Global Dispatches -- World News That Matters

Official and unofficial pronouncements from many sectors of the American foreign policy and political establishment routinely portray China as a major military threat to the United States --even clai…

In November 2021, a rebel group known as M23 carried out a series of surprising attacks in the Eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. By the spring and summer of 2022, M23 had captured even more t…

Joe Biden is traveling to the Middle East for the first time as President, with stops in Israel, Palestine -- and most notably Saudi Arabia.

As a candidate for president, Biden called the Saudi gover…

Food prices are soaring around the world, and along with it so are rates of food insecurity and the risk of famine. 

As my guest today, Sir Mark Lowcock explains, this is only partly due to Russia's …

As the Syrian civil war escalated, the Syrian government began obstructing access to humanitarian relief in rebel held parts of the country. So, in 2014 the UN Security Council took the extraordinary…

Brittney Griner is an American basketball superstar. On February 17th, she was arrested in an airport outside of Moscow allegedly for possession of cannabis oil. She has been held in a Russian jail e…

Sweden and Finland have both formally requested to become members of the NATO alliance. To admit new members to NATO requires the approval of all existing NATO members and so far, Turkey is objecting…

On June 19th, reports began to emerge of a mass atrocity in the Ethiopian region of Oromia committed against members of the Amhara ethnic group. This latest attack fits into a broader pattern of ethn…

In early June, Iran took the dramatic step of turning off some monitoring cameras in key nuclear facilities that had been installed by the International Atomic Energy Agency. The move came in reactio…

On June 5th, armed men attacked worshipers at a Catholic Church in the city of Owo, Nigeria. Scores of people were reportedly killed and many more injured.

My guest today,  Idayat Hassan, is director…

At time of recording there have been over 1,000 confirmed cases of Monkey Pox across 29 countries -- mostly in Europe and North America. The actual number of cases circulating in the population is li…

Today's episode was recorded live in front of a virtual audience at a side event of the International Migration Review Forum. The episode is produced in partnership with CGIAR and the Food and Agricu…

Colombia held the first round of its presidential elections on May 29th and it is hard to overstate just how surprised most analysts were by the results. For generations, Colombia has been dominated …

Dr. Joanne Liu is a professor at the School of Population and Global Health at McGill University and a practicing physician at the University of Montreal. She is the former international president of…

Today’s episode of Global Dispatches is a promotion for a podcast that I think many of my listeners will find valuable. The podcast is called “Inside Geneva,” in which host Imogen Foulkes puts big qu…

President Biden has authorized the deployment of hundreds of American Special Operations forces to Somalia to assist the Somali government in its fight against al-Shabaab.  According to the New York …

The idea that China engages in so-called "Debt Trap Diplomacy" is almost apocryphal. There is a persistent media narrative that China makes big infrastructure investments oversees as part of its Belt…

Russia's invasion of Ukraine has posed a major test for the United Nations.  And while some parts of the UN system have admirably risen to the occasion, the Security Council has not. 

On the line wit…

Pakistan's Prime Minister Imran Khan resigned on April 10th, following a no-confidence vote in Parliament. The former cricket star turned politician had served as Prime Minister since 2018,  but in r…