Archives for May 2020

Are the US and China Destined for War? | Graham Allison

My guest today, Graham Allison, is a legendary scholar of international relations. The last time we spoke was just after the release of his 2017 book Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap? The book examined over a dozen historic cases in which global power shifts resulted in wars, and a few cases in which it did not.  The book makes a compelling case, that war between the US as established power and China as the rising power –while not inevitable– is far more likely than we might think. 

I wanted to re-connect with Graham Allison to see if he thinks world events are confirming or refuting his thesis. This includes the role of this pandemic in shaping trends that might lead to war.

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Three years ago we had a long conversation about his life and career, this included the story behind his writing of “The Essence of Decision” in 1971. The book used the Cuban Missile Crisis as a case study to understand how organizations and governments make decisions — sometimes very bad ones.

That conversation is now available for premium subscribers. 

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COVID-19 is Interrupting Childhood Vaccines on a Global Scale

Barbara Saitta is a nurse with Doctors without Borders who specializes in vaccination campaigns, primarily in poorer countries. She tells me that because of supply chain interruptions, a number of countries are running out of routine childhood vaccines. This includes vaccines for measles, polio, and the all-important pentavalent vaccine that protects against five common diseases. What is so alarming about the interruption of routine childhood vaccines is that there is a direct correlation between mass immunization and avoiding mass death.

We kick off with a discussion of how vaccine campaigns generally operate in a developing country with poor infrastructure, before having a broader conversation about the impact of COVID-19 on routine childhood immunizations.

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How Female Entrepreneurs Can Light Up Rural Rwanda

Image credit: Sven Torfinn. Rwanda. This image is part of a series of pictures produced to illustrate the research “electricity’s impact on women’s empowerment”, conducted by ENERGIA and Hivos. Used With Permission

Just over 52% of households in Rwanda have access to some form of electricity. This access is not evenly distributed across Rwanda. In rural communities, where most Rwandans live, energy access rates are far lower. Furthermore, the country’s geography severely limits the reach of Rwanda’s electric grids.

This means Rwandans are increasingly turning to off-grid energy solutions, namely solar power.

My guest today, Rebecca Klege, is a Ghanian economist whose research focuses on the intersection of clean energy access and female entrepreneurship. She is a researcher at Environmental Research Policy Unit who is completing her PHD studies at the School of Economics, University of Cape Town in South Africa.

What makes Rebecca Klege’s work so unique is that she flips a common study question on its head. Rather than asking how energy access empowers women, she examines how empowered women can promote energy access — and whether or not they do a better job of it than men?

At the center of her research is a for-profit social enterprise called Nuru Energy. This company provides re-chargeable solar lighting to village level entrepreneurs, who then sell the lighting to others in their community. Using sales data from Nuru Energy, Rebecca Klege was able to compare the effectiveness of female salespeople versus their male counterparts. She finds that female entrepreneurs of this solar energy product are significantly more successful than male entrepreneurs.

There are broad implications of this finding, which touches on questions around sustainable development, clean energy access, and women’s empowerment. These questions and more are being put to the test in an on-going randomized control which Rebecca Klege also discusses in this episode.

And on a very similar note, I want to draw listeners attention to a recently concluded Virtual Workshop on Gender & Energy Access, hosted by Duke University and featuring 200 practitioner-scholars from over 30 countries. You can find a link to that workshop and white paper on globaldispatchespodcast.com.

Today’s episode is the third installment in a series of episodes that will be published over the next few months that showcase the research and work of the Sustainable Energy Transitions Initiative. SETI is an interdisciplinary global collaborative that aims to foster research on energy access and energy transitions in low and middle-income countries. Currently, SETI is housed at Duke University, where it is led by Professors Subhrendu Pattanayak and Marc Jeuland. To learn more about SETI, follow them on Twitter @SETIenergy.

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Liberia and COVID-19

Dr. Mosoka P Fallah is helping to lead Liberia’s fight against COVID-19. He is an infectious disease and public health expert and is the Director General National Public Health Institute of Liberia. 

Dr. Fallah was a key player in Liberia’s successful suppression of Ebola in 2014, for which he was named as one of Time Magazine’s Persons of the Year. Now, as Dr. Fallah explains, Liberia’s experience with Ebola is very much informing how both government and society approach COVID-19.

Today’s episode is supported in part from a grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York to showcase African voices in peace and security issues. To view other episodes in this series.

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How COVID-19 is Undermining the Freedom of Expression Around the World

David Kaye is the UN Special Rapporteur on freedom of opinion and expression. He has held this position for the last three years, which has given him a unique vantage point–and unique platform–to monitor trends in the suppression of free speech. He recently submitted a report to the UN Human Rights Council examining how governments and other entities are using the covid 19 pandemic as a pretext to clamp down on free speech.

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An Inside Look at How the United Nations is Marking Its 75th Anniversary

The United Nations turns 75 this year. But rather than have a diamond jubilee, the UN is instead embarking on a listening tour. The UN is seeking feedback from as many people in as many communities as possible, all around three big questions: What Kind of World do We Want to Create? Are We on Track? And What is Needed to Bridge the Gap?

In this special episode, I speak with Michelle Milford Morse, who is the UN Foundation’s Vice President for Girls and Women Strategy. She explains the significance of a 1995 UN meeting on women and gender equality which resulted in a key document called the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action. We discuss progress and the lack there of on gender equality since that meeting, including how the COVID-19 pandemic is impacting gender equality.  I then moderate a one aspect of this listening tour, on behalf of the United Nations Association of the United States.

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Lebanon is in the Midst of a Jaw-Dropping Economic Crisis

Lebanon is in the midst of an economic free fall, the degree to which is jaw dropping. 

Inflation is out of control, commodities are hard to come by, and its currency is devaluing at a rapid clip. This all was happening months before the coronavirus pandemic. Now, in the midst of the pandemic, a deteriorating economic situation is poised to turn into a major political and social crisis.

This is arguably the worst crisis since Lebanon emerged from a 15 year civil war in 1990.

The government of Lebanon signaled that it would seek a bailout from the International Monetary Fund. But IMF loans come with conditions and as my guest today Maha Yahya explains, it is entirely unclear right now whether or not the government would be able to accept the kinds of conditions required for an IMF bailout. 

Maha Yahya is the director of the Carnegie Middle East Center and I caught up with her from Beirut. We kick off discussing the roots of this economic crisis, which she explains can be traced to the political arrangements that ended the civil war 30 years ago. We then have a broad conversation about the impact this economic crisis is having in a country that is already fragile.  

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Global Dispatches Live! Climate and the COVID-19 Recovery

As governments and institutions around the world debate economic stimulus and recovery packages in response to the economic damage done by the coronavirus pandemic, what can they do to ensure that the recovery is just, sustainable and resilient? How can recovery packages align with the Paris Climate Agreement and the Sustainable Development Goals?

I put these questions and more to a heavy-hitting panel in a live recording of the Global Dispatches podcast. This episode was co-hosted by the Leadership Group for Industry Transition in partnership with Stockholm Environment Institute. 

  • Joining from Stockholm is Isabella Lovin, Deputy Prime Minister of Sweden and Minister for the Environment and Climate.
  • Also from Stockholm,  Henrick Henriksson, President and CEO of Scania
  • Joining from Medford, Massachusetts is Rachel Kyte, Dean of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University
  •  From Seattle is Michael Lazarus,  Senior Scientist and  director of the U.S. Center of SEI

To listen to this conversation, download the podcast using the links below.

Learn more about the Leadership Group for Industry Transition

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