Carnegie Council Podcasts

Serhii Plokhy presents a bold new interpretation of the Soviet Union's final months, which places Ukraine at the center of the drama. And by providing the historical background for what is happening now, he shows that there are many key points linking 1991 to today.

It's tempting to see today's Middle East conflicts as the continuation of centuries-old sectarian divisions, but Frederick Wehrey cautions against it. "Sectarianism is really a local institutional governance phenomenon that needs to be addressed through political reform in the Gulf, through ending discrimination, through greater participation in governance."

A doctor, a former advisor to the Obama administration, and a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Emanuel has spent a generation advocating on health care reform. In this lively and sometimes heated discussion, he clearly and succinctly explains "Obamacare," why it evolved as it did, and what it will mean for Americans going forward.

David Speedie discusses the election of new Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko with University of Rhode Island's Nicolai Petro and University of Kent's Richard Sakwa, both speaking from Odessa in southern Ukraine.

Can today's powerful multinational corporations be a force for social good? Should they be, and if so, how should this be implemented? Are they out for themselves, their customers, society, or some combination of all three?

Authoritarian governments try to isolate individuals from one another, but in the age of social media this is impossible to do. Online, people discover that they are not alone. As one blogger put it, "Now I know who my comrades are." The question is, what's next?

In Chinese, the word for ambition is "wild heart" and for millennia individual aspirations were looked down on, as the group always came first. How China has changed!

David Bromwich draws upon thinkers such as Burke, Lincoln, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr. to show that it is moral imagination which allows us to judge the right and wrong of actions apart from ourselves, to see the needs of strangers as clearly as the needs of friends. Thus it is essential to governing and to the well-being of the state.

Journalists have always faced attacks on their freedom to report stories and often on their physical safety as well. Now they face a new threat: digital surveillance. Electronic spying means that journalists cannot protect their sources, and undermines the public's confidence in the media's ability to operate without government interference.

This panel gives an excellent overview of the complexities of the rise of right-wing populism across Europe, focusing in particular on France, the UK, and Hungary. The discussion illuminates the differences and similarities between the movements and shows how in many countries the themes of the radical left have been hijacked by the radical right.