Global Dispatches -- World News That Matters

The Liberal party in Canada, lead by Justin Trudeau, son of Pierre, shocked the world with a big, big win in hotly contested national elections. The Liberal ascent ends a near decade in power for the conservative Stephen Harper and has the potential to fundamentally re-balance Canada's relationship with the world, so says my guest Janice Stein who is the founding director of the Munk School of International Affairs at the University of Toronto. We spoke the morning after the elections and have a great and truly interesting conversation about the discrete changes we can expect in Canadian foreign policy -- and how those changes may affect international relations and global affairs more broadly. We discuss what's called "Middle Power Diplomacy" in academic circles, Canada's role in Climate politics, and why Washington, DC may be none too pleased with some of the changes to come. This is a timely and interesting conversation. Enjoy!

Felice Gaer has served on the UN Committee Against torture since 1999, making her the longest serving American elected to a UN Human Rights body. Though there is little power vested in the independent experts who staff treaty organizations, Gaer has been able to move the needle on human rights cases worldwide through creatively deploying the little power she has. This was an lesson she first learned while investigating the disappearance of the soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov in the early 1980s. Felice has had a very long career in human rights, and we trace the origins of her commitment to human rights from an early age, and more recently to her work on the Committee Against Torture. We kick off our conversation with about a 15 minute conversation about the UN's evolving posture on women's rights and LGBT rights. Gaer tells an interesting story about how an early bureaucratic decision about the structure of the UN's Economic and Social council enabled the integration of women's rights into the broader UN human rights agenda.

So we had a scare. But all ends well. This episode is in two parts. First, you'll hear directly from my amazing wife about giving birth in our family car. It's a crazy story. Then, I speak with Dr. Luc de Bernis Senior Maternal Health Advisor at the UN Population Fund who puts our experience in a larger global health context. We discuss various interventions to reduce maternal and newborn mortality around the world, including the deployment of what the World Health Organization calls "Skilled Birth Attendants." I've reported on health systems and maternal and new born health for years and visited clinics and hospitals in Bangladesh and several countries in sub-saharan Africa, but it wasn't until my wife gave birth in our old car that I truly appreciated the role of a skilled birth attendant in ensuring the safety and health of mother and child.

Christine Fair is a respected scholar of South Asian politics and security. But her career path has been tough, with unnecessary obstacles in her way. In this episode, she speaks candidly about overcoming sexual harassment in graduate school and facing threats of sexual violence by the very subjects she studies as an academic.

The Nobel Peace Prize is announced on October 9. In March this year, Victor Ochen was nominated for the 2015 prize by the same organization the nominated previous laureates, Martin Luther King, Jr, Desmond Tutu, Jimmy Carter and Dag Hammarskjold Victor Ochen may not be a household name. But that may soon change. He is the founder of the peace and reconciliation NGO African Youth Initiative Network, which is active in Northern Uganda. He was the first Ugandan and youngest African ever nominated for the prize. Victor has a powerful personal story. He grew up in IDP camps fleeing LRA violence and even lost his brother to the LRA. But throughout it all he maintained a commitment to peace and justice. In this episode, Victor discusses his nomination, tells stories from a childhood in conflict, and explains why he started an NGO. This is an edited repost of Episode 53

Andrew Young is a civil rights icon who was with his friend Martin Luther King Jr when Dr. King was assassinated in 1968. In this interview, Young traces his a lifelong commitment to non-violence from his childhood in New Orleans, to his civil rights work in the 1950s and 1960s, to becoming Jimmy Carter's ambassador to the United Nations and long-serving Mayor of Atlanta, Georgia. This is a re-post of Episode 32, published last year.

UN Week kicks off on a high note on Friday, with the opening of a special summit on the Sustainable Development Goals. Pope Francis will be one of the first to address the summit on Friday morning. President Obama is helping to close the session on Sunday. In between are over 150 speakers, mostly heads of state. The SDG summit is a very big deal for the United Nations, and quite possibly for all of humanity. It is the culmination of over two years of negotiations over what should replace the Millennium Development Goals, which expire at the end of this year. The SDGs — or, the “Global Goals,” as the advocacy community has taken to calling them — are an aspirational set of 17 goals and 169 targets that every country on the planet is pledging to work toward from now until 2030. The top goal is nothing less than the total eradication of extreme poverty (as defined by people living on $1.25 per day), and each of the goals have embedded in them principles of environmental sustainability. It’s a massively ambitious agenda and if it’s achieved, life for most of the 8 billion on earth in 2030 will be vastly improved. On the line with me to discuss these goals, their likelihood of success and, importantly, how we can measure progress is John McArthur. He is a fellow at Brookings at with the United Nations Foundation and has been studying the SDGs since their inception. This is a great conversation, and nicely sets up not just the coming few days at the UN, but also the coming few years of a new international development agenda in pursuit of these global goals.

The UN Summit kicks off next week in New York! This is always the most exciting time of year for us UN nerds. And between the Pope and Putin, this UNGA promises to be a very interesting one. Here with me to break down what to expect at the UN in the coming weeks and how make sense of it all is Richard Gowan. We discuss the big stories, the overlooked stories, and political intrigue that will accompany the 70th UN General Assembly. Gowan is a fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations and also with the Center on International Cooperation, where he was previously research director. He is a columnist for World Politics Review, which is sponsoring this episode. World Politics Review provides uncompromising analysis of critical global trends to give policy makers, business people, and academics the context they need to have the confidence they want. The good people at World Politics Review are offering Global Dispatches Podcast listeners a two week free trial and then a 50% discount on an annual subscription. To redeem this offer go to about.worldpoliticsreview.com/dispatches

Elmira Bayrasli is the author of the new book "From the Other Side of the World: Extraordinary Entrepreneurs, Unlikely Places." She is also the co founder of Foreign Policy Interrupted, which seeks to amplify the voice of female foreign policy experts-- and she's a former assistant to Madeleine Albright. We kick off discussing the new book, which transitions nicely to a conversation about her experience growing up the child of Turkish immigrants and how she got her start working in foreign policy. If you are a regular listener to the podcast--thank you! Our community of listeners has been growing pretty dramatically in recent weeks, I think largely due to word of mouth--so thank you again for spreading the world. And As always, feel free to reach out to me via twitter @MarkLGoldberg or you can send me an email via GlobalDispatchesPodcast.com. And if you are new to the podcast, welcome! We post one of these longer interviews with foreign policy thought leaders every monday. Go to the website to check out our robust archives.

Why do countries build fences and walls at their border and under what conditions are those walls and fences likely to work as intended? These questions are obviously topical right now, with the US-Mexico border a hot button issue in the US presidential election; and the Syrian refugee crisis dominating discussion the Europe But fences and their effectiveness have largely remained off the radar of any rigorous academic study. Until now. In the most recent edition of the journal International Security, political scientists Ron Hassner and Jason Wittenberg of UC Berkeley compiled what is the first-ever dataset of what they called "fortified boundaries" constructed between countries since 1945. Ron Hassner is on the line with me to discusses their study and the implications of some of their key findings, including the fact that we are in the midst of a fortified boundary building boom and why the religion of a country seems to make a difference in whether or not the country decides to build a border fence.