37th & the World: Recent Episodes
Georgetown Journal of International Affairs (GJIA)
37th & the World is the official podcast of the Georgetown Journal of International Affairs (GJIA), the flagship publication of Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service. In this podcast, we dive into key global trends and speak directly with the experts working on these critical issues. Our undergraduate and graduate student editors host conversations with scholars and practitioners on the subjects they find important and engaging. To read articles published by GJIA, please visit: gjia.georgetown.edu
In this week's "Five in Five" segment, we cover the harrowing kidnapping of the Director of Libya's Central Bank, an unfolding Ukrainian advantage in Kursk, and an escalating and intense standoff between China and Indonesia in the South China Sea Waterway.
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In this week's 'Five in Five' segment, we cover the eruption of anti-immigrant riots in England, diplomatic tensions in the Middle East following the assassination of Hamas and Hezbollah leaders, the swearing-in of Muhammad Yunus as Bangladesh's interim leader, escalating anti-government protests in Kenya, and the cancellation of Taylor Swift's Austrian shows due to a foiled terrorist plot.
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August 2024 saw one of the most complex prisoner exchanges between the United States, Germany, Russia, and other countries. It also brought the return of several well-known wrongfully imprisoned individuals, including Evan Gershkovich, Vladimir Kara-Murza, Alsu Kermasheva, Paul Whelan, and more.
The experience of political prisoners, however, often goes unseen by the general public. In the second half of this two-part interview, GJIA discusses the brutal tactics against political prisoners employed by authoritarians, as well as the role of civil society, lawyers, and the democratic international community in supporting and advocating for their release. Katie LaRoque, Deputy Director for Policy and Advocacy at Freedom House, also shares how listeners can help political prisoners, who all too often fear being forgotten by the world.
This two-part discussion includes topics about incarceration, the treatment of prisoners, and family separation, which may be difficult for some listeners.
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As strikes on Hezbollah and Hamas leaders made headlines this week, Nicolás Maduro claimed victory in Venezuela with over 70 percent of the vote despite claims of electoral fraud. Meanwhile, on Thursday, the largest prisoner exchange between the West and Russia took place, securing the release of several prominent Russian political prisoners like Evan Gershkovich.
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Democratic erosion is a recent issue on the rise across the globe. As some democracies face increasing authoritarian leaders, authoritarian leaders themselves continue to tighten their grip.
In this two-part interview, GJIA discusses political imprisonment, a comment tool of authoritarian leaders, with Katie LaRoque, Deputy Director for Policy and Advocacy at Freedom House. GJIA covers the brutal experience of political imprisonment, why and how it is used, and how Katie, Freedom House, and NGOs across the world are fighting for its release.
This is a two-part discussion which includes topics about incarceration, the treatment of prisoners, and the separation of families, which may be difficult for some listeners.
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The role of women and religion in helping resolve geopolitical turmoil in the Middle East and Eurasia can be an integral factor. As scholars like Dr. Kadayifci-Orellana have studied, peaceful interpretations of religion can be interpreted into resolution solutions. Women, too, play an important part role in these regions, but often need the help of non-profit organizations.
GJIA sits down with Dr. S. Ayse Kadayifci-Orellana, an affiliate researcher at the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace, and Security, to discuss the potential role of religion and women in these regions.
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In this episode, GJIA sits down with Dr. Lise Howard to delve into the Russia-Ukraine war, which erupted on February 24, 2022, when Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The war marked a severe escalation of tensions dating back to Russia's 2014 annexation of Crimea and support for eastern Ukrainian separatists.
Dr. Howard is a Government and Foreign Service Professor at Georgetown University and President of the Academic Council on the UN System (ACUNS). Her recent book, Power in Peacekeeping, (Cambridge University Press 2019) won the 2021 ISSS Book Award from the International Studies Association.
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Since February of this year, a surge in violence has reached "unprecedented levels," leading to rampant food insecurity and numerous displacements. Amidst this unparalleled crisis, families grapple with the challenge of securing even the most basic necessities as desperation worsens.
To understand the crisis, GJIA sits down with Johnny Celestin, a leader with global experience in international development, governance, leadership, and community development. He has over 30 years of experience in the private, public, and philanthropic sectors. He has worked at several organizations and institutions, including the Haitian Center for Leadership and Excellence and Haiti’s Ministry of Planning & External Cooperation.
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University protests over the Israel-Palestine conflict continued this week, while Haiti's prime minister's resignation amidst violence sparks a power shift in the country. In East Africa, devastating floods hit several regions, while in Dominica, the government moved to decriminalize same-sex relationships. Lastly, US troop withdrawal from Niger amid closer ties with Russia.
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2024 is the year of elections worldwide. This year, elections are scheduled in seven of the world's ten most populous countries. In South Asia, elections are held in five out of eight countries.
The elections in both Bangladesh and Pakistan were marked by controversy. In Bangladesh, Sheikh Hasina, the Prime Minister, secured her fourth term in an election that saw the opposition boycott. Meanwhile, in Pakistan, the election was marred by violence, a nationwide shutdown of mobile phone services, and allegations of vote manipulation.
GJIA sits down with Steve Cima, South Asian Regional Director at the International Republican Institute, to discuss the outcomes of these recent elections.
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A 7.4 magnitude earthquake struck Taiwan this week, the US and UK sign a landmark artificial intelligence deal, Israel says a drone attack on a aid worker car was a tragic accident, and Myanmar’s capital was hit by drones sent from the opposition party.
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Thailand's lower-house passes a bill that could legalize same-sex marriage, Turkey's main opposition party has a triumphant win in local elections, and Putin faults Kyiv for the terrorist attack in Moscow last week.
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ISIS-K claims responsibility for a deadly terrorist attack in Moscow, Kate Middleton announces she is undergoing cancer treatment, the U.S. removes citizens from Haiti in the wake of increased gang violence, and Nigerian children hostages are returned home after a successful military operation.
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Israeli forces lead a controversial raid on a Gaza hospital, Putin's claims a landslide victory, and a deadly bird flu threatens Antarctica's penguins.
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Pakistan faces political turmoil as two parties form a coalition government amid inconclusive elections, sparking accusations of "mandate theft." Ukraine alleges war crimes against Russia, the US draws criticism for vetoing a UN ceasefire in Gaza, and tensions rise between Rwanda and Congo over a mineral-rich border. Secretary of State Blinken announces a $200 million aid plan for Haiti amid increasing instability.
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Israel began the next part of its campaign in Gaza, former Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny has died, Senegal's election in jeopardy, Japan's economy plunges into recession, and Indonesia has elected a new president, a man formerly banned from entering the United States.
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Three years after the Tatmadaw military deposed Myanmar's ruling party in a coup d'état, the country still faces an ongoing crisis. In this interview, GJIA sits down with Dr. Htwe Htwe Thein, an associate professor at Curtin University, Australia, specializing in business and economic development in Myanmar.
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Since October 7, Russia has carefully calibrated its public response to either side of the war. Has Russia’s role in this conflict been influenced by its past trade, military and other involvements with Middle Eastern countries?
Former CNN Moscow Bureau Chief Jill Dougherty sits down with GJIA to discuss the role of Russian disinformation in the Middle East and the Israel-Hamas war.
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5in5, the new section of 37th & The World, delves into five key foreign affairs headlines each week in under five minutes. Rising tensions with Al Shabaab in Somalia, US and UK strikes on Houthi rebels and North Korea's president is discussed.
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The Hamas invasion of Israel on 7 October 2023 sent shockwaves throughout the world. Since the invasion, how can Saudi Arabia work with Israel in the region regarding Iran? Will there be a new outcome between the two countries? GJIA sits down with Dr. Daniel Byman to discuss the diplomatic relationship with Saudi Arabia, Israel, Iran, and the United States since October 7.
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Exploring space for internet access could transform the lives of half the world. But there's a catch—the benefits might only reach a few, mainly the United States. How can we ensure everyone gets a piece of the space economy? Join us as we discuss the need for global cooperation and the risks of missing out on economic growth with Dr. Eytan Tepper.
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Sports competitions have played out internationally for hundreds of years and undoubtedly received sustained international attention today. But the application of Sports to international diplomacy, "sports diplomacy", is a new concept in international relations.
GJIA sits down with Dr Stuart Murray, Associate Professor at Bond University, Australia, and a Global Fellow at the Academy of Sport at Edinburgh University. He is also the author of "Sports Diplomacy: Origins, Theory, and Practice", which offers an accessible overview of the role sports plays in international relations and diplomacy.
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Earlier this month, thousands of visitors flocked to Washington's National Zoo and watched as the famed three giant pandas left DC on a plane back to Beijing. How has this affected US-China relations, and what does the recent APEC summit mean for future US-China diplomacy?
37th & The World sits down with Dennis Wilder, a former senior American intelligence official currently serving as a professor of practice at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service and a senior fellow of Georgetown's Initiative for US-China Dialogue on Global Issues. He is also a member of the National Committee on US-China Relations.
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In international relations, cities occupy a rich focal point of migration, economic activities, and other distinctive urbanized social formations. The work of Professor AbdouMaliqu Simone asks us to reposition questions of urban studies through the centering of “Southern Urbanisms,” the everyday ways of living for residents who inhabit cities located in the Global South. In this interview GJIA sat down with Professor Simone to discuss the significance of Southern Urbanisms and how this paradigm can transform how we view social life in cities.
Beginning in November 2022, China faced massive demonstrations contesting its strict zero-COVID policies, which left many citizens constrained within their homes and short of necessary materials. Multiple protests erupted in response to conditions faced by China's workforce, including violent clashes in Zhengzhou against authority figures at the world's largest iPhone factory. In this interview, GJIA sat down with Dr. Eli Friedman, an Associate Professor at Cornell University, to discuss the context and ramifications of these protests as well as broader insights about the state of Chinese labor and its relation to the broader world.
International economic institutions such as the International Monetery Fund and the World Bank are fraught with controversy in large part due to interventionalist policies that less wealthy states claim undermine their sovereignty. Jamie Martin, Assistant Professor at Harvard University, intervenes with a unique historical perspective into this debate with his recent book The Meddlers: Sovereignty, Empire, and the Birth of Global Economic Governance, which focuses on how international efforts to sway global capitalism emerged from elite political struggles and cooperation in the United States and Europe after World War I. In this interview, GJIA questions Martin on his book and potential paths of global economic governance that prioritize “cooperation without dominance.”
As the eyes of the globe shifted towards Qatar during the 2022 World Cup, media reports focused on the working conditions and deaths of migrant workers building Qatar’s infrastructure and in the Middle East at large. Indeed, throughout Jordan, Lebanon, and all the Gulf Arab states, a system for migrant labor called kafala has been in place for decades. Under this system, states give employers sponsorship permits to bring in foreign workers, which bind workers to their employers and allow for exploitation. To explore the persistence of the kafala problem and analyze the possible avenues for lasting reform, GJIA sits down with Ryszard Cholewinski, the Senior Migration Specialist in the International Labor Organization’s Regional Office for Arab States in Beirut.
Iran has captured the international spotlight in recent weeks, as Iranian citizens are undertaking mass demonstrations following the detainment and killing of 22 year-old Mahsa Amini by Iran’s “morality police” for wearing an inappropriate head covering. As the Iranian people’s popular unrest mounts, so too does the regime’s repression – with Iranian police killing hundreds of protestors since the uprising’s outset. Amidst an already tenuous Middle Eastern landscape, the Former Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs David Schenker joins GJIA to discuss how the United States should navigate these protests and the regime’s brutal crackdown.
Food insecurity is one of the most daunting global issues: approximately 1 billion people are risk of malnourishment across the world. In 2021, the New Global Commons Working Group at Georgetown University’s Institute for the Study of Diplomacy (ISD) put together Peace Through Food: Ending the Hunger-Instability Nexus, a report that synthesizes analyses of food scarcity and political instability in order to guide policymakers. In an interview with Kelly McFarland, Director of Programs and Research at the ISD, GJIA discusses the gravity of this crisis and the implications of the working group’s report for the leadership of nation-states and international organizations.
Read an edited transcription of the interview here.
Art never exists within a vacuum: it is always embedded within a broader historical context and political interpretations. Frank Herbert’s 1965 science-fiction epic Dune, currently in the midst of a two-part film adaption, exemplifies this dynamic. Dune narrates the story of a humanity dispersed across the stars 20,000 years into the future. It focuses on the young nobleman Paul Atreides as he acts upon a prophecy to control the planet Arrakis and its valuable spice—which makes space-travel possible—with the messianic command of Arrakis’ indigenous Fremen people. Far more than a pulpy adventure tale, Herbert incorporated environmental science, history, religious thought, and political philosophy from the nearly two-hundred books he consulted to write Dune, resulting in a rich tome with commentary on religious and cultural synthesis, resource-based geopolitics, and colonialism and anti-colonial resistance. In this interview, GJIA covers these themes and more with Haris Durrani, a Ph.D. candidate in history at Princeton University who is also dubbed, the “leading post-colonial Dune scholar of our time.”
The decolonization that spanned across the 20th century dramatically reshaped our world, but what often escapes common knowledge about this period is that anticolonial intellectuals and statesmen did not only envision decolonization as a campaign for national sovereignty but as an effort to fundamentally counter global hierarchies of material wealth and race. Adom Getachew narrates these transcontinental efforts of Pan-African leaders in her 2019 book Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination. In this interview, GJIA explores the historical insights of her book as well as how contemporary projects for worldmaking can learn from the past century. We additionally discuss further lessons for a world after empire from the volume guest edited by Getachew, Imagining Global Futures.
Read an edited transcription of the interview here.
Only within recent years has race become a common analytical framework within mainstream international relations (IR) theory. Alexander Barder argues in his book Global Race Warthat the dominant paradigms of international relations are rooted in historical racial hierarchies and power relations. GJIA discusses the implications of this theory for not only political hotspots, but also for International Relations courses as microcosms of imperial ideology.
Since 2019, Kenyans from the Kipsigis and Talai people have sought reparative compensation for their evictions enforced by the British military in favor of white settler-owned tea plantations across decades of colonial rule. In 2021, Fabian Salvioli, the UN Special Rapporteur on the promotion of truth, justice, reparations, and guarantees of non-recurrence, issued three reports that backed Kipsigis and Talai demands to rectify their historical claims of land dispossession during the colonial era. In an interview with Mr. Salvioli, the Georgetown Journal of International Affairs contextualizes this reparative controversy within broader questions of UN-backed transitional justice and the legacies of colonialism.
Read an edited transcription of the interview here.
Reparations for large-scale atrocities such as slavery and colonialism have increasingly developed as a political demand for populations descended from historically harmed groups. The Georgetown Journal of International Affairs sat down with Olufemi Taiwo, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University, to discuss his novel approach to reparations that stresses a global, material, and progressive outlook: the constructive view of reparations.
The Georgetown Journal of International Affairs sits down with Margaret Huang, the Executive Director of the Southern Poverty Law Center, to discuss the recent rising proliferation of white nationalist extremism.
In this special episode of "37th and the World," GJIA hosted a panel on April 6th with the Yale Journal of International Affairs (YJIA) titled "Contemporary Threats to the Global Supply Chain." We were joined by three guests: Sarah Morgan (Senior Government Relations Officer at the International Labor Organization), Levent Altinoglu (Senior Economist at the Federal Reserve Board of Governors), and Jared Webber (Associate Partner at McKinsey & Company Manufacturing and Supply Chain).
Georgetown Journal of International Affairs sits down with Mr. Michael Kugelman, the Deputy Director of the South Asia Program at the Wilson Center, to discuss Pakistan’s foreign policy as a rising power in the South Asian region.
In the wake of tensions in Ukraine, the migrant crisis in Belarus, and potential sanctions on Nord Stream 2, the world is speculating how Russia’s regional policies will impact the United States’ security and diplomacy. Professor Jill Dougherty, former CNN Moscow Bureau Chief and current CNN Foreign Affairs Correspondent, joins GJIA to discuss the implications of Russian strategy in Eastern Europe and Asia.
The ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine is the most recent event out of a series of crises that have challenged European foreign affairs and geopolitical cohesion. This issue is at the core of the theme of the Transatlantic Policy Symposium (TAPS), “Toward a Geostrategic Europe?” In anticipation of TAPS, a graduate student-run conference at Georgetown University’s BMW Center for German and European Studies, I asked one of the symposium co-chairs, Nick Lokker, about the content and anticipated events at the conference to be held on Friday, March 18th. More information about the event is available here.
Relations between China and western nations have been strained for centuries, and both sides have sought out various models of economic interdependence. As China reaches a new, challenging stage in its economic development, Dr. Alicia Garcia Herrero, Chief Economist for Asia-Pacific at the French investment bank Natixis, discusses the motives behind China’s economic policy.
In light of the alarming surge of Covid-19 infections in India, pressure has mounted on developed nations to improve equity in global vaccine distribution. Professor Lawrence Gostin, Director of the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University, joins GJIA to discuss how the United States can improve global vaccine distribution, including the recent Biden administration decision to support intellectual property waivers for vaccines.
As the conversation around climate change progresses, climate resilience has slowly gained attention as a necessary component to mitigating climate change’s worst effects. GJIA sat down with Alice Hill, former special assistant to President Barack Obama and current senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, to discuss climate resilience and its often overlooked significance in the conversation around climate change.
As the United States grapples with the aftermath of the Capitol riots, Dr. Daniel Byman, Professor at the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service, joined GJIA on February 22nd, 2021 to break down the drivers of the growing white supremacy movement, its increasingly globalized nature, and how the United States and its allies should respond.
While the Yemeni Civil War war has continued since 2015, the Yemeni people have suffered, creating the world’s largest humanitarian crisis; thousands of civilians have died as a result of the Saudi-led coalition’s airstrike and preventable causes like malnutrition, disease, and poor health. Professor Charles Schmitz joins GJIA to uncover what actions are currently being taken to combat the crisis, the root causes aside from the war that contributed to the economic collapse, and the probability of political negotiations in the future.
On November 23, 2020, Ambassador Frank Lavin sat down with GJIA to discuss prospects under a new presidency for ending the three-year old trade war. The conversation lays out obstacles to a “reset” faced by a president with clearer pro-trade leanings, including Beijing’s entrenched belief in the inevitability of its superior long-term economic trajectory and dismissal of American objections as rooted in spite.
In 1995, tens of thousands of activists gathered in Beijing for the Fourth World Conference on Women to develop a framework to advance gender equality. In light of the conference’s 25th anniversary, The Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security (GIWPS) published Beijing+25: Accelerating Progress for Women and Girls to reflect and provide a roadmap to advance gender equity. GJIA sat down with Dr. Jeni Klugman, managing director of GIWPS, to discuss the report, including new challenges for women in the era of COVID-19.
As American and European governments propose new rules to regulate the growing monopoly power of technology giants, Dr. Hal Singer, Managing Director of Econ One, joins GJIA to discuss the future of Big Tech. In this interview, he discusses the effects of monopolization in the digital space and how the government should go about regulating technology firms.
GJIA sat down with Dr. Ervand Abrahamian, Distinguished Professor of History at Baruch College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, on October 25, 2020, to discuss the current direction of Iranian politics and the effects of four years of increased confrontation with Washington.