Global Dispatches -- World News That Matters

Conflict in Israel and Palestine is escalating in ways we have seen before: an Israeli military assault on Gaza as rockets fly from Gaza to Israel. But what distinguishes this latest iteration of the…

The last time World Food Program Chief Economist Arif Husain came on the show to discuss global trends in food security was 15 months ago. Needless to say, since January 2020 and the onset of the pan…

It was a combination of imperial ambition and white supremacy that inspired the advent of the field of global health in the 19th century and that colonialist legacy can still be seen in the practice …

The longtime ruler of Chad, Idriss Deby, died from wounds sustained while visiting troops on the battlefield. Deby had been the president of Chad for over 30 years and was considered a stalwart ally …

When COVID-19 forced countries to impose widespread lockdowns last year, there was a concurrent surge in gender based violence and domestic abuse. The United Nations has called this a "shadow pandemi…

India is currently in the midst the single worst spike in COVID cases experienced anywhere in the world since the start of the pandemic. 

On the line with me to explain how and why the COVID crisis g…

On April 22 and 23rd, the White House hosted the Climate Leaders Summit which featured more than 40 world leaders. Joe Biden kicked off the summit with a major announcement that the United States has…

The American foreign policy tradition has been recently dominated by just a few ideologies: neoconservatism of the Regan and George W. Bush eras and the liberal internationalism of the Clinton and Ob…

On April 14th President Biden announced that American Troops will be leaving Afghanistan by September 11, 2021, formally ending US military engagement after twenty years of war. What contributed to t…

The COVID-19 pandemic is just the latest iteration of what Charles Kenny calls an unending war between humanity and infectious disease. His new book "The Plague Cycle" documents and describes how the…

For the last several months Niger has experienced a surge in attacks against civilians by violent extremists. This region of West Africa, the Sahel, has experienced profound and growing security chal…

When economies started tanking last year as COVID-19 spread rapidly around the globe, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund mounted their crisis response. Now, one year later we can assess s…

On March 30th, leaders from 23 countries plus the heads of the World Health Organization and the European Union called for a new international treaty to confront the next pandemic. Global health expe…

Benin is a geographically small country in West Africa, located between Nigeria and Togo. Since the 1990s Benin has earned a reputation as a strong and stable multiparty democracy.

However, that has …

In mid-March, the government of Turkey announced that is was withdrawing from a key human rights treaty known as the Istanbul Convention. Turkey took this move right in the middle of a major annual u…

Globalization was always presumed to have a flattening effect; power in a globalized world would be more diffuse and less centralized. A groundbreaking idea, called "Weaponized Interdependence," flip…

Health systems in Brazil are collapsing. Hospitals are running out of beds and oxygen as COVID cases in that country are soaring. Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro has long downplayed the severity o…

Several American allies have pledged to pursue an explicitely feminist foreign policy. But what does this mean in practice?  

In today's episode, we explore what a feminist foreign policy would mean …

The pandemic has been described as a mass extinction event for journalism. This is true in the United States, Europe and the developed world but even more so in poorer countries. 

A free and independ…

In early November, a civil war broke out in the Tigray region in Ethiopia. The conflict pitted the federal government and its allies against the regional government of Tigray, known as the TPLF.  

Si…