To help me cope with my existential dread (and also provide incredible value to you, our listeners), Kerstin Leitner joined me on the podcast. Kerstin has 30 years of experience as a UN official, and she has lived in numerous places around the world, like Africa, China, and the United States. Today she lives in…
Today’s guest is Ipsita Chatterjee, a human geographer interested in the economic, cultural, and geopolitical impacts of globalization. Ipsita is also a prolific author, and her latest book “The Alt-Right Movement: Dissecting Racism, Patriarchy and Anti-immigrant Xenophobia” served as the basis of our discussion. To help me better understand this phenomenon, she took me through…
In the West, there are two different competing narratives about the war in Ukraine. The prevailing narrative is that it is a struggle between the “bad guys” and “good guys”. For many, Russia led by dictator Putin represents imperialism and is alone responsible for this unprovoked war, whereas Ukraine represents freedom and democracy as well…
My guest for the day was Eston McKeague, the president of the Young World Federalists and a member of the Board of Citizens for Global Solutions. Eston is a passionate world federalist and advocates for a youth-led movement to unite the world. We had a great conversation about his organization, the Young World Federalists, how…
More than support for the candidates, it seems that voters’ rejection of Bolsonaro or Lula will decide the presidential elections. A ‘country-continent’ with 215 million inhabitants, twice the size of the European Union and the leading power in Latin America. This is Brazil, a federal republic with a presidential system made up of 26 states…
Rizvina de Alwis joined us to give an inside view of the situation. Rizvina is a writer, a storyteller, and an advocate, and she’s worked with the UN in areas like gender equality, gender-based violence, and more. We talked about the recent history of Sri Lanka, how things got to the point they are now,…
Costa Rica is an exceptional country in a number of ways. It is a small nation in a region, Central America, torn by civil wars well into the 1980s, that abolished its army over 70 years ago and has lived in peace ever since. The country has achieved exceptionally high levels of human development despite…
Energy, mostly in the form of fossil fuels, drives everything we do. Nearly all aspects of 21st-century life, from commuting to work to waging a war, depending on the consumption of energy, make the latter arguably the most valuable tradable commodity in the human world. Consequently, the more one controls the energy supply, the more…
The year of 2020 has ushered the start of a new era, one that many expected to be one of achievement, economic growth, and development on a global scale. However, today we can in fact say that this new era that began is being marked by political and economic crises and uncertainties. Since the COVID-19…
This is an abridged version of the original article published on the author’s blog, The Political Abyss, which you can access here. The last few years have been awash with political upheaval, national scandals and, of course, global pandemics. As political tensions have risen and the stakes have become higher and higher, political engagement has,…
