Carnegie Council Podcasts

Central European University's President Michael Ignatieff is a human rights scholar, an educator, a former politician, and, as he tells us, the son of a refugee. He discusses what he calls "the ordinary virtues," such as patience and tolerance; the status of human rights today and the dilemmas of migration; the essential critera for true democracy; and the ideal curriculum. His advice to students: Learn to think for yourself.

On the 44th anniversary of the Khmer Rouge entering Phnom Penh, the Brennan Center's Andrew Boyle discusses his work helping to prosecute the perpetrators the of genocide and other crimes against humanity in 1970s Cambodia. Boyle details the cases, the defendants, and the controversies surrounding the tribunal. Why did justice take so long? How did Cambodians react to the trials? And why is this genocide conviction so significant?

Criterion Institute's Christina Madden discusses her think tank's strategy of demystifying finance for non-profit and grassroots organizations and using these global systems to create transformative social change. Madden discusses specific examples, involving the Dakota Access pipeline and the rights of women in the workplace. How is the #MeToo Movement similar to the fight against climate change?

In this episode of the Crack-Up series on 1919, Andrew Roberts, author of "Churchill: Walking with Destiny," examines how Churchill dealt with the complicated problems facing Great Britain at the end of World War I, including how to treat the Germans in defeat, his changing views on Russia--but always in pursuit of British national interests--his stance on a homeland for the Jews, and his determination to hold on to British India.

We've been through information and technology revolutions before, going back to Gutenberg, says former chairman of the FCC Tom Wheeler. Now it's our turn to be at a terminus of history and the rules that worked for industrial capitalism are probably no longer adequate for Internet capitalism. So our task is not to flee but to stand up, recognize the challenge, and deal with it.

As part of Carnegie Council's Information Warfare podcast series, Devin Stewart interviews Joshua Kurlantzick about his recent project on Chinese media and influence campaigns and techniques in East Asia. Kurlantzick connects his project, which will become a book, to his previous books "Charm Offensive" and "Democracy in Retreat." He concludes by assessing China's overall impact on Asian politics and the fate of democracy worldwide.

With millions of Venezuelans fleeing the Maduro regime, what are the effects on Latin America and the Caribbean? What could or should the United States do? Is it helpful to compare this situation to the Syrian refugee crisis? Senior Fellow Kavitha Rajagopalan discusses immigration policies and asylum law in the context of Venezuela's economic collapse.

In this wide-ranging talk, Carnegie Council Senior Fellow Alexander Görlach discusses the importance of empathy in liberal democracies, the shocking Uyghur detention in China, and how AI is affecting all facets of society. What does liberalism look like in 2019? How will technology change democracy and religion?

"Climate, cyber, then mass gun violence, sometimes motivated by terrorist ideology--and the ideology can most frequently be tied to far-right-wing extremism, sometimes tied to no ideology at all, sometimes tied to pathology. Those three things I think are the real risks that the Department of Homeland Security really should be focused on. In contrast, what is not a real risk is the conditions of the Southwest border."

For about 18 months after World War I there was what historian Erez Manela calls the "Wilsonian moment"--a brief period when President Woodrow Wilson led people around the world to believe that he would champion a new world order of self-determination and rights for small nations. How did this actually play out, particularly in the case of Egypt, which was a British Protectorate at the time?