Archives for February 2017

Episode 141: Joshua Landis

As the Syria civil war enters its seventh year, the outcome of the conflict no longer seems in doubt. With some 400,000 people killed and over 11 million Syrian displaced, its appears likely that the Syrian government will likely prevail over its armed opposition.

On the line to discuss how the Syrian government gained the upper hand, and what this means for the future of Syria is Joshua Landis, a longtime scholar and expert on the region.

Joshua Landis

Joshua Landis is someone I have turned to for many years to help me make sense of events in Syria and the broader middle east. He started his blog Syria Comment over ten years ago and has since become an oft-cited expert on Syria and the civil war. He’s a professor at the University of Oklahoma where he directs the Center for Middle East Studies.

Joshua Landis seemed destined to become one of America’s foremost Syria specialists. He spent much of his childhood and adolescence in the region, including Saudi Arabia and Lebanon. Landis describes how spending some formative years in Beirut both as a child during the height of Beirut’s cosmopolitan boom and later in his twenties during the Lebanese civil war, shaped how he understood his Syria civil war as it was unfolding.

We kick off with a discussion of the current state of the conflict in Syria before pivoting to a longer conversation about Landis’ life and career, with plenty of digressions about historic foreign policy events in the Levant.

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For the first time in six years, a famine has been declared

The United Nations did some extremely rare in February: agencies declared that a famine was ongoing in parts of South Sudan. More than 100,000 people are affected by this famine and childhood mortality rates are already surging there.

On the line with me to discuss why this famine declaration was made, what is means on the ground for the people affected by it and the humanitarian agencies trying to contain the damage is Steve Taravella, senior spokesperson for the World Food Program in Washington. And as Steve describes “famine” is actually a technical term — it does not mean just having no food. Rather it is a threshold that is taken from a number of indicators that taken together mean that people are dying from starvation in extreme numbers.

This famine declaration comes as the UN is also fighting intense food security crises in Yemen, Somalia and parts of Northern Nigeria. And Steve describes how this is really an unprecedented moment for relief organizations like his.

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Episode 140: Molly Crabapple

Molly Crabapple is an artist and writer who combines those two crafts to produce cutting edge journalism on some key global topics. She’s reported and drawn from Guantanamo, worked with Syrian activists to depict scenes from inside ISIS strongholds, and most recently returned from refugee encampments in Greece.

Molly is a contributing editor to VICE and her work has appeared in Vanity Fair, the New York Times, Newsweek and elsewhere. Her art is part of the permanent collection at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

She describes how she uses art in the service of journalism—something frankly that is unique and totally innovative. I’ve posted an art work of hers so you can get a sense of her style. Her memoir Drawing Blood was published to critical in 2015.

 

Scenes from the Syrian War is a collection illustrated articles serialized in Vanity Fair, made in collaboration with an anonymous source within Syria. Using photos sent via cell phone, Molly recreates rare glimpses of daily life in ISIS-occupied Syria.  You can see more of her art at MollyCrabapple.com 

Episode 139: Bathsheba Crocker

Assistant Secretary Bathsheba Crocker Credit: United Nations Foundation

Diplomacy runs in Bathsheba Crocker’s family.

Sheba and her father Chester Crocker are the first parent-child combination to have both served as Assistant Secretaries of State. Crocker-the-elder was a noted Africa specialist who served in the Regan administration, and Sheba describes his how influence and the influence of her mother’s family, who were Jews who fled eastern Europe to Zimbabwe, had a profound impact on her worldview.

Bathsheba Crocker recently left her post as President Obama’s Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs. She had served in various positions in the State Department for the entirety of the Obama administration and before that she worked in the office of the United Nations’ special envoy for Tsunami Recovery and Relief. (That “Special Envoy” was none other than Bill Clinton.)

Since leaving her post, Sheba admits she has more time on her hands these days and you find her on Twitter and also writing for Foreign Policy’s Shadow Government vertical. We kick off with a discussion about how the transition to the Trump administration is shaking up the State Department.

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Is Gross National Happiness the New GDP?

(World Government Summit, Dubai) – One of the key themes running through this conference is that happiness is not simply a matter of personal contentment, but should be treated as a public good. But that raises a two key questions: how can governments measure happiness and subsequently design policies that promote it?

These are questions that are currently on the fringes of public policy discourse in many countries economies, but not all. Last year the United Arab Emirates created a Ministry of Happiness and the government of Bhutan created an index to measure citizen well being. Still, these concepts are relatively new.

With me to discuss the intersection of happiness and public policy is economist Andrew Oswald who pioneered this line of study. We discuss how one actually measures and quantifies happiness in a way that’s relevant to public policy and also some of the political implications of a happy verses a discontented population. This is cutting edge stuff, and intellectually very interesting.

If you have 20 minutes and want to learn how happiness can be quantified and guide public policy — including as a possible anti-dote to populism — have a listen.

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In Myanmar, Crimes Against Humanity Committed Against the Rohingya Community are Ongoing and Unrelenting

Displaced Rohingya people in Rakhine State, Burma. Credit: Foreign and Commonwealth Office

Crimes against humanity are ongoing in Burma and they are being committed by the state against the Rohingya people.

This is a minority community in Burma that has historically faced intense discrimination, but there was some degree of hope that as the country transitioned to a democracy the situation of this community would improve. Alas, we are now nearly a year into the leadership of Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi and the plight of this minority community is as dire as ever.

A number of recent reports have indicated an uptick in violence against the Rohingya — including what appears to be the systematic use of rape and sexual violence. One of those reports was published by Human Rights Watch on February 6. On the line to discuss the report and the broader situation of the Rohingya in both Burma and across the border in Bangladesh is Brad Adams, the Asia director of human rights watch.

This is a fairly under covered story, but one in which I’ve tried to highlight on this podcast from time to time. It has certainly been drowned out by the unrelenting pace of news reports about the new Trump administration, but worth highlighting. If you have twenty minutes and want to understand why discrimination and violence committed against this minority population in Myanmar is of international concern, have a listen.

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Episode 138: Dr. Larry Brilliant

Dr. Larry Brilliant starred in a 1960s film that was a total flop. The movie was called Medicine Ball Caravan and it was a sort of documentary that followed Larry and a bunch of other hippies as they followed the touring busses of acts like the Grateful Dead.

But despite the commercial failure of this film I would posit that it lead, though somewhat indirectly, to the global eradication of small pox. That’s because after the filming ended, Larry kept the hippie caravan going until he reached India, and, while there, joined the World Health Organization’s efforts to eliminate small pox from the country. It’s a great story.

Larry is now an epidemiologist with the Skoll Foundation and we have an absolutely fascinating conversation about his life and career, including how a chance encounter with Martin Luther King in 1962 forever changed his life. Many of these stories are included in his recently published memoir: Sometimes Brilliant:The Impossible Adventure of a Spiritual Seeker and Visionary Physician Who Helped Conquer the World’s Worst Disease. We kick off discussing the current threat from global pandemics before pivoting to his extraordinarily unique life story.

How the Middle East is Reacting to Trump’s Travel Ban

By now, you are well aware of President Trump’s sweeping ban on migrants from seven Muslim majority countries; the indefinite suspension of refugees from Syria and the suspension of all refugee resettlement into the United States for at least four months. The executive order is, of course, the subject of intense debate and discussion here in the United States, but I wanted to get a sense of how this executive order is playing out in the region so I called up one of my favorite scholars and public intellectuals who studies the politics of the Middle East, Marc Lynch.

Marc is a political science professor at George Washington University. He describes how different countries are reacting to the executive order and the implications it has for both domestic politics in the Middle East and those countries’ foreign policies. This is a useful conversation that puts into context the foreign policy and international relations implications of this executive order.

If you have 20 minutes and want to understand what this policy means for Middle East, have a listen.