Archives for August 2015

Episode 79: Juliana Barbassa

Screen Shot 2015-08-31 at 9.48.08 AMJuliana Barbassa is a journalist and the author of the new book Dancing with the Devil in the City of God: Rio di Janeiro on the Brink. 

We have a great conversation about the current political upheaval in Brazil; how preparations for the 2016 summer Olympics are changing the character of Rio; and why corruption in Brazil’s political system is seemingly so endemic.

Juliana had a nomadic upbringing. She is Brazilian, but spent much of her childhood overseas in the middle east and Texas, where she developed a bug for journalism. We discuss her life and career, including her time covering key immigration debates in the USA in the 1990s and 2000s; and her writing of this interesting new book about Rio.

If you want to learn more about the most important city in one of the most interesting countries on earth, have a listen.

This Gay Syrian Refugee Risked it All

Earlier this week the UN Security Council did something it’s never done before: it held a meeting specifically focusing on violence directed against LGBT people. The council called two witnesses, both of whom are gay men caught up in the conflict in the Middle East. The first witness was an Iraqi who spoke to the Council by phone. He spoke anonymously and from an undisclosed location because he was marked for death by ISIS.

Tsubhihe second witness was Subhi Nahas, a gay Syrian refugee now living in the USA. A day after addressing the Security Council, Subhi spoke with me.

The episode you are about to hear is in two parts. First, you’ll hear Subhi’s story and how he fled Syria once Al Qaeda’s affiliate, Jabat al-Nusra, took over his town. Next, you will hear from Neil Grungras, the founder of the Organization for Refuge, Asylum and Migration, which happens to employ Subhi. Neil helps put the situation of LGBT refugees and asylum seekers in a broader global context.

This is a powerful episode, and a profound reminder that marginalized communities deserve our support.

Episode 78: Kenna

Kenna Zemedkun is a critically acclaimed musician and producer who’s collaborated with the likes of Pharrell Williams and Justin Timberlake. He’s also a pathbreaking social entrepreneur who, as of now, is the world’s first one-for-one artist. Kenna has a new album coming out, Songs for Flight, and embedded into the production of the album is a novel profit sharing scheme in which NGOs and non-profits benefit directly from sales.Screen Shot 2015-08-24 at 9.45.59 AM

Kenna has had a fascinating life and career. He was born in Ethiopia in the mid 1970s, just as the country began to unravel. He eventually landed in Virginia Beach, where along with his high school friends Chad Hugo and Pharrell Williams, he began to make waves in the music industry and…far beyond. He featured prominently in Malcom Gladwell’s 2005 book Blink about the science of first impressions.
 
This is a really fun and interesting conversation. We discuss his family’s escape from Ethiopia and how that experience traces directly to the roots of his own commitment to social justice. And we talk music! 

The Worm Wars!

“Worm Wars” is shorthand for an ongoing scientific debate about the efficacy of de-worming programs; that is, programs supported by governments and non profits to stop the transmission of parasitic worms. This debate has become exceedingly heated in recent weeks after new research called into question old research about a key claim that de-worming programs increased school attendance.

This largely academic debate offers key insights into the role of research in influencing international development and global health agendas.

The debate gets very complicated, very quickly. Here to help me make sense of it all and explain its larger relevance to international development is my old pal Tom Murphy. Tom is a correspondent for the website Humanosphere and also the co-founder along with…me of DAWNS Digest.

Episode 77: Carne Ross

Carne-Ross-_MG_4183-crop_GUESTCarne Ross is the founder of Independent Diplomat, a non-profit that provides diplomatic services to marginalized groups around the world. He was a long serving member of the British foreign service, mostly covering the Middle East and Iraq before he resigned in 2004 after giving secret testimony to a British inquiry investigating the botched intelligence about Iraq’s WMD program. His testimony was rather damning, earning him quite a few enemies in the British government.  When the testimony was released, Carne became a public figure in the UK.

In this episode, Carne Ross discusses his long career in the foreign service, including working the Iraq portfolio at the Security Council. We discuss his work with Independent Diplomat, and discuss why he decided to enter the diplomatic ranks in the first place. And here, you’ll see  how the author Salman Rushdie had a rather unique influence over his career trajectory.

Humanity is Poised to Win the Fight Against Ebola

Ambulance Depot Near Emergency Response Centre, FreetownThere is a new ebola vaccine. And it works spectacularly well. A recent paper in the Lancet demonstrated of the 7,600 people in Guinea who received the vaccine, not one person contracted the virus.

Dr. Jeremy Farrar is on the line to discuss the implications of this vaccine for the fight against ebola.  He is a professor of tropical medicine and director of the Welcome Trust, a philanthropy that supports medical research. We discuss how the vaccine trial was conducted, how the results can be analyzed and what an effective vaccine might mean for the global fight against ebola. Dr. Farrar has also very prominently called for the creation of a global vaccine fund to spur the development and deployment of vaccines to counter fast emerging epidemics. We have a lively conversation about this proposal.

Episode 76: Liz Sly

image credit: http://www.alkhabarnow.net/

image credit: http://www.alkhabarnow.net/

Journalist Liz Sly is the Beirut bureau chief for the Washington Post. She is one of my favorite and go-to-reporters for news and context about Syria and the broader middle east. We kick off discussing the current situation in Beirut, which has seen a massive influx of Syrian refugees. We also spend a good amount of time discussing the situation in Syria, before pivoting to a longer conversation about her life and career.

Sly is a veteran journalist who has reported from around the world. We discuss how she got her start, why she was so attracted to Beirut in the 1980s, and what it was like covering some of the biggest global stories of the last 30 years, including reporting from Rwanda just after the April 1994 genocide.

Our conversation is definitely heavy at times, but certainly worth your attention. If you are interested in the middle east, foreign policy, journalism and learning from one of the most respected foreign correspondents in the middle east you will love this episode.

Colombia’s FARC Insurgency May Be Coming to an End. But Can the Peace Hold?

credit: Colombian army, via facebook

Credit: Colombian army, via facebook

The FARC insurgency in Colombia has been raging for fifty years. And now, after a long peace process, it may soon be coming to a formal end. But even if a peace deal is signed, sustaining the peace will be incredibly challenging and may hinge on whether or not there is a meaningful improvement in the lives of people in rural Colombia. 

That is the argument of my guest James Bargent, a freelance journalist in Colombia who has a piece in World Politics Review discussing the prospect of a peace dividend in poor, rural outposts of Colombia over which FARC has historically exerted a great deal of influence. We have a very interesting conversation about the history of this insurgency, the peace process, the challenge of coca eradication and the complex relationship between impoverished farmers, FARC guerrillas and the government.

This episode is being brought to you by World Politics Review, which provides uncompromising analysis of critical global trends to give policy makers, business people, and academics the context they need to have the confidence they want. The good people at World Politics Review are offering Global Dispatches Podcast listeners a two week free trial and then a 50% discount on an annual subscription. To redeem this offer go to about.worldpoliticsreview.com/dispatches 

Episode 75: James Fearon

FearonJames Fearon is on every international relations syllabus. He is a professor at Stanford and widely known for his research into conflict and war. He uses game theory to explain the outbreak of international conflict, and along with his colleague David Laitin he’s undertaken groundbreaking research into the structural factors that make the outbreak of civil war more likely.

Fearon discusses his research and career path, which started in Kenya in the early 1980s and he eventually led to a PHD program at Berkeley where he studied under one of the great IR theorists of all time, Kenneth Waltz.

This conversation is pretty laden with international relations theory, but I did my best to keep it accessible to non-experts as well. Even if you have just a passing interest in IR you will still gain a lot from this conversation. We start off with a conversation about Iraq and Syria.