Talking Policy

In this series, The Short Read, host Lindsay Morgan shares analysis from Political Violence At A Glance, an award-winning online magazine sponsored by the UC Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation, which also sponsors the Talking Policy podcast. In this episode, she reads a piece by past IGCC dissertation fellow and Brown University postdoctoral fellow Mariana Carvalho titled, "Why Are There So Many Political Assassinations in Brazil?"

The Ukraine war has dragged on for well over 400 days, has cost billions of dollars and many thousands of lives, and continues to threaten global stability. To understand how and why the war began, Talking Policy host Lindsay Morgan talks with Jesse Driscoll about his new book, Ukraine's Unnamed War: Before the Russian Invasion of 2022 (with Dominique Arel). This interview was recorded on April 7, 2023.

In this new series, The Short Read, host Lindsay Morgan shares analysis from Political Violence At A Glance, an award-winning online magazine sponsored by the UC Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation, which also sponsors the Talking Policy podcast. In this episode, she reads a piece by IGCC dissertation fellow and UC Berkeley Ph.D. candidate Oren Samet and UC Berkeley Robson Professor of Political Science Susan Hyde titled, "Can Democracy Assistance Be Effective in the Age of Authoritarianism?"

In this new series, The Short Read, host Lindsay Morgan shares analysis from Political Violence At A Glance, an award-winning online magazine sponsored by the UC Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation, which also sponsors the Talking Policy podcast. In this episode, she reads a piece by IGCC dissertation fellow and UC Los Angeles Ph.D. candidate Kevin Gatter titled, "That's Not Really A Thing Anymore: Why Calls for Secession Come and Go."

On February 26, for the second time in less than a year, tens of thousands of Mexicans filled Mexico City’s main public square to protest the president’s attempts to weaken Mexico’s independent elections agency. Is Mexican democracy at a tipping point? In the latest episode in Talking Policy’s Future of Democracy series, host Lindsay Morgan talks with longtime Mexico expert, Kate Bruhn, a professor of political science at UC Santa Barbara, about the state of Mexican democracy. This interview was conducted on February 28, 2023.

In the first episode in IGCC’s 2023 Book Talk series, host Lindsay Morgan talks with Ethan Kapstein about his book Exporting Capitalism: Private Enterprise and U.S. Foreign Policy. Kapstein is the co-director of the Empirical Studies of Conflict Project at Princeton University, and the Arizona Centennial professor of International Affairs at Arizona State University. In the interview, he shares his views on how and why the U.S. has sought to spread private enterprise around the world, and how effective these policies have been. This interview was conducted on February 14, 2023. It has been edited for length and clarity.

The closely contested 2020 presidential race was followed by unsubstantiated allegations of vote fraud and a wide partisan divide over trust in elections. American distrust in elections is growing—at least among some groups. As part of Talking Policy’s series on the Future of Democracy, host Lindsay Morgan talks with Thad Kousser, a political scientist at UC San Diego, about whether Americans are losing faith in elections, why it’s happening, and what it means for the future of American democracy.

Tensions between the U.S. and China, and between China and Taiwan, continue to simmer. In our third Dispatch from Taipei, Talking Policy host Lindsay Morgan talks with James Lee and what Taiwanese people think about U.S. policy towards Taiwan. James is an assistant research fellow at the Institute of European and American Studies at Academia Sinica in Taiwan, and an affiliated researcher at the UC Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation. This interview was conducted on January 24, 2023. 

In the latest Talking Policy episode, Christian Davenport, one of the world's leading scholars of state repression and a professor at the University of Michigan, and Ben Appel, an associate professor at UC San Diego, discuss their new book, The Death and Life of State Repression.

In the latest episode in Talking Policy’s series on the Future of Democracy, host Lindsay Morgan talks with political scientist Amber Boydstun about how the media shapes how citizens think about politics and elections, and how the role of the media is changing. This interview was recorded on November 4, 2022.