms--and the many political pitfalls along the way -- is Karen Mathieson, project director at the Center for Global Development. We kick off with a discussion of why the World Bank needs reform before having a longer conversation about the proposals now on the table.
Diego Garcia is a small Island in the dead center of the Indian Ocean that is part of the Chagos Archipelago. In the early 1970s, the United Kingdom, which controlled the Islands, leased Diego Garcia to the United States for use as a military base. However, in the process of transferring Diego Garcia to the US, the United Kingdom forcibly expelled the island's native population and that of the surrounding Chagos Archipelego. Thousands of Chagossians were exiled from their homeland, most of whom were forced to Mauritius, which is over 2,000 kilometers away.
The forced deportation of Chagossians was a crime against humanity committed 50 years ago. But only recently has it gotten its day in court. My guest today, Philippe Sands is a famed international lawyer who has taken on the cause of righting his historic wrong. His recent book "The Last Colony: A Tale of Exile Justice and Courage" tells the story of the Chagossian exile and the effort to secure justice for Chagos islanders. We kick off our conversation with a brief history of the Island before we discuss the series of legal victories in both British courts and the International Court of Justice in the Hague that has lead to final negotiations underway to support the return of Chagosians to their homeland.
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