Best of the week - 18 December 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
- COVID can be the catalyst for a safer and better world says Peter Frankopan in The Times
- How the pandemic is resetting Britain’s whole free market model. Martin Sandbu in Prospect Magazine
- Challenging the ‘Great Reset’ theory of pandemics. Mark Honigsbaum in Engelsberg Ideas
- Sweden and Japan are paying the price for COVID exceptionalism. Paul O’Shea in The Conversation
- Podcast: COVID-19 and the vaccine. A shot of hope and a return to normal? Listen to Intelligence Squared with Sarah Gilbetr, Project Leader for the Oxford/Astra/Zeneca vaccine, Richard Horton, editor of the Lancet and Tim Spector, epidemiologist and founder of the ZOE COVID symptom tracking app.
UK politics/Brexit
- With the UK falling apart, what price sovereignty? Ian Linden for The Article
- What are Australian style and Canadian style Brexit trade deals? David Collins explains for The Conversation
- Podcast: Where is the opposition? TALKING POLITICS looks past COVID and Brexit to ask where the long-term opposition to Johnson’s government is going to come from. Listen to Helen Thompson and Chris Brooke discuss the options.
US politics and foreign affairs
- The future of liberalism. Timothy Garton Ash for Prospect Magazine
- A political obituary of Donald Trump. The effects of his reign will linger, but democracy survived says George Packer in The Atlantic
- When did the Democrats win? The minority repeatedly thwarting the will of the majority is intolerable and untenable. Michael Tomasky in the New York Review of Books
- How Biden should investigate Trump. James Fallows in The Atlantic
- The war is dead. Long live the war! Counter-terrorism after Trump. Johnny Hall for LSE Ideas
- Swan song from the Trump State Department. A strange, flawed, China paper. Read Daniel Baer in Foreign Policy
- Podcast: Does the world need the US anymore? Listen to Jonathan Freedman ask Samantha Power, former US ambassador to the UN, whether the world could become less dependent on US leadership and thus more resilient. From the Guardian’s Politics Extra podcast
- Podcast: Listen to this inspiring conversation on democracy with Danielle Allen, Harvard political theorist. From the Ezra Klein Show.
Global politics
- Drones are destabilizing world politics. James Lyall in Foreign Affairs
- Inside the disinformation forever war. Russian ‘active measures', including election meddling, disinformation and influence operations, were as common throughout the Cold War as they are today. Calder Walton for Engelsberg Ideas
- The world’s most important body of water. The ghosts that haunt the South China Sea. Daniel Yergin in the Atlantic
- There is only one way out of Afghanistan and that requires cooperating with regional powers. Read Barnett R Rubin in Foreign Affairs
- What will international migration in West Africa look like after COVID-19? Joseph Teye in Open Democracy.
'Best of the week' will be taking a break for the holidays, but we'll be back with a bumper edition on Friday 8 January 2021.
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