Zubaida Akbar is an Afghan human rights activist living in Washington, D.C. She is desperately trying to get vulnerable people out of the country, including a group of female journalists who are almost certainly marked for execution by the Taliban.

We kick off discussing what she is hearing from her friends in Kabul as people attempt to flee the Taliban’s retribution.  We then have a very heavy conversation about the tragedy unfolding in Afghanistan.

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Back in 2008, in the midst of both a global economic catastrophe and stalled progress on climate diplomacy, a unique multilateral platform called the Climate Investment Funds was born.  

The G-8 created the Climate Investment Funds to support developing economies as they shifted to a less carbon intensive future. The Climate Investment Funds supports the development of clean energy markets and invests in projects and programs the enable clean energy transitions and adaptation to climate change.

The CEO of the Climate Investment Funds, Mafalda Duarte is on the podcast today to explain the significance of this multilateral platform to the common global effort to confront climate change.

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The Global Peace Index is an ambitious effort to measure peacefulness around the world using quantitative data. Now in its 15th year, the Index has offered policymakers and analysts a useful way to measure key trends in peace and conflict. 

Steve Killelea, founder and executive director of the Institute for Economics and Peace, is on the podcast to discuss the report’s findings and what it suggests about trends in peace and conflict around the world. 

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In the new book Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump  journalist Spencer Ackerman offers an intense examination of how a never ending war on terror became an embedded and malignant force in American civic life.

This is one of the most important foreign policy books of a generation. Spencer Ackerman, on the podcast today, is a Pulitzer Prize and National Magazine Award winning reporter who has worked for Wired, The Guardian, The Daily Beast and is now the publisher of the Forever Wars newsletter on Substack.

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Yemen has two rival central banks. These banks have their own priorities and fiscal policies — and were set up, in part, to help defeat the other and control the Yemeni Rial. 

The result has been runaway inflation and food prices that are increasingly out of reach for ordinary Yemenis. 

Annelle Sheline of The Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft explains how Yemen came to have rival central banks and how this situation fits into the broader conflict in Yemen. 

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On July 25th, Tunisian President Kais Saied fired the prime minister, dismissed parliament, and assumed dictatorial powers . This was a self-coup in which the president invoked an emergency clause in the constitution allowing him to rule by decree.

Tarek Megirisi, Senior Policy fellow at European Council on Foreign Relations, explains what happened in Tunisia and the broader domestic and international implications of this power grab.

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At the United Nations, debates over gender equality, reproductive health and women’s rights were not always as polarized as they are today. When I started covering the United Nations as a journalist in the early 2000s the feminist movement, broadly speaking, was in ascendence and very much driving discussions around gender issues at the UN. 

This is not as much the case today. According to my guest today, Jelena Cupac, that is because of the ascendence of a transnational network of conservative anti-feminist NGOs operating at the United Nations.  Jelena Cupac is a PHD with the Berlin Social Science Center. She is the co-author with Irem Ebeturk of an article in the academic journal International Affairs “Backlash advocacy and NGO polarization over women’s rights in the United Nations” which examines how this network of conservative NGOs has been able to influence debates over women’s rights at the United Nations.

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