Best of the week - 26 June 2020

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

• The geopolitics of a pandemic. Helen Thompson discusses in Engelsberg Ideas
• The wrong government for a crisis? The Economist explores
• How humanity has unleashed a flood of new disease. Ferris Jabr in the New York Times Magazine
• The world should prepare better for catastrophic and existential risks.

UK Politics/Brexit

• A new revolt from the right? Matthew Goodwin looks inside the Tory party
• What’s changed since the Brexit vote? Anand Menon discusses in the Guardian.

Colonialism, Imperialism and Racism

• Why have IR theorists given up on exploring racism? Robbie Shilliam investigates for Foreign Policy.
• Podcast: Britain wrestles with its past. The Talking Politics team talk to writer and political commentator Fintan O'Toole about how British politics can and should deal with its imperial past in the age of Brexit.
• Podcast: Listen to the Bastani Factor: Insurgent Empire from Novara Media. While anti-colonialism was driven by those in the global south, it was often in conversation with the imperial core. Priya Gopal discusses her ‘Insurgent Empire’ and the relationship between anti-colonial resistance and British dissent.
• The Pillage of India. Christopher de Bellaigue reviews books on Britain’s colonial past by William Dalrymple and Shashi Tharoor for the New York Review of Books
• Podcast: Listen to the Daily on how Facebook,Twitter and YouTube are undermining the Black Lives Matter movement and the quest for racial justice.

USA foreign relations/Trump election

• Are the USA and China entering a new cold war? Timothy Garten Ash for the Guardian.
• Trump, China and Latin America. Daniel Taylor and Inderjeet Parmar ask whether the US is losing the soft power war for the Wire.
• Why Trump is in trouble. Matthew Goodwin for Reaction.
• Podcast: Listen to the Daily on the voters that Trump is losing. Nate Cohn, who covers elections, polling and demographics for The Upshot at The New York Times looks at how voters in the key battleground states view the candidates.

WHO

• Inside the Trump administration’s decision to leave WHO. Read Sebastian Rotella, James Bandler and Patricia Callahan views in Propublica
• The Health Transformation Army. James Meek on the history of the WHO for the London Review of Books. What can the WHO do?

Middle East

• Is Assad finished? Anchal Vohra for Foreign Policy looks at the war inside the Assad family
• ISIS in the Sinai. A persistent threat for Egypt. Read Allison McManus’s report for the Centre for Global Policy.

The best of the rest

• The Polish election. Timothy Garton Ash looks at Polish populism in broadcasting
• Podcast: Talking Politics: History of Ideas. The complete series of talks by David Runciman in which he explores some of the most important thinkers and prominent ideas lying behind modern politics – from Hobbes to Gandhi, from democracy to patriarchy, from revolution to lock down.

Photo by Sincerely Media on Unsplash