Notes from the World

On this week’s episode of Notes from the World, we speak to Sarah Hunaidi, a Syrian writer and human rights advocate, about the fall of the dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad and what may lie ahead for that country. Sarah's work has been published by Foreign Policy, the Independent, Chatham House, Buzzfeed, and the New Arab among other publications. She provides political analysis and commentary on refugee and gender issues in the Middle East and the diaspora, and has appeared regularly on channels like NPR, BBC, and Aljazeera. She graduated from Harvard University with a Master’s Degree in Middle Eastern Studies and is currently working on a translation of the diaries of Samira Khalil, a Syrian dissident and revolutionary activist who went missing in December 2013.

On this week’s episode of Notes from the World, we speak to Philip Obaji Jr, a Nigerian journalist who currently serves as correspondent for The Daily Beast covering sub-Saharan Africa. In recent years, his work has focused on the activities in the region of the Russian state-funded private military company the Wagner Group and its successor, the Africa Corps, whose abuses against civilian populations and links to the governments of the Central African Republic, Mali and elsewhere we discuss in detail during our conversation. In 2022, he was awarded  the Jaime Brunet International Human Rights Prize and the following year he was the recipient of the One World Media International Journalist of the Year award, becoming the first Nigerian to receive both honors.

This week on Notes from the World, we discuss the current situation in Afghanistan with Roqia Samim, the Program Director for Research and Policy at the Klau Institute for Civil and Human Rights at Notre Dame Law School.

Roqia obtained her law degree from the Law and Political Science School of Herat University and also holds an LL.M degree in international human rights law from Notre Dame Law School. Roqia served as Human Rights Advocate at the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission and worked as the Provincial Coordinator for the Women Leadership Development program with USAID. As an Associate Political Affairs Officer in the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan Herat Field Office, she supported Sustainable Development Goals for Gender Equality and Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions in the western region of Afghanistan.

Today, on Notes from the World, we discuss the past, present and future of Afghanistan, and the ongoing battle by the nation's women to have their human and civil rights recognized by the Taliban, who ruled the country from 1996 until 2001, and then again since August 2021.

This week on Notes from the World, we speak with Michela Wrong, a British journalist and author who has spent three decades covering Africa and who is the author of, among other books, In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz: Living on the Brink of Disaster in the Congo, I Didn't Do It for You: How the World Betrayed a Small African Nation (about Eritrea) and Do Not Disturb: The Story of a Political Murder and an African Regime Gone Bad, which focuses on the murder of Rwanda’s former head of intelligence Patrick Karegeya in Johannesburg, South Africa in 2013. We spoke about the history of DR Congo, the rise of Paul Kagame and the Rwandan Patriotic Front and the pitiless, expansionist authoritarian state that Rwanda has become under his rule.

This week on Notes from the World, we speak to author Sarah Gerard about her new book, Carrie Carolyn Coco, which recounts the brief life of writer Carolyn Bush, the problematic leadership at my alma mater Bard College, the changing face of her native Florida and the geographies of grief.

For this week's episode of Notes from the World, I spoke with Michael Pierse, a Senior Lecturer at Queens University Belfast, about post-Brexit Northern Ireland, the recent far-right agitation there, the global actors helping to stir it & the possible political trajectory on both sides of the border. Go raibh maith agat, Michael.

[Note: I had some challenges splicing the two dialogue streams together this time, but I did my highly-inexpert best and hope it won't distract from the discussion too much. ]

We speak to the noted historian Manisha Sinha as we tackle the aftermath of the U.S. Civil War, the class elements of white reaction against Reconstruction, the role of Southern elites, the presidency of Ulysses S. Grant, the so-called Compromise of 1877 and the Wilmington Coup of 1898. A fascinating and very relevant discussion.

Manisha Sinha is the James L. and Shirley A. Draper Chair in American History at the University of Connecticut and an authority on the history of slavery and abolition and the Civil War and Reconstruction. She is the author of The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina, The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition and The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction, 1860-1920.

Jasmin Muyanović is a political scientist and policy specialist focusing on southeastern Europe. Born in Sarajevo, he is currently a Senior Non-Resident Fellow at the Newlines Institute, a member of the Advisory Council of the Nationhood Lab at Salve Regina University's Pell Center for International Relations and an Advisory Board member of the Kulin Initiative, which focuses on political, economic and social policies in Bosnia & Herzegovina. He is the author of two books, Hunger and Fury: The Crisis of Democracy in the Balkans (Hurst Publishers and Oxford University Press, 2018) and The Bosniaks: Nationhood after Genocide (Hurst Publishers & Oxford University Press, 2023). He spoke to Notes from the World about the tangled history of the former Yugoslavia and what the future may hold for the region.

In this week's episode of the Notes from the World podcast, I speak to Sergio Guzmán, the director and co-founder of Colombia Risk Analysis, which provides commercial, security and political risk analysis for the Andean Region. As we approach the two year mark of his time in office, we examine the presidency of Colombia’s Gustavo Petro - its struggles with Congress, its environmental ambitions, Colombia’s security situation and the government’s negotiations with the Ejército de Liberación Nacional (ELN) guerrilla insurgency, among other issues. We also look at where Colombia may be heading in the coming months. This interview was recorded on 29 May 2024.

In this week's episode of the Notes from the World podcast, I speak to El Salvador's Juan Martinez d'Aubuisson, a journalist and anthropologist who has extensively researched that country's gangs and their links to the political and economic sectors since 2008, as well as performing extensive fieldwork in Honduras. He is the author of several books, including Ver, oír y callar: Un año con la Mara Salvatrucha 13 (Pepitas de Calabaza, 2019) and El niño de Hollywood (Debate, 2018), the latter in collaboration with his brother, Óscar Martínez, and translated into English as The Hollywood Kid (Verso, 2019). His work has appeared in The Washington Post, El País, Gatopardo and El Faro, among other publications. We speak about the evolution of El Salvador’s criminal groups, the country’s political situation and the rise and consolidation of power of its controversial president, Nayib Bukele. This interview was recorded on 3 April 2024.