The Fletcher Forum Podcast

Dr. Vivek Mishra joins the Fletcher Forum Podcast to discuss the upcoming US Presidential Election. Dr. Mishra is the Deputy Director of the Observer Research Foundation's Strategic Studies Programme, where he writes on US elections and US-India relations. We discuss the election's key inflection points, as well as his perspective of Indian observers' impressions of the election.

In this episode, we're in conversation with Ellie Johnson and Abdullah Alharoun, Chairperson and Content Chair of this year's Decolonising International Relations Conference, scheduled to take place on the 24th and 25th of October. We discuss the nature and importance of the decolonizing exercise, the role of the conference in bridging the gaps in contemporary narratives on IR and Fletcher's own contributions to the Decolonizing exercise.

This week we're featuring a conversation with Maggie Adomako and Richard Geegbae, two of the three members of the 2024 Fletcher D-Prize winning Ongeza Zao Na Pato (OZP) team. OZP is bringing farmers beans and cow peas in Kenya to support a business-smart and environmentally sustainable transition. We even discuss Richard's new idea for how Fletcher students can help their classmates gain valuable experience in development work.

Our inaugural 2024-2025 episode features members of Fletcher's Russia and Eurasia Program discussing the upcoming conference on Russian sanctions and the broader economic impacts of economic warfare resulting from the war in Ukraine. Arik Burakovsky, Assistant Director of the Russia Eurasia Program, Pavel Luzin, a fellow at the program, and Akshat Dhankher, a graduate assistant and second year MALD student at Fletcher join us to discuss how they had the idea for a conference entirely focused on sanctions against Russia.

With South Africa's historic elections concluding on May 29th 2024, the ANC is facing its first coalition since its inception in 1994. Michael Walsh, visiting scholar at UC Berkeley and Senior Fellow at FPRI joins us to discuss his latest article, covering the South African elections and providing a systematic framework to understand political landscapes through evaluating internal party conflict adjacent to their platforms.

Second year MALD, Julia Shufro, discusses the field of human security with international security professor, Rockford Weitz. Listen to their conversation about the role of protecting civilians in conflict, considering people when creating policy, and the nexus of human rights and human security.

As the world's largest democracy, India, wraps up its election cycle, the team speaks with Milan Vaishnav, a Senior Fellow and Director of the South Asia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and Paul Staniland, Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, on the theme. We delve into questions around what makes Modi, the man to beat, what do the voters care about and how the election may shape India's democracy.

The Self-Help Group movement that began in South Asia has now proliferated across developing countries of the world. Seen as a means of women's financial and social empowerment, SHGs have been a popular development intervention. In this conversation with Dr. Michael Woolcock, Lead Social Scientist at the World Bank and Adjunct Lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School, we delve into the history of SHGs, their desired and sometimes undesired outcomes and their relevance today.

This podcast features Jordan Strouse, a 3rd year Fulbright grantee in Taiwan who joins the forum to comment on the intersections of linguistic interplay and exchange in Taiwan. The conversation also includes his commentary on Taiwan's bilingual 2030 policy and the challenges of teaching English in an environment where students might speak any of 5 languages natively

A podcast with Ian Lesser, Vice President of the German Marshall Fund of the United States discussing the future of European Security from an American perspective. If the Helsinki Accords have been abandoned with the war in Ukraine, can Europe replace them with something new? Throughout European history, the neutral countries have played a large role in this, by tying great powers together or holding them accountable. What could this new role for neutral European states look like, and which European states can be counted upon to take up the mantle of neutrality in the future? All this and more on this episode of the Fletcher Forum Podcast!