The Central African Republic is near the bottom of every major economic or development indicator. It is also a country that is emerging from civil war. 

Despite these challenges, the COVID-19 pandemic is not raging out of control in CAR. This is in part due to the work of Dr. Marie Roseline Belizaire, a Haitian epidemiologist with the World Health Organization who was deployed to the Central African Republic early in the pandemic to assist the country with COVID -19 preparedness and response plan. 

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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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Even before the coronavirus pandemic, the world order was undergoing some profound shifts. China was rising. The USA, under the Trump administration was abdicating its traditional role as a global leader, and global institutions were seemingly getting weaker. So how does the COVID-19 pandemic layer on top of these trends?

Ian Bremmer is the President of the Eurasia Group and GZero Media. He explains how and why the COVID-19 pandemic is impacting great power politics and geopolitical shifts.

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Congressman Ami Bera is a Democrat from California who serves on the House Foreign Affairs Committee and is chair of the subcommittee on Asia and Pacific.

He is also a medical doctor who has long championed global health issues. Last November he served on a commission on pandemic preparedness convened by the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC that issued a series of recommendations that today looks rather prescient.  

We spoke just a day after President Trump announced that the United States was freezing funding for the World Health Organization and needless to say Congressman Bera strongly disagrees with that move. And it’s his reasoning I think that is most instructive.  He does a really good job of explaining why preventing clusters of COVID-19 from taking hold in poorer countries is required for securing the US homeland, and how the WHO is critical to that effort. 

We cover other ground too, including what the trajectory of the outbreak looks like here in the United States, and how that trajectory might shape US politics and foreign policy.

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There is a coronavirus human rights crackdown. Regimes around the world are using the pandemic as a pretext to erode civil liberties and trample human rights to further entrench themselves in power.

Philippe Bolopion, deputy director for advocacy at Human Rights Watch explains how the pandemic is impacting human rights around the world.

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What explains why some countries are responding to the coronavirus more effectively than others? One branch of political science, called comparative politics, offers a useful lens to understand how differences between countries are affecting governments’ response to the COVID-19 Pandemic

Sofia Fenner is an assistant professor of political science at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania who explains what comparative politics and political science can teach us about how governments are responding to this crisis.

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Desert locusts are eating their way through east Africa and leaving a huge food security crisis in their wake. Desert locusts are migratory pests. One swarm one square kilometer in size could eat as much food in a day as 35,000 people. And in many places in East Africa, the swarms today are far larger than that. Ethiopia and Somalia are experiencing their worst desert locust situation in 25 years. Kenya is experiencing its worst locust crisis in 70 years.

Keith Cressman is the senior desert locust forecasting officer at the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. He explains why we are seeing this historic upsurge in desert locusts in East Africa, their impact on the lives and livelihoods of people in this region, and what can be done to control the swarms and mitigate their impact. 

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