This December marks four years since the first confirmed case of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China. On this episode of Trending Globally, Dan Richards speaks with two experts from the Pandemic Center at Brown University’s School of Public Health about the ways our society’s approach to public health has changed since 2019.  They discuss how we should be thinking about COVID-19 in our daily lives, the unexpected ways international conflicts have changed conversations around pandemic preparedness, and...

On this episode, political economist and Watson professor Mark Blyth talks with Nobel Prize-winning economist Sir Angus Deaton about his new book, “Economics in America: An Immigrant Economist Explores the Land of Inequality.”  You may not know Angus Deaton by name, but you probably know a phrase he helped to make famous: “deaths of despair.” In 2015, Deaton and his wife and research partner Anne Case published a paper that revealed something startling: an increase in mortality rates among...

How do our individual experiences shape our political views? What role do our own stories and memories play in how we think about the world around us? How can we use our memories — even our most painful ones — to help build a more peaceful politics?  These are complicated questions, and not of the variety we often ask on this show. But historian Omer Bartov thinks that trying to answer them is essential to finding political solutions to our most vexing problems. And in his new book “Genocide,...

Last year, President Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act into law. Considered by many to be the biggest climate and energy bill ever passed, the IRA included roughly $370 billion to help shift the U.S. to cleaner forms of power. And it was just one of three laws passed by the administration that will play into the United States’ move away from fossil fuels.  The impact of these policies, however, will go far beyond our climate. Indeed, they form the core of “Bidenomics,” and they’re...

In 1982, Mumia Abu-Jamal was sentenced to death for the murder of a Philadelphia police officer. An ex-Black Panther, he had no prior criminal record. Amnesty International investigated his case and found in many ways that it "failed to meet minimum international standards.” He’s been incarcerated for more than 40 years. Over those decades, Abu-Jamal has become a leader of the anti-death penalty movement and an influential critic of mass incarceration. He’s written multiple books, and...

One day in the year 2000, in the midst of the Second Congo War, Honoria* fled her home in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and never returned. After 16 years in a refugee camp in Uganda, she relocated to Philadelphia, where she became one of the roughly 80,000 refugees who entered the U.S. that year.  Honoria’s family was one of the dozens that Blair Sackett, a sociologist and postdoctoral fellow at the Watson Institute, followed as they navigated life in the U.S. Sackett, whose work...

Imagine if, when you were in middle school, an Ivy League professor came to your school and told you that you were going to be part of an experiment. You were going to get to decide how the money in your school was spent.  What would you want to spend it on? How would you convince your classmates that your idea was best? Furthermore, would you even believe what this professor was telling you?  Jonathan Collins is a professor of political science at the Watson Institute, and has recently been...

This summer, military forces in the West African country of Niger pushed the country’s president, Mohamed Bazoum, out of power. This was not the first coup in Niger’s history, or in the recent history of the Sahel region of Africa. In the last few years there have been coups in multiple countries in the region, including Burkina Faso and Mali.  But this one has put the West especially on edge.  Why? Listening to U.S. officials or much of the reporting on the topic, you’d think this coup has...

On August 23, at least 5 GOP hopefuls for the party’s presidential nomination will take to the stage in Milwaukee for their first primary debate. In other words, the 2024 election is about to get real. In this episode, Dan Richards talks with Wendy Schiller, professor of political science at Brown University and director of the Watson Institute’s Taubman Center for American Politics and Policy, about where the race stands now, and what to expect in the coming months. They discuss why efforts...

In the last year, programs like ChatGPT, Dall-E and Bard have shown the world just how powerful artificial intelligence can be. AI programs can write hit pop songs, pass the bar exam and even appear to develop meaningful relationships with humans.  This apparent revolution in AI tech has provoked widespread awe, amazement — and for some, terror.  But as Brown Professor of Data Science and Computer Science Suresh Venkatasubramanian explains on this episode of Trending Globally, artificial...

In May, Nigerian political veteran Bola Tinubu was sworn in as president of the country. The outcome was predictable, but that doesn’t mean there were no surprises in this year’s election. The biggest, perhaps, was the national rise of progressive politician Peter Obi. Obi galvanized young people around issues of government accountability, transparency, and generational change. In the process, he came closer to winning the presidency than any third-party candidate has in Nigeria’s modern...

On May 14, 2023, Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan faced the most challenging test of his political career from a multi-party coalition led by social democrat and reformer Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu. The diverse coalition Kılıçdaroğlu represents, known as the Table of Six, is united by one cause: removing Erdogan from power and ending the country’s authoritarian turn.  The challengers were optimistic, given the multiple crises facing Turkey that Erdogan has struggled to manage: rampant...

This Spring, visiting professor at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs’ China Initiative Lyle Goldstein made his first trip to China in five years. He met with military strategists, government officials and scholars to try to better understand China-Russia relations in the wake of the war in Ukraine.  He left more concerned about another part of the world just 100 miles off the coast of China—Taiwan.  As he described the current tension between China, Taiwan, and the...

You’ve seen it in the headlines, and maybe you’ve felt it in your own life: over the last few years, cyber attacks have become more frequent and more damaging. They can also vary widely in nature, ranging from minor nuisances to national security crises. Is there anything we can do to secure ourselves – as individuals, and as a society – from these attacks? Is there any way to get ahead of the problem, given the dizzying speed of change in our digital technology?  According to our two guests...

There are some ideas that inform so much of our thinking about the world that we tend to take them for granted. One example: the idea of the “free market.” Whether we’re talking about income inequality, climate change, or the future of U.S.-China relations – even if it doesn’t come up explicitly, the idea of the free market informs how we think about all of these topics and more.  But despite its ubiquity, most of us can’t seem to agree what, exactly, we mean by the term.  Which is why in...

Every minute, roughly 20 people in America (mostly women and children) become victims of domestic violence. The effects of these crimes ripple out to families and communities in every corner of the United States. Yet, despite this, policymakers have failed to address domestic violence in a consistently meaningful way.  In this episode, political scientists Wendy Schiller and Kaitlin Sidorsky – authors of the new book "Inequality Across State Lines" - explain how the government fails to...

Last year, the biggest piece of climate legislation in American history was signed into law. However, it wasn’t always touted as such; even its name - “The Inflation Reduction Act” – avoided the topic of climate. This puts it in a long line of federal climate legislation, according to climate policy experts Leah Stokes and Jeff Colgan.  As Jeff told Dan Richards in this episode of “Trending Globally,” “Lots of the progress that we make on climate change is best done when the word climate is...

If asked to think of parts of the world that have made impressive progress in social measures like literacy rates, life expectancy and infant mortality rates over the last century, you might first imagine a small, affluent country in Northern Europe or East Asia. But in this episode, we explore a place that achieves remarkable results on these and other measures without having the high income levels typically associated with states that have broad-based social welfare programs.  Dan Richards...

February is Black History Month, and in this episode of “Trending Globally,” you’ll hear from two scholars at Brown who are bringing to light overlooked aspects of the Black experience in America.  In the first half of the episode, Mack Scott, a visiting professor at Brown’s Center for Slavery and Justice, talks with Dan Richards about the complex relationship between Rhode Island’s Narragansett Nation and the state’s Black communities in the 18th and 19th centuries. It’s a vivid example of...

January 24th, 2023 marked an unsettling milestone: the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the ‘Doomsday Clock’ forward to 90 seconds to midnight – the closest it’s been to ‘Doomsday’ since the clock was established in 1947.  But what would it take for a nuclear weapon to actually be used in the world today? And if one was used, how would the rest of the world respond?  In this episode, the second in our limited series on the theory, policies, and practice of conflict escalation, you’ll...

In 2007, Watson Professor John Eason moved with his family from Chicago to Forest City, Arkansas. At the time Eason was getting his PhD at the University of Chicago, and he moved to Forest City to learn about America’s mass incarceration crisis from a perspective that’s often overlooked: that of the towns where America’s prisons are located.  What effect do prisons have in these often underserved rural communities? And what role do these communities play in what scholars and activists often...

2022 is coming to a close, but one of the most consequential events of the last year continues unabated: the War in Ukraine. As we approach the one-year mark of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, experts and casual observers (not to mention countless Ukrainians and Russians) are all left wondering: how might this war end?  Should the US and NATO support Ukraine at all costs? Or should they push Ukraine and Russia towards a negotiated settlement? What would such a settlement even look...

We’ve got a lot of exciting new Trending Globally episodes coming up in the next few weeks and months, but this week we’re sharing an episode of another podcast from the Watson Institute: Mark and Carrie.  The show is hosted by political economist and Rhodes Center Director Mark Blyth, and political scientist Carrie Nordlund. On each episode they discuss, debate, add context to, and, occasionally, make fun of the biggest headlines of the day. The conversations are always thought-provoking and...

On October 30, 2022, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva – known by most simply as Lula – defeated Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro in a runoff election. On Lula's agenda: rebuild Brazil’s social safety net, restore the country’s democratic institutions, and advocate for the country's most marginalized citizens -- oh, and save the Amazon rainforest. He'll have to do all of that while navigating a divided government, polarized public, and aggressive far-right opposition. On this episode of Trending...

This year’s US midterm elections were as consequential as any in recent history. But it’s not just the headline-grabbing national races for Congress that will reshape the country in the coming years. There were also thousands of state-level elections on Tuesday, the results of which will have huge implications for Americans on issues including gun control, reproductive rights, the pandemic response, and climate change.  On this episode of Trending Globally we’re stepping aside from midterm...