Mexico, like the United States, has a gun violence problem. It has one of the highest murder rates in the world, and most of those murders come from firearms. In 2019, for example, almost 70% of  the country's 35,000 murders involved firearms.

But unlike the U.S., Mexico doesn’t have tens of thousands of licensed firearms dealers. 

It has two. 

So how do so many guns make their way into Mexico? And how do these guns shape Mexican society? 

These are two of the questions Ieva Jusionyte explores in her new book “Exit Wounds: How America’s Guns Fuel Violence across the Border.” Jusionyte is an anthropologist at the Watson Institute and spent much of the last few years following people whose lives are shaped by guns in Mexico. Guns, which, by and large, come from the United States. 

On this episode, Jusionyte discusses the impact of American firearms on Mexican society and the role they play in spreading violence and trauma on both sides of the border. 

Learn more about and purchase "Exit Wounds: How America’s Guns Fuel Violence across the Border"

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Photo credit: Tony Rinaldo

In February of this year, Providence became the first city in America to approve opening a state-sanctioned overdose prevention center. Sometimes known as safe injection sites, these are facilities where people can bring illegal drugs and consume them under the supervision of trained volunteers and health professionals. 

It’s one of the boldest experiments in the U.S. of an approach to addressing the drug overdose crisis known as “harm reduction,” which is focused less on forcing people to stop using drugs and instead on helping people use them more safely. 

It might sound counterintuitive that such an approach could help stem our country’s drug overdose epidemic, which killed over 112,000 Americans in 2023. But as our two guests on this episode explain, overdose prevention centers — along with many other “harm reduction” interventions — work. Studies have shown that they not only help reduce drug-related deaths, they also help people recover from drug addiction more broadly. 

On this episode, Dan Richards talks with two public health leaders in Rhode Island about this new overdose prevention center — how it will work, why it matters, and what it says about the future of addressing America’s drug overdose crisis. 

Guests on this episode:

• Colleen Daley Ndoye, executive director of Project Weber/RENEW, the organization that will be overseeing Rhode Island’s overdose prevention center
• Brandon Marshall, chair of epidemiology at Brown University. 

Learn more about Project Weber/RENEW

Learn more about the People, Places, and Health Collective at Brown University’s School of Public Health

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In the 1970s in Nicaragua, left-wing rebels, calling themselves the Sandinista National Liberation Front, fought to overthrow their country’s dictator. 

It worked. The Sandinistas led a coalition that took over the government in July 1979, in what became known as the Sandinista Revolution. 

However, within a few years, the Sandinistas faced a violent backlash, which pushed the country into a state of unrest that lasted for almost a decade. 

This period of violence, from roughly 1982-1988, was known as the Contra War. To many Americans, it’s often associated with the Cold War and Ronald Reagan. It’s been described as a proxy battle between the Soviet-supported Sandinistas on one side, and the U.S.-supported counter-revolutionaries, or Contras, on the other. 

But in this episode, we’ll go beyond that Cold War framing of the conflict, to uncover a fuller explanation of why the Sandinista Revolution was successful in Nicaragua in 1979, why it was replaced by a liberal democratic government in 1990, and why that democracy has since fallen apart. 

Mateo Jarquín is a historian and author of The Sandinista Revolution: A Global Latin American History.” Through interviews with former Sandinistas and archival research conducted across Latin America, Mateo tells the story of this momentous decade in Latin American politics from the perspective of those who lived it. In doing so, he challenges our understanding of the Cold War’s impact on Latin America, from the 1980s straight through to the present. 

In the second half of the episode, we’ll talk with Watson Senior Fellow Steven Kinzer about Nicaragua’s repressive political regime today, and a surprising act of resistance whose full effects are yet to be seen. 

Learn about and purchase “The Sandinista Revolution: A Global Latin American History”

Listen to episode 1 of “Revolution Revisited” a limited series on the history of the Sandinista Revolution, from Trending Globally

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Here’s a depressing fact: it takes longer to travel from Boston to Los Angeles today than it did 50 years ago. Getting to the airport, getting through the airport, the flight itself — just about every part of the process takes longer than it once did.  

According to New York Times senior writer David Leonhardt, this is just one example of the stagnation defining so many aspects of America’s society and economy today. From life expectancy to education outcomes to rates of income inequality, by so many measures, American society simply isn’t improving for as many Americans as rapidly as it once did. By some measures, it’s not improving at all.

In other words: the American dream is increasingly out of reach. 

Leonhardt’s newest book, “Ours Was the Shining Future: The Story of the American Dream,” explores the data and the history behind this dimming of the American dream. This spring, he came to the Watson Institute to discuss the book with Jeff Colgan, director of the Watson Institute’s Climate Solutions Lab. In this episode of Trending Globally, Colgan talks with Leonhardt about the cultural and political shifts that have contributed to this change, and about what needs to be done to make widespread prosperity attainable in the decades to come. 

Learn more about and purchase “Ours Was the Shining Future: The Story of the American Dream”

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The last decade has seen the growth of two political movements that appear diametrically opposed: the Black Lives Matter movement and the rise of Donald Trump.  But as our guest on this episode explains, these two movements are linked, and can only be understood together. 

On this episode, Dan Richards talks with political scientist Juliet Hooker about how these movements are just the most recent evolution of two of the most powerful forces in American politics — what she describes as “Black grief” and “white grievance.” 

Hooker’s new book, “Black Grief/White Grievance: The Politics of Loss,” explores how these two forces have related to each other throughout American history, what they can teach us about how to build a better democracy, and what they tell us about how feelings of loss shape not only our psyches but our politics.

Learn more about and purchase “Black Grief/White Grievance: The Politics of Loss”

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Learn more about “Humans in Public Health,” a podcast from the Brown University School of Public Health

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 Mark Blyth and political scientist Carrie Nordlund. On each episode, they discuss, debate and, occasionally, make fun of the biggest headlines of the day. The conversations are always thought-provoking and informative, and while the topics are sometimes somber, the show is not. 

On this episode, they discuss some of the factors shaping the 2024 U.S. elections, the state of the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, and what’s next for the U.K.’s Labour Party. They also ponder: is Mark too old for VR headsets? 

Listen to more of Mark and Carrie and subscribe. 

Learn about all of the Watson Institute’s other podcasts. 

February 24, 2024, marks two years since the beginning of the War in Ukraine. 

In the war’s first year, Russia’s assault on Ukraine shook the West, while Ukraine's defense of the territory captivated the world. 

While no less deadly or consequential, the war's second year has looked very different. The war has become a stalemate on the battlefield, altering the politics in Kyiv, the Kremlin, and among their respective allies. Neither country’s leaders appear to be looking for a way out of the war anytime soon, and the prospect of peace in Ukraine seems as far away as it’s been at any point in the last two years. 

On this episode, Dan Richards discusses the state of the War in Ukraine with Lyle Goldstein, a Senior Fellow at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University and director of Asia Engagement at Defense Priorities. They explore the shifting definitions of “victory” in both Kyiv and the Kremlin over the past 12 months, what an end to this conflict might look like, and what it would take to bring both country’s leaders to the negotiating table. 

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In the United States, inequality along the lines of race in education is such a persistent issue that it often fails to make headlines. COVID-19 brought it back to the front of the nation’s consciousness as evidence mounted that nonwhite students were experiencing roughly twice as much learning loss as their white counterparts. 

Yet, as our guest on this episode explains, if history is any guide, more attention to the issue doesn’t necessarily mean better outcomes for nonwhite and poor students. There’s a long history of well-financed, elite (largely white) institutions investing time and money to try and address inequality in American education with little to show for it. Even more unsettling, these efforts often make the problem worse. 

On this episode, Dan Richards talks with Noliwe Rooks, chair of Africana Studies at Brown University, and the author of an award-winning book, “Cutting School: Privatization, Segregation, and the End of Public Education.” They discuss the surprising history of some of America’s most influential school reform efforts, and the deeper historical patterns and racist structures that keep our education system broken for so many American children. 

Learn more about and purchase “Cutting School: Privatization, Segregation, and the End of Public Education.”

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Backlash is hardly a new political force — since America’s founding, change has often been driven by citizens mobilizing in opposition to policies, programs, or social movements. 

But recently, as our guest on this episode explains, backlash movements have come to dominate our politics in unprecedented ways. He argues that to build a more stable and healthy politics, we need to better understand how these forces work. 

Why do certain policies, movements, or individual politicians incite powerful backlash movements while others don't? And why — whether we’re talking about immigration, healthcare, reproductive rights, or countless other issues — has backlash come to dominate so many different policy realms? 

On this episode, Dan Richards explores these questions with Eric Patashnik, a political scientist at the Watson Institute, and author of the book “Countermobilization: Policy Feedback and Backlash in a Polarized Age.” In the book, Patashnik provides a theory of political backlash — what causes it, why it’s diffused through our politics over the last few decades, and how policymakers and politicians can learn to remain effective in a political moment dominated by backlash and countermobilization.   

Learn more about and purchase “Countermobilization: Policy Feedback and Backlash in a Polarized Age”

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Trending Globally will be back with all new episodes soon, but in the meantime we’re rereleasing some of our favorite episodes from 2023. We hope you enjoy – and have a great start to 2024!

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The beginning of 2023 saw a disturbing 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 (originally released in February 2023), the second in our limited series on the theory, policies, and practice of conflict escalation, you’ll hear from two experts rethinking how nuclear threats are understood and modeled. 

Rose McDermott is a professor of International Affairs at the Watson Institute, and Reid Pauly is an assistant professor of Nuclear Security and Policy at Watson. Their paper “Decision-making Under Pressure: The Mechanisms and Psychology of Nuclear Brinkmanship” is the lead article in the current issue of International Security. In it, they reframe one of the most fundamental theories for understanding nuclear risks: nuclear “brinkmanship.” They highlight why conventional models of brinkmanship fail to fully explain how a nuclear crisis might unfold and explore what interventions are needed to prevent one from starting. 

Read Rose and Reid’s paper, “Decision-making Under Pressure: The Mechanisms and Psychology of Nuclear Brinkmanship.”

Listen to the first episode in our limited series, “Escalation,” with Lyle Goldstein. 

Learn more about the Watson Institute’s other podcasts.