Best of the week - 4 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
- Britain’s vaccine nationalism. Tom McTague in the Atlantic
- The vaccine is here. How will we get it to billions of people? Read Liz Breen and Sarah Schiffling in The Conversation
- Is a scotch egg a meal? Jed Meers investigates for The Conversation
- Podcast: Englesburg Ideas on ‘Covid and reform. Can the West fix its governing systems?’
- Adrian Wooldridge and Vernon Bogdanor discuss the COVID crisis and the long-term impact on the development of the West.
UK politics and economy
- Britain’s economy of men. Why only one in four boardroom seats in Britain is taken up by women. Michael Goodier in the Economist
- Podcast: TALKING POLITICS - From Brexit to Scottish Independence. Listen to Helen Thompson, Anand Menon and Kenneth Armstrong discuss the issues.
US politics and relations around the world
- What Thucydides knew about the US today. Was he the greatest historian of not only empire but also contemporary politics? A look back at the 2018 article from Edward Mendelson in the New York Review of Books
- The President is acting crazy so why are we struggling it off? Susan B Glasser in the New Yorker
- Trump’s world. The foreign policy legacy of the ‘America first’ President in Foreign Affairs
- Joe Biden wants to re-enter the nuclear deal with Iran/Middle East and Africa. The Economist
- Podcast: Insight Cambridge, a new student led podcast on world affairs. Listen to Gary Gerstle on his take on the years 2016 to 2020; touching on Trump, race and how the US Constitution makes it possible for minorities of voters to overrule the majority
- Podcast: NPR Fresh Air on US national security and the final days of the Trump Administration. Listen to New York Times’ reporter Eric Schmitt on Trump’s final days. He has ousted his secretary of defense and the head of the Pentagon's Defeat Isis Task Force, is considering striking Iran, and is expected to pull troops from Afghanistan. What does this mean for American national security?
A selection of other compelling reads/listens
- Drone technology: risk free assassinations. Read Andrew Cockburn in the London Review of Books
- Violence against women deserves more than a 16-day international campaign. Nicole Behnam for the Council on Foreign Relations
- Damning report from Israeli human rights groups on military invasions of Palestinian homes. The Guardian
- Assad’s Syria is starting to starve like Saddam’s Iraq. The impact of sanctions. Anchal Vohra in Foreign Policy
- Podcast: Intelligence Squared. The powerful and the damned: what transpired during interviews and private meetings and exchanges with Vladimir Putin, Angela Merkel and Prince Andrew. From the rise of China to conversations with billionaire bankers facing economic meltdown.
A look back…
- Henry Kissinger and World Politics. David Runciman in the London Review of Books
- Europe’s most terrible years. 1939-45. Read Geoffrey Wheatcroft in the New York Review of Books.
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