37th & The World

As the eyes of the globe shifted towards Qatar during the 2022 World Cup, media reports focused on the working conditions and deaths of migrant workers building Qatar’s infrastructure and in the Middle East at large. Indeed, throughout Jordan, Lebanon, and all the Gulf Arab states, a system for migrant labor called kafala has been in place for decades. Under this system, states give employers sponsorship permits to bring in foreign workers, which bind workers to their employers and allow for exploitation. To explore the persistence of the kafala problem and analyze the possible avenues for lasting reform, GJIA sits down with Ryszard Cholewinski, the Senior Migration Specialist in the International Labor Organization’s Regional Office for Arab States in Beirut.

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Iran has captured the international spotlight in recent weeks, as Iranian citizens are undertaking mass demonstrations following the detainment and killing of 22 year-old Mahsa Amini by Iran’s “morality police” for wearing an inappropriate head covering. As the Iranian people’s popular unrest mounts, so too does the regime’s repression – with Iranian police killing hundreds of protestors since the uprising’s outset. Amidst an already tenuous Middle Eastern landscape, the Former Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs David Schenker joins GJIA to discuss how the United States should navigate these protests and the regime’s brutal crackdown.

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Food insecurity is one of the most daunting global issues: approximately 1 billion people are risk of malnourishment across the world. In 2021, the New Global Commons Working Group at Georgetown University’s Institute for the Study of Diplomacy (ISD)  put together Peace Through Food: Ending the Hunger-Instability Nexus, a report that synthesizes analyses of food scarcity and political instability in order to guide policymakers. In an interview with Kelly McFarland, Director of Programs and Research at the ISD, GJIA discusses the gravity of this crisis and the implications of the working group’s report for the leadership of nation-states and international organizations.

Read an edited transcription of the interview here.

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Art never exists within a vacuum: it is always embedded within a broader historical context and political interpretations. Frank Herbert’s 1965 science-fiction epic Dune, currently in the midst of a two-part film adaption, exemplifies this dynamic. Dune narrates the story of a humanity dispersed across the stars 20,000 years into the future. It focuses on the young nobleman Paul Atreides as he acts upon a prophecy to control the planet Arrakis and its valuable spice—which makes space-travel possible—with the messianic command of Arrakis’ indigenous Fremen people. Far more than a pulpy adventure tale, Herbert incorporated environmental science, history, religious thought, and political philosophy from the nearly two-hundred books he consulted to write Dune, resulting in a rich tome with commentary on religious and cultural synthesis, resource-based geopolitics, and colonialism and anti-colonial resistance. In this interview, GJIA covers these themes and more with Haris Durrani, a Ph.D. candidate in history at Princeton University who is also dubbed, the “leading post-colonial Dune scholar of our time.”

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The decolonization that spanned across the 20th century dramatically reshaped our world, but what often escapes common knowledge about this period is that anticolonial intellectuals and statesmen did not only envision decolonization as a campaign for national sovereignty but as an effort to fundamentally counter global hierarchies of material wealth and race.  Adom Getachew narrates these transcontinental efforts of Pan-African leaders in her 2019 book Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination.  In this interview, GJIA explores the historical insights of her book as well as how contemporary projects for worldmaking can learn from the past century. We additionally discuss further lessons for a world after empire from the volume guest edited by Getachew, Imagining Global Futures.

Read an edited transcription of the interview here.

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Only within recent years has race become a common analytical framework within mainstream international relations (IR) theory. Alexander Barder argues in his book Global Race War that the dominant paradigms of international relations are rooted in historical racial hierarchies and power relations. GJIA discusses the implications of this theory for not only political hotspots, but also for International Relations courses as microcosms of imperial ideology.

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Since 2019, Kenyans from the Kipsigis and Talai people have sought reparative compensation for their evictions enforced by the British military in favor of white settler-owned tea plantations across decades of colonial rule. In 2021, Fabian Salvioli, the UN Special Rapporteur on the promotion of truth, justice, reparations, and guarantees of non-recurrence, issued three reports that backed Kipsigis and Talai demands to rectify their historical claims of land dispossession during the colonial era. In an interview with Mr. Salvioli, the Georgetown Journal of International Affairs contextualizes this reparative controversy within broader questions of UN-backed transitional justice and the legacies of colonialism.

Read an edited transcription of the interview here.

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Reparations for large-scale atrocities such as slavery and colonialism have increasingly developed as a political demand for populations descended from historically harmed groups. The Georgetown Journal of International Affairs sat down with Olufemi Taiwo, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University, to discuss his novel approach to reparations that stresses a global, material, and progressive outlook: the constructive view of reparations.

Read an edited transcription of the interview here.

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The Georgetown Journal of International Affairs sits down with Margaret Huang, the Executive Director of the Southern Poverty Law Center, to discuss the recent rising proliferation of white nationalist extremism.

Read an edited transcription of the interview here.

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In this special episode of "37th and the World," GJIA hosted a panel on April 6th with the Yale Journal of International Affairs (YJIA) titled "Contemporary Threats to the Global Supply Chain." We were joined by three guests: Sarah Morgan (Senior Government Relations Officer at the International Labor Organization), Levent Altinoglu (Senior Economist at the Federal Reserve Board of Governors), and Jared Webber (Associate Partner at McKinsey & Company Manufacturing and Supply Chain).

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