Global Dispatches -- World News That Matters

Your very own To Save Us From Hell co-host Anjali Dayal briefed the United Nations Security Council on Monday! She was paired with former UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon for a special meeting of the Council dedicated to examining the role of the Secretary-General and the process for selecting Antonio Guterres's successor. Anjali gives co-host Mark Leon Goldberg a behind-the-scenes account of what it's like to sit in the briefers' chair at the famous horseshoe table and shares highlights from the meeting. After the paywall, Mark and Anjali discuss a glowing New Yorker profile of International Atomic Energy Agency chief—and UN Secretary-General candidate—Rafael Grossi. It's certainly a PR coup for the Argentine, but does PR really matter when it comes to running for UN Secretary-General? We discuss! And one more thing: this is the 50th episode of To Save Us From Hell. Fifty episodes of deep dives into power, politics, and the UN's place in the world. Huge thanks to everyone who listens—and especially to our paid subscribers, who make this show possible. If you've been on the fence, now's the moment: grab a paid subscription using the discount link below, get access to our full episodes and support the show with a cult following around the UN! https://www.globaldispatches.org/40percentoff

In 1998, 120 countries came together to adopt the Rome Statute, creating what would become the International Criminal Court. Four years later, that treaty entered into force, and the ICC officially opened its doors as a permanent court tasked with prosecuting individuals accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Now, looking around the world today, it's clear the ICC has not put an end to war crimes or crimes against humanity. But even so, the court—and the treaty that created it—have profoundly shaped international politics in ways that are often overlooked. My guest today is Mark Kersten. He's a Senior Consultant with the Wayamo Foundation and an Assistant Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of the Fraser Valley in British Columbia. We start with a brief history of the ICC, and then dig into how the court has influenced not just legal definitions of war crimes and crimes against humanity, but how states themselves behave. When we spoke, Mark had just returned from the ICC's annual Assembly of States Parties—the court's main governing body. He explains why that meeting offers a window into some of the biggest challenges the ICC now faces, including the very real possibility of U.S. sanctions—not just against individual court officials, but against the institution itself. This episode is produced in partnership with Lex International Fund, a philanthropic initiative dedicated to strengthening international law to solve global challenges. It's part of our ongoing series highlighting the real-world impact of treaties on state behavior, called "When Treaties Work."

2025 was a year of global protests. More than 70 countries across every region of the world experienced anti-government demonstrations. Some of these movements — such as those in Nepal and Madagascar — led to the toppling of governments; others emerged in countries with little history of protest, like Tanzania. Many were youth-led, with Gen Z protesters drawing inspiration from one another across borders. My guest today is Thomas Carothers, director of the Democracy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where he runs the Global Protest Tracker. Drawing on data from the Tracker, he and co-author Judy Lee recently published an essay on the drivers of global protests in 2025, which we discuss in our conversation. We begin with some big-picture global trends before turning to a longer discussion about whether Gen Z–led protests can be considered a global movement.

Over the course of Syria's fourteen-year civil war, around one million people went missing, presumably killed. Among them was the father of my guest today, Maryam Kamalmaz. Maryam's father was an American psychotherapist who traveled to Syria on a humanitarian mission when he was detained and disappeared by the Assad regime. She campaigned for his release, but eventually learned that he had died in detention. Today, Maryam Kamalmaz is the Director for Missing Persons Affairs at the Syria Emergency Task Force, an advocacy group based in Washington, DC, where she is supporting international efforts to identify the roughly one million people who went missing during Syria's civil war. We begin by discussing the case of her father before having a broader conversation about why finding the missing—and their remains—is so important for Syria's democratic transition following the fall of the Assad regime. This is a powerful conversation, recorded live at the Halifax International Security Forum in late November.

On December 4, the entire United Nations Security Council made an unprecedented trip to Syria. It is hard to overstate what a significant turning point this represents — both for the Security Council and the United Nations as a whole. For thirteen long years, the civil war in Syria was the largest and most brutal conflict in the world, and one that stymied the United Nations by exposing massive geopolitical rifts between key global powers. We may now look to Gaza or Ukraine as examples of paralysis at the Security Council — but it was Syria that first broke it. Now, all fifteen members are in Damascus, in an important show of unity. Mark and Anjali break down why this trip is so significant and what role the UN can play in supporting Syria's democratic transition. After the paywall: Mark and Anjali discuss shocking new revelations about the UN's budget, and what the official "pre-launch" of the selection process for the next Secretary-General tells us about how the UN's next leader will be chosen. Discount link to listen to full episode: https://www.globaldispatches.org/40percentoff

The Halifax International Security Forum always includes a sizable and bi-partisan group of United States Senators who were suddenly put on the spot: Did they think Ukraine should accept this ultimatum? By Saturday afternoon, several senators issued a joint statement condemning this plan. Then something extraordinary happened. A couple hours after this joint statement was released, an even larger and more bi-partisan group of senators gave a press conference in which Republican Senator Mike Rounds said that he and two other senators had just got off the phone with Marco Rubio, who was en route to Geneva to meet with Ukrainian officials and European allies. According to Senator Rounds, Rubio said this stridently pro-Russian 28 point plan was not an American plan at all, but rather a Russian proposal that was improperly leaked to the press. But then, about two hours later, Rubio publicly disavowed that disavowal! He posted on Twitter that "The peace proposal was authored by the U.S." So what the heck is going on here? I caught up with Toronto Star columnist and fellow Substacker Justin Ling to try to make sense of this bizarre turn of events. We kick off discussing the back and forth on this plan, but then have a deeper conversation about what this episode reveals about American global leadership and what the conversations in Halifax revealed about how America's traditional middle power allies, like Canada and Europe, are adjusting to a world order in which the United States is an unreliable ally and unstable international actor.

When Damascus was liberated in December of last year and Bashar al-Assad fled to Moscow, thousands of the regime's political prisoners were released from jail. Around the region, Syrians who had fled the country began returning home. It was a joyous occasion for so many who had lived as refugees in neighboring countries — including in Lebanon, which had hosted more Syrian refugees than any other country. But there are still hundreds — possibly thousands — of Syrians who remain political prisoners in Lebanon. Most, if not all, of these prisoners are being detained by Hezbollah for their activities opposing the Assad regime, which was a key Hezbollah ally during Syria's civil war. In today's episode, I speak with one of those detainees — whom I will call Omar — who managed to smuggle a phone into a prison in Lebanon. Omar was detained in 2024, but prior to that he worked to expose Hezbollah's mass detention of Syrian opposition activists. In our conversation, he tells his story and that of his fellow detainees. This episode came about through a chance encounter with Mouaz Moustafa as we were both attending the Halifax International Security Forum last week. Mouaz Moustafa is the director of the Syria Emergency Task Force and has played a key role in supporting Syria's democratic transition since the fall of the Assad regime. I actually met Mouaz a couple of years ago at this same conference, and when I ran into him in hallway this year, he pitched me the story and offered to translate the interview. This episode would not have happened if not for the Halifax International Security Forum, so a special thank you to the conveners of this important global gathering.

Kabul is running out of water. If present trends continue, the capital of Afghanistan could run completely dry by 2030. There are several reasons for this. The first is climate change: there is less snowmelt to feed the city's aquifers. The second is aging infrastructure: pipelines are decrepit or, in some cases, non-existent. The third is management: in a city reeling from water shortages, people are drilling their own wells in yards and basements, with no regulation from the de facto Taliban government. The fourth is population pressure: the city has grown sixfold in the last twenty years. And over the last year alone, millions of Afghans who had fled to neighboring Iran and Pakistan have been forcibly returned, adding to already substantial resource pressures. This is causing extreme stress on the people of Kabul, who, according to my guest today Marianna von Zahn, are now spending about 30% of their income on water. Marianna von Zahn is the Afghanistan Country Representative and Director of Programs for Mercy Corps, which recently released a report on the dire water crisis in Kabul and will soon release a similar report on water shortages in other parts of the country. We kick off by discussing the scale and impact of the crisis in Kabul before having a longer conversation about what can be done to mitigate it. This includes exploring ways the international community can work with Taliban authorities to stave off an impending humanitarian catastrophe. https://www.globaldispatches.org/40percentoff

U Thant was a Burmese diplomat and the third Secretary-General of the United Nations. He assumed the role following the death of Dag Hammarskjöld in a plane crash in the Congo in 1961, and soon became one of the most consequential players in international affairs for over a decade. Thant's contributions to some of the key global challenges of the era were widely celebrated at the time but have since been overlooked—until now. A brilliant new biography, Peacemaker: U Thant and the Forgotten Quest for a Just World, places the former Secretary-General at the heart of several crucial moments of the 1960s, including the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Vietnam War, post-colonial struggles in the Congo, and much more. The book is written by Thant Myint-U, a historian who has worked at the United Nations—and who also happens to be U Thant's grandson. In our conversation, Thant describes how his grandfather went from being a schoolteacher in rural Burma to, just 15 years later, playing a key role in mediating the Cuban Missile Crisis as UN Secretary-General. We also discuss Thant's efforts to end the Vietnam War before it escalated, and his work confronting a fascist regime in a breakaway region of the Congo. More broadly, we explore the lessons that the current UN system and its Secretary-General can draw from U Thant's remarkable tenure. Thant Myint-U is the author of Peacemaker: U Thant and the Forgotten Quest for a Just World.

My interview guest today, Axel Marschik, is a veteran Austrian diplomat who has thought extensively about how the General Assembly can play a more robust role in peace and security when the Security Council fails to do so. In a paper that was widely discussed around the UN, Ambassador Marschik proposed that the General Assembly craft pre-authorized sanctions that would be automatically triggered if the Security Council is "unable or unwilling to act to confront some of the most serious violations of international law, including aggression and mass atrocity crimes." Under his proposal, the General Assembly would design a suite of sanctions in the abstract that would become very real—and automatically imposed on the offending party—through a General Assembly vote should the Security Council fail to take meaningful action. In our conversation, Ambassador Marschik fleshes out this idea, including what sorts of sanctions he has in mind and how to translate this concept into a General Assembly resolution creating such a mechanism. Ambassador Marschik currently serves as Austria's Ambassador to Germany and previously served as Austria's Permanent Representative to the UN from 2020 to 2025. This episode of Global Dispatches is produced in partnership with Lex International Fund, a philanthropic initiative dedicated to strengthening international law to solve global challenges. It's part of our ongoing series highlighting the real-world impact of treaties on state behavior, called "When Treaties Work."