Best of the week - 5 February 2021

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

• The vaccine race against time. Andrew Sullivan for the Weekly Dish
• Want a well-run pandemic response? Put a woman in charge says Anne Perkins for Prospect Magazine
• Will young people ever work again? The pandemic in an uncertain future. Maria Albano in Unherd
• Vaccine nationalism is medially and morally indefensible says the WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus in Foreign Policy.

UK and Europe

• Podcast: What is the Union? Historian Colin Kidd talks about the origins of the Union and the ideas that underpin it. Is the island of Britain a natural territorial political unit? Is nationalism compatible with Unionism? What changed in the 1970s? From TALKING POLITICS
• Podcast: Is Brexit ‘done? Listen to Dr Karl Pike (QMUL), Dr Anand Menon (UK in a Changing Europe, KCL) and Professor Eunice Goes (Richmond University), discuss whether Brexit is, in fact, ‘done’, and what part the UK’s ongoing relationship with the EU will play in future political strategies. A Mile End Institute podcast.

United States

• The case for a third reconstruction. The enduring lesson of American history is that the republic is always in danger when white supremacist sedition and violence escape justice. Manisha Sinha in the New York Review of Books
• Joe Biden sends a clear message to the watching world. American’s back. Scott Lucas for The Conversation
• Why the Republican party won’t - or can’t – dump Trump. Emily Tamkin for the New Statesman
• The race to dismantle Trump’s immigration policies. Sarah Stillman in the New Yorker
• Podcast: Can America lead again? Listen to Iain Martin with guests Sir Nigel Sheinwald, Professor Joseph Nye, Karin von Hippel and Tom McTague on the foreign policy challenge facing the Biden administration.

In the news….Navalny/Putin, Belarus, coup in Mynamar, Indian farmers

• How to contain Putin’s Russia. Michael McFaul in Foreign Affairs
• How the West can help Alexei Navalny without damaging his cause. Paul Lever in Prospect Magazine
• Between Westernisers and Slavophiles – the search for Russia’s sole. Andrei Zorin’s essay in Englesberg Ideas looks at how Russia’s identity is shaped by its literature and how many of the arguments championed by its great authors resonate in the present
• Belarus protests. New date explains why people have been taking to the streets. Félix Krawatzeh and Gwendolyn Sasse for The Conversation
• Myanmar coup. How the military has held onto power for 60 years. Michael W Charney in The Conversation
• Myanmar’s military was already in charge so why did it stage a coup? Joshua Carroll for Novara Media
• Podcast: The end of democracy in Myanmar. Listen to the Daily examine the rise and fall of Aung San Suu Kyi
• Farmers protests in India: Modi’s efforts to repress dissent expose its growing authoritarianism. Read Sunny Hundal for Open Democracy.

Other interesting articles

• How Mars became the prize for the new space race and why China is hellbent on winning it. Steffi Paladini for The Conversation
• The military drone rulebook has changed. Iran and Turkey have become drone powers. Read James Rogers in the Washington Post
• Podcast: Listen to Bellingcat Founder Eliot Higgins on Navalny, Syria and Skripal from Intelligence Squared. He explains how his new pioneering category of reporting has cracked some of the biggest cases in the world using software that helps pinpoint the location of an image, to an app that can nail down the time a photo was taken
• How to win the influence contest in the Middle East. Use the soft power of Gulf states to counter Iran’s appeal. Steven Simon, Josh Landis and Aiman Mansour in Foreign Affairs
• What the Lincoln Project gets wrong about Israel-Palestine. Peter Beinart in the New York Review of Books
• The greatest humanitarian you’ve never heard of. Robert D Kaplan in Foreign Policy
• Podcast: Rousseau on Inequality. Listen to TALKING POLITICS – History of Ideas. Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality (also known as the Second Discourse) tells the story of all human history to answer one simple question: how did we end up in such an unequal world?

Photo by Sincerely Media on Unsplash