Best of the week - 10 July 2020
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Each week BISA Director, Juliet Dryden, scours the internet for IR-related content that might interest you. Here she brings you this week's best readings and podcasts to keep you up to date with what's happening around the world.
COVID-related news
- Sweden has become the world’s cautionary tale. Peter S Goodman in the New York Times
- How women have been most affected by the pandemic. Clare Wenham, Julia Smith, Sara E. Davies, Huiyan Feng, Karen A. Grépin, Sophie Harman, Asha Herten Crabb and Rosemary Morgan in Nature
- Podcast: Four new insights on coronavirus from The Daily podcast series
- Flailing States: Anglo-America loses its grip. Pankaj Mishra in the London Review of Books.
Racism
- Why is mainstream international relations blind to racism? Read Gurminder K. Bhambra, Yolande Bouka, Randolph B. Persuad, Olivia U. Rutazibwa, Vineet Thakur, Duncan Bell, Karen Smith, Toni Haastrup and Seifudein Adem in Foreign Affairs
- We can’t talk about racism without understanding whiteness says Priyamvada Gopal for the Guardian
- Anti-racism means remembering the colonialism legacy in Asia too writes Sholto Byrnes for The National
- The intent was genocide says Peter Nabokov for the New York Review of Books. Surviving Genocide: Native nations and the United States from the American Revolution to Bleeding Kansas.
United States
- How Biden’ foreign policy team got rich. Jonathan Guyer for American Prospect
- Stop saying Trump is in denial. The truth is much worse. Greg Sargant for The Washington Post
- Trump’s America is slipping away. Ronald Brownstein for the Atlantic
- Podcast: Listen to the Ezra Klein Show on the frightening fragility of American’s political institutions. Can American democracy survive Donald Trump?
- Podcast: Listen to the Daily. Maggie Haberman asks what Trump’s divisive speech at Mount Rushmore reveals about his re-election campaign. Is the goal the end of America?
China/Hong Kong
- China has shown it is willing to pay the economic price for supressing Hong Kong argues James Lin
- China only has itself to blame for Australia’s move on Hong Kong argues Ben Bland for the Guardian.
Middle East
- In Syria, a grim trade-off between tackling famine and pandemic. Robbie Gramer and Colm Quinn for Foreign Policy
- International Crisis Group on rethinking peace in Yemen. Should diplomats adopt an inclusive, multiparty framework for talks to replace today’s flawed model?
- Podcast: Listen to Iran Is not our enemy with Mehdi Hasan, Azadeh Moaveni, Daniel Hannan and Salman Al-Ansari from Intelligence Squared.
In other news
- Tariq Ali on Victor Serge’s defective bolshevism. Read ‘Inquisition Mode’ in the London Review of Books
- Podcast: Listen to Helen Thompson’s History of Ideas from Talking Politics. She asks if our understanding of where political ideas come from is liberating or limiting and asks how many of them were just rationalisations for power.
Photo by Sincerely Media on Unsplash
