Episode 116: Stewart Patrick

Stewart Patrick is an international relations scholar with a background in studying human evolution. As you might imagine, that combination makes for some fascinating conversation.

Stewart is a Senior Fellow and Director of the International Institutions and Global Governance Program at the Council on Foreign Relations. He's a Rhodes scholar who has studied the intersection of the evolution of culture and international relations and we have some great digressions about how culture contributes to the creation of international norms and international law. In the early 2000s, he received a fellowship to serve on the policy planning staff of Colin Powell's State Department, and he discusses two big lessons he drew from that experience: the power of ideology to shape policy and how bureaucratic politics can influence big decisions. We kick off discussing his newest project, which is The Global Governance Report Card grades international performance in addressing a specter of current global challenges.