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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.
Dr. Joanne Liu is a professor at the School of Population and Global Health at McGill University and a practicing physician at the University of Montreal. She is the former international president of Medicines Sans Frontiers/Doctors Without Borders and for the purposes of this conversation she served on the Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response.
This panel was co-chaired former New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark and Former President of Liberia Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. It was formed by the World Health Organization in 2020 to provide an audit of how both the WHO and its member states were responding to COVID-19 and what steps need to be taken to prepare or prevent the next pandemic.
As Dr. Joanne Liu explains, world leaders need to be approaching pandemic preparedness and response as if it were a potentially existential threat to humanity, on par with a nuclear catastrophe. This requires far greater levels of political attention than it currently receives. We discuss at length why global cooperation around pandemic preparedness is lagging and what steps need to be taken in the near term to change course.
Today's episode of Global Dispatches is a promotion for a podcast that I think many of my listeners will find valuable. The podcast is called "Inside Geneva," in which host Imogen Foulkes puts big questions facing the world to the experts working to tackle them in Switzerland's international city. Inside Geneva is is produced by Swissinfo, a public service media company based in Bern, Switzerland.
In this episode, Imogen Foulkes talks to human rights defenders and investigators bringing their cases to the UN Human Rights Council. You will hear from a diverse array of human rights defenders, investigators and victims of human rights abuses as they pursue justice at the Geneva-based UN Human Rights Council.
President Biden has authorized the deployment of hundreds of American Special Operations forces to Somalia to assist the Somali government in its fight against al-Shabaab. According to the New York Times President Biden has also authorized a Pentagon plan to step up airstrikes against al-Shabaab leadership.
This increased US military engagement in Somalia comes at a time of transition in Somalia. After years of political wrangling, Somalia's Parliament has elected a new President, Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, who took office on May 15th. Meanwhile, the African Union's about 20,000 strong peacekeeping force in Somalia is beginning a process of winding down.
My guest today, Harun Maruf, is a veteran journalist and editor at VOA Somali Service. I kick off by asking him how news of increased US military involvement in Somalia is being received in Mogadishu and beyond. We then have an extended conversation about the security situation in Somalia today.
The idea that China engages in so-called "Debt Trap Diplomacy" is almost apocryphal. There is a persistent media narrative that China makes big infrastructure investments oversees as part of its Belt and Road Initiative, and when countries cant replay those loans China seizes infrastructure.
My guest today, Deborah Brautigam, is the director of the China Africa Research Initiative at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. She has done extensive research on Chinese-financed infrastructure investment projects in Asia and Africa and has definitively shown that the narrative of Chinese Debt Trap diplomacy is not supported by facts.
We kick off discussion the origin of this myth, which stems from media commentary around Chinese investment in a port in Sri Lanka. We then discuss other examples of the perpetuation of this myth and have a broad conversation about how China (and other lenders) actually seek repayment of loans.
Russia's invasion of Ukraine has posed a major test for the United Nations. And while some parts of the UN system have admirably risen to the occasion, the Security Council has not.
On the line with me to assess the UN's response to Russia's invasion is Richard Gowan, the UN Director for the International Crisis Group. We kick off discussing a recent diplomatic mission by UN Secretary General to both Moscow and Kyiv before having a longer conversation about how his major international crisis is impacting diplomacy at the UN. Towards the end of the conversation Richard Gowan discusses a recent paper he wrote outlining the opportunities that this crisis may present for reforms at the UN.
Ukraine War and UN Reform -- International Crisis Group
Pakistan's Prime Minister Imran Khan resigned on April 10th, following a no-confidence vote in Parliament. The former cricket star turned politician had served as Prime Minister since 2018, but in recent months he had increasingly fallen out of favor with Pakistan's powerful military establishment, which has long been a dominant force in Pakistani politics.
My guest, Michael Kugelman, is Senior Associate for South Asia at the Wilson Center. We kick off discussing how Imran Khan leveraged his celebrity as one of the greatest cricket players of all time to a career in politics. We then discuss how he governed as Prime Minister and the circumstances that lead to his downfall. Finally, we have an in-depth conversation about how this political transition in Pakistan may impact US-Pakistani relations and regional dynamics between Pakistan, India and China.
Of all the countries that border Ukraine, Moldova is arguably the most vulnerable to Russian aggression. Since 1992, Russian troops have been present in a breakaway region of Moldova called Transnistria. This is a majority Russian-speaking region that receives considerable support from Moscow.
In late April there were a series of explosions in Transnistria, the perpetrators are unknown but the explosions further heightened concerns that Russia's invasion of Ukraine would spill over into Transnistria and possibly even Moldova proper.
My guest Paula Erizanu is a journalist and author from Moldova and also based in the UK. I caught up with her from Chisinau, Moldova's capital city. We kick off discussing the general mood of people in Chisinau as Russia targets the nearby Ukrainian port city of Odessa. We then discuss the history of the Transnistria conflict before having a broader conversation about how Russia's invasion of Ukraine is impacting Moldovan politics and Society.
Libya is a popular point from which Africa refugees and migrants set off for Europe. However, if caught, these migrants and refugees have been subject to indefinite detention in hellish conditions in Libya.
Journalist Sally Hayden first caught wind of this story when she unexpectedly received a Facebook message from an Eritrean migrant stranded in a Libyan jail. This lead her on a reporting journey that resulted in her new book, "My Fourth Time We Drowned: Seeking Refuge on the World's Deadliest Migration Route."
We kick off discussing how it is that she first started receiving messages from migrants trapped in a Libyan prison before having a broader conversation about the lives she profiles and how the European Union is partly responsible for this human rights disaster.
Sri Lanka is in the midst of an economic catastrophe.
The government is low on foreign exchange reserves and struggling to pay off its debts. The Sri Lankan rupee has plunged in value over the last several weeks. Inflation is soaring. Fuel is scarce, and there have been widespread blackouts in major parts of the country.
This sharp economic downturn is sparking a major political crisis for the government, long controlled by a single family. But now widespread protests are posing the most significant challenge to the Rajapaksa family's grip on power in decades.
My guest today, JS Tissanayagram, is a Sri Lankan journalist and human rights activist living in the US. He kicks off describing how this crisis is impacting the daily lives of people in Sri Lanka before we have a longer conversation about the roots of this economic crisis and is political implications.
Sweden and Finland are both historically neutral countries. Though both are members of the European Union, they are decidedly not members of NATO
But that may soon change.
In the wake of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Finland and Sweden have signaled a desire to join the US-lead western military alliance.
On the line with me to explain the significance of Sweden and Finland joining NATO is Ivo Daalder, President of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and former US Ambassador to NATO.
We kick off discussing Sweden and Finland's historic neutrality before having a longer conversation about the process of NATO membership and what impact adding these two countries to the alliance may have both militarily and diplomatically.
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