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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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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Why Don’t More People Use Clean Cookstoves?

Photo credit: Karan Singh Rathore / www.sanjhi.org via US State Department. CC license/flickr

For years, the global development community has struggled over the problem of dirty burning cookstoves. These are typically rudimentary stoves that burn wood or other biomass — and in the process emit harmful smoke indoors. Nearly three billion people around the world cook their meals this way, leading to environmental damage and illness. Indoor air pollution attributed to dirty burning cookstoves kills millions of people each year.

The solution to the problem of dirty cookstoves should be straightforward — just replace cookstoves that emit harmful pollutants with cleaner burning, improved cookstoves. Indeed, there are a great variety of efficient and clean cookstoves available today. But so far, these improved cookstoves are not being used at anywhere near a scale commensurate with the problem. The solution might exist, but consumers are often not using these better cookstoves. 

My guest today, Subhrendu Pattanayak, sought to learn why people who would benefit the most from improved cookstoves are not using them. He is the Oak Professor of Environmental and Energy Policy at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy. In 2019, he published the results of a five year study with co-author Marc Jeuland of communities in rural India that offers some key insights into the barriers of increasing demand for cleaner burning cookstoves.   We discuss these findings at length in our conversation.

Today’s episode is the first 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. Since 2015, the network has expanded to include over 150 researchers, policymakers, and practitioners working in the field of energy from over 35 countries. Currently, SETI is housed at Duke University, where it is led by Professors Subhrendu Pattanayak and Marc Jeuland.  SETI’s research addresses the most pressing energy challenges faced by low- and middle-income countries, from clean cooking in Senegal to micro-hydro power in Nepal to coal divestment in Chile. To learn more about SETI, follow them on Twitter @SETIenergy.

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Do War Crimes Tribunals Actually Deter War Crimes?

Slobodan Milosevic at the ICTY

Since the World War Two era Nuremberg Tribunals of former Nazi officers, human rights advocates have argued that one key value of war crimes tribunals is its potential ability to deter crimes against humanity and war crimes. A new study in the academic journal International Security tests this question with fresh analysis from the Balkans wars in the 1990s. Political Scientist Dr. Jacqueline McAllister of Kenyon College examines the circumstances in which the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia was able — or not — to deter and prevent war crimes during the Yugoslav wars.

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The Coronavirus Pandemic and Its Effect on Low Income Countries and Global Development

The COVID19 pandemic will have major implications for international development. This includes in countries where organizations like the World Bank and other global development institutions have made major investments in the past decade. Amanda Glassman, senior fellow and executive vice president of the Center for Global Development explains the consequences of the coronavirus pandemic to low income countries, and what organizations like the World Bank can do to help mitigate this crisis.

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A Peace Deal Has Ended South Sudan’s Civil War

After years of conflict that killed over 400,000 people and displaced millions, a peace deal was signed to formally end South Sudan’s civil war. On the line to discuss what this peace deal entails and analyze whether or not it can hold is Jok Madut Jok, a professor at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University and a senior analyst with the Sudd Institute, which is a public policy center based in Juba, South Sudan.

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Burkina Faso is Experiencing a Surge in Violence

Burkina Faso, the landlocked country in West Africa, is in the midst of an escalating humanitarian emergency. Over half a million people have been displaced in the last year — a 500% increase from one year ago, according to the latest data from the United Nations.

The vast majority of the newly displaced are fleeing an unrelenting series of terrorist attacks. Most of these attacks are occurring in regions near the border with Mali. But terrorist violence has also reached the capitol city Ouagadougou including high profile strikes against foreign targets, like an attack on a western hotel in 2016 and an attack on the French embassy in 2018.

As we enter 2020, the scale and pace of terrorist attacks has picked up in intensity. This includes a late December attack in the town of Arbinda, in a province that borders Mali, which saw at least 37 civilians killed.  Also, earlier this year, there was a bombing of a bus carrying school children that killed 14 people.

This surge in violence in Burkina Faso comes six years after peaceful protests lead to the ouster of longtime ruler Blaise Compaoré.  And according to my guest today, the increase pace of terrorist attacks in Burkina Faso might be tied to upcoming elections in 2020, which are being contested by Blaise Compaoré’s political party.

Arsene Brice Bado is professor of political science at the center for research and action for peace, known as CERAP, at the Jesuit University in Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire. He is from Burkina Faso, and in this conversation he offers a few explanations for why his country is experiencing such violence after a rather euphoric period following the ouster of Blaise Compaoré.

We kick off discussing some recent attacks in Burkina Faso before having a longer conversation about the causes and consequences of increasing violence in Burkina Faso. We also discuss what kinds of policies and what kinds of international engagement might help reduce the prospect of further violence.

If you have twenty minutes and want to understand why Burkina Faso is experiencing a man-made humanitarian emergency, and what that means for the broader Sahel region — and the world,  have a listen.

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What to Expect from North Korea in 2020

We may be in for a very turbulent year of nuclear diplomacy with North Korea

Since 2018, North Korea has had a self-imposed moratorium on the testing of nuclear weapons and long range missiles, like the kind that could reach the United States. The moratorium stems from the diplomatic opening between the United States and North Korea that culminated in three meetings between Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un.  However, even as North Korea has paused its long range missile and nuclear testing, it has continued other tests to advance its nuclear weapons program. 

At the very end of 2019, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un delivered remarks in a New Year’s speech that suggest what this self-imposed moratorium on nuclear and missile testing was over — and on top of that, that North Korea has a powerful new weapon in its arsenal. 

So what does this all mean for nuclear diplomacy with North Korea and the prospect of more provocations, or even outright conflict?

On the line with me to discuss where we are headed with North Korea is Dr. Jeffrey Lewis.  He is a professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterrey. He is a longtime nuclear security expert and and North Korea watcher.  We kick off discussing the impact, if any, of the US killing of Iranian general Qassam Soulemani on North Korea’s strategic thinking before having a longer conversation about North Korea’s nuclear program and the prospects for diplomacy in 2020.  

Also, last time Jeffrey Lewis was on the show we discussed his book, published in 2018, which is actually a novel that presents a very plausible scenario for a nuclear exchange between North Korea and the United States that takes place in 2020. So, naturally, we ended this conversation discussing the likelihood of whether or not the events he describes in his book may transpire.

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How Prepared are We for the Next Big Global Epidemic?

In 1976 Peter Piot was a 27-year-old microbiologist working in Belgium when he travelled to the Democratic Republic of Congo, then called Zaire, to investigate a particularly deadly disease outbreak. He took samples back to his lab and was among the team that first discovered the ebola virus.

Today, he is one of the world’s leading experts on epidemics and infectious diseases. This includes HIV/AIDS. In 1995, he was the founding director of the United Nations Program on AIDS, called UNAIDS, and served in that role until 2008. He is now the director of one of the world’s most prestigious health research institutes, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

And on the podcast today, we talk about epidemics and what can be done to avert and contain them. This includes the ongoing ebola epidemic in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which is now the second worst ebola outbreak in history. And we also discuss what the world has gotten right (and wrong) about both fighting HIV and AIDS. Peter Piot argues that we need to re-define what we mean by ending the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

We kick off though discussing the kind of nightmare scenarios that most concern Peter Piot. This includes what he calls “the big one.”

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 Peter Piot is a 2019 REACH award judge; the award winners will be announced at the Reaching the Last Mile forum.’

What is Next for Peace Talks With the Taliban?

U.S. Army soldiers on security duty in Paktīkā province, Afghanistan, 2010. Sgt. Derec Pierson/U.S. Department of Defense


In late August it appeared that the United States was very close to an agreement with the Taliban that would see US troops withdraw from the Afghanistan.

Leading the negotiations on the US-side was Zalmay Khalilzad, a widely respected former US Ambassador to the UN who is an immigrant to the US from Afghanistan.  He also served as US Ambassador to Afghanistan shortly after the fall of the Taliban.

Significantly, these negotiations did not include the Afghan government, rather they were direct negotiations between the US and the Taliban.

By early September it appeared that the two sides had reached a deal. Then, on September 7th Donald Trump appeared to upend the deal in a tweet suggesting that a planned meeting between the US and Taliban at Camp David had been cancelled, apparently ending these talks. But then, days later, he fired National Security Advisor John Bolton who had largely opposed negotiating with the Taliban in the first place.

So where does this leave the peace process and negotiations for a US withdrawal from Afghanistan? And what happens next? On the line to discuss these questions and more is Daniel Serwer. He is a professor of conflict management and American foreign policy at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Study and a scholar at the Middle East Institute

Daniel Serwer has had a long career in and out of government participating in peace talks and peace building efforts around the world, including Afghanistan.

We kick off discussing just what Zalmay Khalilzad was negotiating with the Taliban before having a longer conversation about how those talks broke down and what comes next.

If you have 20 minutes and want to get up to speed on US diplomacy towards Afghanistan, then have a listen.

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