Podcasts

Through the weaponization of social media, the internet is changing war and politics, just as war and politics are changing the internet. Terrorists livestream their attacks, “Twitter wars” produce real-world casualties, and viral misinformation alters not just the result of battles, but the very fate of nations. The result is that war, tech, and politics have blurred into a new kind of battlespace that plays out on our smartphones.

P. W. Singer and Emerson Brooking tackle the mind-bending questions that arise when war goes online and the online world goes to war. They explore how ISIS copies the Instagram tactics of Taylor Swift, a former World of Warcraft addict foils war crimes thousands of miles away, internet trolls shape elections, and China uses a smartphone app to police the thoughts of 1.4 billion citizens. What can be kept secret in a world of networks? Does social media expose the truth or bury it? And what role do ordinary people now play in international conflicts?

Delving into the web’s darkest corners, we meet the unexpected warriors of social media, such as the rapper turned jihadist PR czar and the Russian hipsters who wage unceasing infowars against the West. Finally, looking to the crucial years ahead, LikeWar outlines a radical new paradigm for understanding and defending against the unprecedented threats of our networked world.

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Every day, Americans make decisions about their privacy: what to share and when, how much to expose and to whom. Securing the boundary between one’s private affairs and public identity has become a central task of citizenship. How did privacy come to loom so large in American life? Sarah Igo tracks this elusive social value across the twentieth century, as individuals questioned how they would, and should, be known by their own society.

Privacy was not always a matter of public import. But beginning in the late nineteenth century, as corporate industry, social institutions, and the federal government swelled, increasing numbers of citizens believed their privacy to be endangered. Popular journalism and communication technologies, welfare bureaucracies and police tactics, market research and workplace testing, scientific inquiry and computer data banks, tell-all memoirs and social media all propelled privacy to the foreground of U.S. culture. Jurists and philosophers but also ordinary people weighed the perils, the possibilities, and the promise of being known. In the process, they redrew the borders of contemporary selfhood and citizenship.

The Known Citizen reveals how privacy became the indispensable language for monitoring the ever-shifting line between our personal and social selves. Igo’s sweeping history, from the era of “instantaneous photography” to the age of big data, uncovers the surprising ways that debates over what should be kept out of the public eye have shaped U.S. politics and society. It offers the first wide-angle view of privacy as it has been lived and imagined by modern Americans.

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More than 2 million Americans have served in Afghanistan or Iraq since September 11, 2001, and C.J. Chivers has reported from both wars from their beginnings. The Fighters vividly conveys the physical and emotional experience of war as lived by six combatants: a fighter pilot, a medic, a scout helicopter pilot, a grunt, an infantry officer and a Special Forces sergeant. Chivers captures their commitment and sense of purpose, their courage and ultimately their sacrifice, confusion and moral frustration as new enemies arise, and invasions give way to counterinsurgency duties for which they often were not prepared.

The Fighters is a tour de force, a portrait of modern warfare that parts from slogans. It does for these troops what Stephen Ambrose did for the G.I.s of WWII and what Michael Herr did for the grunts in Vietnam. The Fighters presents a human side of the long arc of two wars, told with the empathy and understanding of an author who is himself an infantry veteran.

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Our Woman in Havana chronicles the past several decades of US-Cuba relations from the bird’s-eye view of State Department veteran and longtime Cuba hand Vicki Huddleston, our top diplomat in Havana under Presidents Clinton and George W. Bush.

After the US embassy in Havana was closed in 1961, relations between the two countries broke off. A thaw came in 1977, with the opening of a de facto embassy in Havana, the US Interests Section, where Huddleston would later serve. In her compelling memoir of a diplomat at work, she tells gripping stories of face-to-face encounters with Fidel Castro and the initiatives she undertook, like the transistor radios she furnished to ordinary Cubans. With inside accounts of many dramatic episodes, like the tumultuous Elián González custody battle, Huddleston also evokes the charm of the island country, and her warm affection for the Cuban people.

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In Have the Mountains Fallen?: Two Journeys of Loss and Redemption in the Cold War, Jeffrey Lilley's new book puts the spotlight on Kyrgyzstan. He examines the threat and legacy of the Soviet empire through intersecting narratives of a captive people's aspiration for freedom.

Join our Cover to Cover conference call on Wednesday, August 8, at 2:00-2:30 pm ET.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: After the witnessing the collapse of the Soviet Union as a journalist in the 1990s, Jeff Lilley moved to Central Asia in 2004. During a three-year posting in Kyrgyzstan, he started reading the works of Chinghiz Aitmatov, slept in yurts, drank fermented mare's milk, and hiked in the country's beautiful mountains. Over the following ten years, as he worked in the field of democracy and governance in support of Washington, DC, and the Middle East, he continued researching Aitmatov while adding Altay's remarkable life story. He finished writing the book in 2016, shortly before returning to Kyrgyzstan to lead a British-funded parliamentary support program. Lilley is the coauthor of China Hands: Nine Decades of Adventure, Espionage and Diplomacy (Public Affairs, 2004). 

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A generation after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the world is once again on the edge of chaos. In Edge of Chaos, Dambisa Moyo sets out the new political and economic challenges facing the world, and the specific, radical solutions needed to resolve these issues and reignite global growth.

Dambisa enumerates the four headwinds of demographics, inequality, commodity scarcity and technological innovation that are driving social and economic unrest, and argues for a fundamental retooling of democratic capitalism to address current problems and deliver better outcomes in the future. In the twenty-first century, a crisis in one country can quickly become our own, and fragile economies produce a fragile international community.

Edge of Chaos is a warning for advanced and emerging nations alike: we must reverse the dramatic erosion in growth, or face the consequences of a fragmented and unstable global future.

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Bosnia, Rwanda, Haiti, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria - a quarter-century of stumbles in America's pursuit of a more peaceful and just world. American military interventions have cost thousands of lives and billions of dollars, yet we rarely manage to enact positive and sustainable change. In Peace Works: America's Unifying Role in a Turbulent World, ambassador and global conflict leader Rick Barton uses a mix of stories, history, and analysis for a transformative approach to foreign affairs and offers concrete and attainable solutions for the future.

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The Israel-Palestine conflict has reached yet another inflection point.

What's next for this protracted conflict? Is hope lost for a peaceful resolution? Is there an end in sight?

Listen to our KNOW NOW program with Yousef Bashir, Gaza-born peace activist, to gain insight on these complex questions.

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In 2008, when Michael McFaul was asked to leave his perch at Stanford and join an unlikely presidential campaign, he had no idea that he would find himself at the beating heart of one of today’s most contentious and consequential international relationships. As President Barack Obama’s adviser on Russian affairs, McFaul helped craft the United States’ policy known as “reset” that fostered unprecedented collaboration between the two countries. Then, as U.S. Ambassador to Russia (2012-2014), he had a front-row seat when this fleeting, hopeful moment crumbled with Vladimir Putin’s return to the presidency. From Cold War to Hot Peace is a riveting inside account combines history and memoir to tell the full story of U.S.-Russia relations from the fall of the Soviet Union to the new rise of the hostile, paranoid Russian president.

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Violence and conflict is a common thread that runs throughout history and across all cultures. It disrupts local, national and international communities, and results in war, displacement and death.

One strategy to addressing violence and conflict is through a public health approach. The Violence Prevention and Restoration (PAR) Model, developed by the International Center for Compassionate Organizations (ICCO) explains how violence begins, spreads, and infects others much like a thought borne pathogen or virus.

This KNOW NOW program featured Ari Cowan and Tony Belak, Director General and Associate Director of ICCO, who discussed how the proliferation of international conflicts and violence in communities can be prevented by utilizing the PAR Model. Xiao Yin Zhao, Executive Director of the World Affairs Council of Kentucky and Southen Indiana, hosted this program. 

Read Cowan's white paper on rethinking violence and listen to the podcast today.

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Over the last fifteen years, Pakistan has come to be defined exclusively in terms of its struggle with terror. But are ordinary Pakistanis extremists? And what explains how Pakistanis think?

Much of the current work on extremism in Pakistan tends to study extremist trends in the country from a detached position, a top-down security perspective, that renders a one-dimensional picture of what is at its heart a complex, richly textured country of 200 million people. In Pakistan Under Siege: Extremism, Society, and the State, using rigorous analysis of survey data, in-depth interviews in schools and universities in Pakistan, historical narrative reporting, and her own intuitive understanding of the country, Madiha Afzal gives the full picture of Pakistan’s relationship with extremism.

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Israel has long confronted a uniquely hostile and harsh strategic environment, which bears little comparison to that of any other state in modern history. Chuck Freilich's new book, Israeli National Security: A New Strategy for an Era of Change, is the most comprehensive study to date of Israel's national security strategy and provides a critical analysis of the major national security dilemmas Israel faces today and recommendations for policy changes.

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Boasting a robust economy, technical excellence, and growing military prowess, India is poised to exert significant influence on everything from global trade and climate change to clean energy and worker mobility. It’s been a long road, and one marked by daunting challenges—extreme poverty, sparse infrastructure and widespread discrimination among India’s diverse population.

Alyssa Ayres, senior fellow for India, Pakistan and South Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations, reveals just what’s at stake for the nation as she discusses her new book—Our Time Has Come: How India is Making Its Place in the World.

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Ambassador (Ret.) Mary Carlin Yates recently returned from Sudan, where she served as U.S. Interim Chargé d'Affaires (2011-2012). The goal of the January trip was to make progress on assessing a re-engagement strategy between the U.S. and this geopolitically significant state, at the crossroads of Africa and the Middle East.

"We are at a critical time, and the progress towards re-engagement and having a strong bilateral relationship to both nations hangs in the balance as Khartoum's government and president flirt with closer relations with Russia," Ambassador Yates told WACA and WorldOregon in an email.

Read Sudan: A Strategy for Re-Engagement by Ambassador Yates and Kelsey Lilley, and listen to a podcast of this call, hosted by Derrick Olsen, President of WorldOregon.

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The 2014 Ebola epidemic in Liberia terrified the world—and revealed how unprepared we are for the next outbreak of an infectious disease. Somewhere in nature, a killer virus is boiling up in the bloodstream of a bird, bat, monkey, or pig, preparing to jump to a human being. This not-yet-detected germ has the potential to wipe out millions of lives over a matter of weeks or months. That risk makes the threat posed by ISIS, a ground war, a massive climate event, or even the dropping of a nuclear bomb on a major city pale in comparison.

In The End of Epidemics, Harvard Medical School faculty member and Chair of the Global Health Council Dr. Jonathan D. Quick examines the eradication of smallpox and devastating effects of influenza, AIDS, SARS, and Ebola. Analyzing local and global efforts to contain these diseases and citing firsthand accounts of failure and success, Dr. Quick proposes a new set of actions which he has coined “The Power of Seven,” to end epidemics before they can begin.

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*Please click the "Listen to the podcast" link below to watch a receording of the webinar. 

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Boot joins Global I.Q. Minute to discuss his newest book, The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam. Boot delves into the life of the legendary CIA operative—a man whose singular adventures illuminate the “wrong turns” made by the U.S. during the 20-year conflict.

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"These are no ordinary times. It will not be business as usual in a world of disarray; as a result, it cannot be foreign policy as usual," writes Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations. His latest book, A World in Disarray: American Foreign Policy and the Crisis of the Old Order is a timely examination of a world increasingly defined by disorder. In three parts, the book contemplates the history of world order from the rise of the modern state system to the end of the Cold War; accounts for the momentous shifts in the last quarter century to shed light on the current state of affairs, and outlines specific steps to tackle the many challenges ahead. 

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