GDL Coffee Break Podcast: Recent Episodes
Khaldun Al Saadi
The Global Diplomacy Lab is launching its official podcast! We are a platform for new and more inclusive diplomatic approaches. Hosted by GDL Member Khaldun Al Saadi, the GDL Coffee Break Podcast seeks to get an inside look at the perspectives on global challenges and the work routines of the wonderful guests Khaldun will be interviewing each episode, which will range from experts to activists, young diplomats and more. To dive into these exciting topics, don’t forget to have a look at the show notes for the episodes, which include material referenced in the interviews. Grab up a cup of coffee and enjoy the conversation!
In this episode of GDL member Khaldun Al Saadi’s Coffee Break Podcast, GDL’s Dean Dirk Brengelmann discusses the art of diplomacy and the importance of bridging differences and strengthening relations.
Dean Brengelmann has held several bilateral positions, for example as German Ambassador to Brazil and the Netherlands. His professional life has mainly comprised of multilateral posts, including in NATO. He describes the delicate task of an ambassador whose function involves bringing together different interests and nurturing relationships. In a role where others want something from you and you want something from others, it is extremely important to know your priorities as an ambassador, he explains.
The Dean reminisces about his experience at the GDL Festival in Tunisia this October, the first internal event that he joined as Dean. He was impressed by the GDL’s diversity and community spirit: Many of the Members conveyed their concerns over the current state of the world seeming like its ‘falling apart’, but were also united by their wish to move forward. With this in mind, the future of GDL will move ahead with the intention of crisis prevention as one of its main areas of focus.
Credits
Executive Producer: Svenja Prigge (GDL Secretariat)
Audio Production: Thomas Reintjes
Design: Julie August
Music: “Bread” by Lukrembo
Host: Khaldun Al Saadi
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In this episode of GDL member Khaldun Al Saadi’s Coffee Break Podcast, fellow member Patrick Mpedzisi talks about global inequality, management of diversity and the impact of migration on Europe.
Patrick Mpedzisi is an organisational development consultant with over two decades of experience in the NGO sector of Africa. Over the course of his professional career, Patrick created new and innovative processes for CSOs in Africa to engage in regional processes. He has managed major CSO initiatives, led regional campaigns and built civil society capacities across the continent. A lawyer by profession, he also founded Mitupo.org, a platform for restoring, preserving and celebrating African culture and identity and serves as a Board member for the Zimbabwe Evaluation Association. Patrick's focus lies in programmatic and strategic improvements, advocacy, policy engagement, resource mobilisation, sustainability and change management.
To kick off the episode, Patrick provides an insight into how he manages to juggle all the different responsibilities he currently holds and which tools help him to stay organised. Afterwards, Khaldun and Patrick dive into one of Patrick’s current focus topics: global inequality. They converse about the roots and manifestations of inequalities among states, within countries and between regions. Patrick shares his key learnings on how to successfully manage diversity and utilise its positive potential. In the end, Khaldun and Patrick elaborate on the impact of migration in Europe and discuss how Europe can adapt in a modern, changing global landscape.
To learn more about Patrick’s expert insights, make yourself with a cup of coffee (or a hot beverage of your choice) and check out the new episode on Spotify!
What does Impact on Diplomacy actually mean? In this special episode of GDL member Khaldun Al Saadi's coffee break podcast, members Katarzyna Hanula- Bobbitt and Mahmoud Javadi share their expertise and experience.
What does Impact on Diplomacy actually mean? In this special episode of GDL member Khaldun Al Saadi's Coffee Break Podcast, members Katarzyna Hanula Bobbitt and Mahmoud Javadi share their expertise and experience.
In this episode of GDL member Khaldun Al Saadi's Coffee Break Podcast, speaks to Iranian diplomat and research fellow at the Institute for Political and International Studies Mahmoud Javadi pn human security.
In this episode of the GDL Coffee Break Podast, Host Khaldun Al Saadi's talks to fellow member Katarzyna Hanula Bobbitt about the reductive perception of refugees as an economic burden rather than as human beings and what to do about that.
In this episode of the GDL Coffee Break Podcast hosted by Khaldun Al Saadi,GDL Member Ghada Zribi talks about the importance of including youth voices in policy making processes.
Ghada co-hosted a GDL Lab on "Bringing Youth Voices into 21st Century Policies" in July 2022. The project aimed at bringing the voices of youth to the negotiating table and designing policy recommendations on future work, capitalizing on the demographic dividend and addressing the aspirations of youth.
Ghada also discusses the challenges faced by the youth and their aspirations for the future. She touches on the importance of role models for youth, talking about her own story to give an example.
In this episode, host Khaldun Al Saadi talks to GDL Member Eleonora Tafuro Ambrosetti. She is currently working as a research fellow at the Russia, Causasus, and Central Asia Centre at ISPI (Italian Institute For International Political Studies). Prior to working at the ISPI, she completed her PhD at the Middle East Technical University (METU) in Ankara, Turkey, and is a Marie Curie Fellow.
In her field of work, Eleonora is focusing on Russian Foreign Policy and Soft Power, EU-Russia and Russia-Turkey relations as well as EU neighbourhood policies. Just recently, she published a paper on Russian Soft Power Sources at the South African Institute of International Affairs that you can find here.
Putin’s war of aggression in Ukraine has drawn a lot of international attention and has impacted Eleonora’s field of work profoundly. Naturally, Russia’s usage of Soft Power seems to play a critical role during this time. It uses narratives that construct an attractive image of itself towards other countries and social groups. That image mainly involves anti-Westernism and Russia as a conservative and alternative pole of power. Eleanora explains that one of Russia’s main goals is to promote its influence, especially in countries that already show anti-American tendencies, while simultaneously exploiting its social differences to the West.
In this episode, host Khaldun Al Saadi talks to ElsaMarie D'Silva. She currently serves as president of the Red Dot Foundation Global, an NGO that works to end violence against women. She is also the innovator of Safecity, an online platform developed by Red Dot Foundation that uses crowdsourcing to track reports of sexual violence and harassment in public spaces and maps this data to show unsafe areas in cities. Since launching Safecity in 2012, Elsa has overseen the platform’s rise to become the largest crowdsourcing app on the issue in India, Kenya, Cameroon, and Nepal. For her pioneering work in addressing gender-based violence, Elsa received the 2013 Digital Women in Social Impact Award from She The People, the 2015 Female Entrepreneur of the Year Award from Dusan Stojanovic, the Government of India’s 2016 #WomenTransformingIndia award, and Vital Voices’ 2017 Global Leadership Award. In 2015, she was listed as one of BBC Hindi’s Top 100 Inspirational and Influential Women.
Safecity is a platform that crowdsources personal stories of sexual harassment and abuse in public spaces. This data which maybe anonymous, gets aggregated as hot spots on a map indicating trends at a local level. The idea is to make this data useful for individuals, local communities and local administration to identify factors that causes behavior that leads to violence and work on strategies for solutions. You can find further inormation on Safecity here: www.safecity.in
Elsa contributed to the following publications:
- "The Demographic Dividend and the Power of Youth: Voices from the Global Diplomacy Lab" by Anthem Press here.
- She Is - Stories of Women Advancing the Sustainable Development Goals in India.
In this episode host Khaldun Al Saadi talks to Dulguun Batmunkh, from Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. She is pursuing a MA in International Policy at Stanford University, California, United States. She earned a BA in International Relations from the National University of Mongolia, and a MBA in Public Policy from the University of Finance and Economics in Mongolia. Dulguun worked as a Program Manager at the Konrad-Adenauer-Foundation, where she established civic education programs and networking platforms for promising young politicians and mid-career women to promote their proactive participation in politics. In her function as the Development Cooperation Officer of the German Embassy in Ulaanbaatar, she helped at concluding negotiations and official project agreements between the German-Mongolian governments on development cooperation. Dulguun served as the Secretary-General of the UN Youth Advisory Panel Mongolia 2013-2016 and is co-founder of the UN Association of Mongolia. Dulguun is a recipient of the President’s Scholarship of Mongolia, the Women's Scholarship for Peace by the UNODA and the first Knight-Hennessy-Scholar from Mongolia.
· You can find further information on the Knight-Hennessy-Scholars program here.
· Details about the Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford University Dulguun talks about can be found on the project’s website.
Welcome to the third episode of the Global Diplomacy Lab Coffee Break Podcast. Tamara Gómez Marín is our guest in this episode. She is the Consul General of Costa Rica in Rome, Italy. She talks about putting people first in her work as a diplomat, climate change and how the project Circular Cities tries to solve it as well as her believe in solidarity as a source of inspiration.
· You can find an article on Developing a circular economy at the local level in Costa Rica here.
· Last year, the Government of Costa Rica was honoured with the Earthshot Prize in the “Protect & Restore Nature” category.
· You can read more about “The National Forestry Financing Fund” (FONAFIFO) in Costa Rica and how it contributes to sustainable development here.
Welcome to the second episode of the Global Diplomacy Lab Coffee Break Podcast. This time our guest is Kebba-Omar B. Jagne. He is Team Lead / Head of Experimentation at the Accelarator Lab at the UNDP in The Gambia. He talks about working with unconventional UNDP partners such as start-up and scale ups, elaborates on the challenges of digitally transforming informal markets in The Gambia and gives an insight on what inspires him most.
· You can find an article on Experimentation into Informalities – Digitally Transforming Informal Markets in The Gambia here.
· Further information on the work of the Accelerator Lab can be found on their blog
Welcome to the first episode of the GDL Coffee Break Podcast, where we explore the work routines, perspectives on global challenges and sources of inspirations of inspiring guests from the Global Diplomacy Lab network.
· Our first guest is Hélène De Bock. She works as a diplomat at the Embassy of Belgium in Berlin and is a former Deputy Director for Human Rights and Democracy at the Belgian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
· She briefly mentioned their work on the European Strategic Compass, you will find an interesting explanatory article on that process here.
· On the main topic, Business and Human Rights, there are a few reference documents
· The UN Guiding Principles on Business & Human Rights (B&HR), elaborated by Prof. John Ruggie.
· The Business & Human Rights Ressource Centre clubs together a lot of interesting information on the topic. A TEDx video on B&HR is available here
· She mentioned the Documentary we showed at the Embassy in the framework of the European Sustainable Development Week this year: Sweatshops/Deadly Fashion. You can find the trailer to the movie here.
· She also mentioned that States were producing National Action Plans (NAP) to implement the UN Guiding principles of 2011. You can find an overview and links to existing NAPs here.
· The Belgian NAP, is currently being reviewed and updated.
· The German NAP is also being updated.
· Two Eleanor Roosevelt quotes:
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“Surely, in the light of history, it is more intelligent to hope rather than to fear, to try rather than not to try. For one thing, we know beyond all doubt: Nothing has ever been achieved by the person who says, ‘It can’t be done.’”
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“Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home – so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world. Yet they are the world of the individual person; the neighbourhood he lives in; the school or college he attends; the factory, farm or office where he works. Such are the places where every man, woman and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity without discrimination. Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere. Without concerned citizen action to uphold them close to home, we shall look in vain for progress in the larger world.”