Departures with Robert Amsterdam (Amsterdam & Partners LLP)

In the early 19th century, the Ottoman empire was facing rebellion, decline, and increasing competition for influence with Europe. The leadership in Istanbul implemented desperate plans to preserve the empire through modernizing reforms, known as Tanzimat, which among other measures declared Muslims, Christians, and Jews to be equal under the law. But things did not go as planned.

In Eugene Rogan's richly colorful and kaleidoscopic account, "The Damascus Events: The 1860 Massacre and the Making of the Modern Middle East," the reader is taken deep inside the conspiratorial series of events that led up to the eight-day-long mob violence and execution of some 5,000 Christians, and the world-changing response to restore peace and order to the city.

Drawing on original never before seen historical documents and eyewitness accounts, Rogan's narrative reads like a dramatic Hollywood film, focusing on how resentment over growing Christian wealth and trade eventually prompted the violence. With detailed portraits of some of the main protagonists, the book makes a strong case for 1860 as a pivotal turning point that led to much of the structures that can continue to be observed in the modern Middle East.

State repression, whether or not it’s outwardly aggressive, invites backlash. So how does the Chinese state maintain control during disruptive periods of intense urbanization, even as heavy consequences impact society? 

This week Departures is pleased to feature a discussion with Lynette Ong, a Professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto about her excellent new book, "Outsourcing Repression Everyday State Power in Contemporary China."

Through the coordination of independent social forces, including thugs and gangsters, local governments across China have successfully repressed the masses in land expropriation cases, and through evictions for demolition projects. During the COVID-19 pandemic, these nonstate actors have morphed into medical personnel and volunteers who are known community members. Ong argues this leveraging of neighbors and familiar faces to enforce the zero covid policy contributes to social compliance amid what are seen as increasingly harsh restrictions on the most basic personal liberties.

In her discussion with host Robert Amsterdam, Prof. Ong discusses the recent zero covid policy and food shortages in Shanghai, where social unrest could be reaching a level unmatched by outsourced repression. Amsterdam and Ong discuss potential structural outcomes for how the party will need to adapt to manage social crises and if the current model experiences such a high profile break down.

Marina Litvinenko has seen a lot in her life.

In 2006, her husband, the former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko, was assassinated by radioactive poisoning by agents of the Russian government. Her unrelenting quest for justice and answers has led through the courts, the media, and the highest levels of diplomacy - and yet, after all this time, there were people in the UK who still did not heed her warnings about dealing with Vladimir Putin before last year's invasion of Ukraine.

In this conversation with Robert Amsterdam, Marina discusses her campaign, views and insights on the conflict in Ukraine, and how the West should deal with punishing those around Putin (while avoiding isolation of independent Russian citizens).

It may just be a smattering of insignificant rocks and reefs along the Nine-dash line between the Philippines and China, but in recent years this area has become the focus of the world's most complex and dangerous maritime dispute. China's growing influence and willingness to project its will against smaller neighbors and US allies has drawn Washington into a set of intersecting disputes, while placing significant pressure on America's commitment to established international law regarding open seas.

This week on Departures we are pleased to feature Gregory Poling, the Southeast Asia Program and Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC. Poling is the author of the new book, "On Dangerous Ground: America's Century in the South China Sea," which offers a detailed and highly engaging history of Washington's involvement in this part of the world and how the current tensions evolved from past unsettled issues.

Poling's book takes issue with the China-centric narrative which has become embedded in the global conversation about these territorial claims, and puts the focus on strategic decisionmaking happening not just in Beijing and Washington, but also among many other smaller neighboring Southeast Asian countries with interests at play.

George F. Kennan is arguably the most important American diplomat of the modern era, whose "long telegram" and strategy of containment shaped the Cold War and postwar period. And yet, at critical moments later in his career, he was cast aside and shut out by the institutions he once led.

In his new book, "Kennan: A Life Between Worlds," acclaimed historian Frank Costigliola draws attention to the very interesting and intimate details of his personal life and upbringing, drawing a much more complex and sometimes surprising portrait of America's top diplomat, bringing us inside his thinking and decision making experiences.

In this podcast interview with host Robert Amsterdam, Costigliola explores the intricate web of politics, ideology, and personal struggles that shaped George F. Kennan's rise to prominence, and shares some of his thoughts about Kennan's policy visions which did not come to fruition, and what he might think of current global tensions.

When one thinks of Zimbabwe, the concept of "free and fair elections" is not the first to come to mind. And yet, like many post-Cold War authoritarian states, elections are nevertheless organized and manipulated to produce something adjacent to public legitimacy, which becomes all the more treacherous when the opposition is able to actually win them.

To discuss the rapidly developing situation in Zimbabwe, this week on Departures we are featuring a very special guest, Chenayi Mutambasere. Chenayi is a development economist based in the UK where she is also vice chair of Governors for UTC @MediaCityUK in Salford. She has worked for transformation projects in international banks, local government and the legal sector. Chenayi is a keen researcher and contributor to economic policy research in Zimbabwe.

Perhaps one of the most meaningful facts that illustrates the sweeping changes taking place in global affairs is the following: In 1950, nearly one in three people in the world lived in a Western country. By 2050, that number will dwindle to one in ten, bringing with it a wide variety of recalculations by companies, culture, influence, and politics.

This demographic change is but one of many interesting pillars supporting the arguments of the Singapore-based political scientist Samir Puri, whose new book, "Westlessness: The Great Global Rebalancing" explores how the gradually diminishing power of the West is mapped onto geoeconomics, technology, popular culture, and identity.

In this conversation with host Robert Amsterdam, Puri makes it clear that it is not a total replacement or dislocation of the West from global affairs we will be confronted with, but rather a realignment that has been decades in the making. Puri points to the global economic crisis of 2008 as one of several turning points, when the West's confidence in its economic supremacy began to crack, but also discusses sweeping changes to technology and popular entertainment and global commerce that indicate how the next several decades are quite unlikely to resemble the apex of Western power in postwar period.

Yoweri Museveni's 35 years of iron-gripped ruthless authoritarianism in Uganda did not take place in a vacuum. It has instead been a years-long process of converting the country's institutions into instruments of arbitrary power, which has been fueled by a series of targeted moves to destabilize the social coordination that would be needed to hold leadership accountable.

This has been the fascinating focus of research for Prof. Rebecca Tapscott, a visiting fellow at the University of Edinburgh's Politics and International Relations Department. She joined the Departures with Robert Amsterdam podcast this week to discuss her book, "Arbitrary States: Social Control and Modern Authoritarianism in Museveni's Uganda."

Tapscott explains that for Uganda, among other countries with nationalist movements which took power, it is crucial that there is a high level of "unpredictability and arbitrariness" which shapes people's experience of how the state works, how they experience security and justice. Her research takes an interesting look into the functioning of hybrid regimes, where some vestigial presence of democratic institutions continue to exist but are largely rendered ineffective in terms of successful opposition organizing.

What does it mean to perceive reality? How do art, science, and philosophy converge in shaping our understanding of the world? In this episode of Departures with Robert Amsterdam, we sit down with William Egginton, acclaimed author and professor, to dive into his latest book, "The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality."

Egginton weaves a captivating narrative that bridges the literary genius of Jorge Luis Borges, the groundbreaking physics of Werner Heisenberg, the poetry of Robert Frost, and the profound philosophy of Immanuel Kant. Egginton explores how these thinkers confronted the boundaries of human knowledge, the mysteries of perception, and the paradoxes of existence, fate, and choice.

In this conversation with Robert Amsterdam, Egginton shares his insights into the unexpected connections and overlapping themes with these towering figures, the questions they asked, and how their ideas resonate with our quest to make sense of an increasingly complex universe. The remarkable harmony between nature, science, art, philosophy and literature during these critical years resonated deeply with us, and we hope you enjoy this conversation about this special book.

"If you can't beat 'em, join 'em," is often a colloquial proverb tossed around to express a reluctant surrender to whatever dominant force one may be facing - but it might also be a decent way to express how many states have found their domestic political options increasingly constrained by in the age of globalization, whereby participation in international commerce binds a national government to the rules and norms of powerful institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

But the question of who gets to set those rules and whose interests the norms favor has continued to be a sore point of contention. In his latest book, "The Meddlers: Sovereignty, Empire, and the Birth of Global Economic Governance," Harvard historian Jamie Martin examines the birth of the global economic order, and traces back many of its foundational assumptions and ideologies to earlier imperial political conflicts.

Martin's book takes a close look at the major players who shaped the Bretton Woods conference, how they evolved from the post WWI institutions like the League of Nations and Bank for International Settlements, and why they thought it necessary to create rules that could reach over national boundaries to enforce austerity, coordinate the central bank policy, oversee development programs, and regulate commodity prices.

This effort to govern capitalism on a global level is fraught with problems common to most attempts to govern, including aspects of racism, colonialism, and the hubris of empires who believed they were in the best position to dictate decisions on behalf of other nations.

The sharpening polarization taking place in the United States over the past several election cycles has gradually calcified the nation's institutions into obstructionist forces which are impeding Washington's ability to project its influence abroad. Now, many are asking, is the United States really the "indispensable" power it perceives itself to be, or are we witnessing the beginning of its abdication?

These are the questions that Michael Cox, an Emeritus Professor at the London School of Economics, wrestles with in his fascinating new book, "Agonies of Empire: American Power from Clinton to Biden."

Professor Cox joins Robert Amsterdam on the podcast this week to discuss his study of US foreign policy across the past five presidential administrations, with particular attention paid to the less recognized achievements of geoeconomic statecraft during certain periods followed by less successful doctrines of later presidents.

Cox brings a uniquely British perspective to the ways in which the American people expect their leaders to exercise power, interrogating a number of sweeping presumptions from the cultivation of patriotism, the discontent over globalization (despite benefitting immensely from it), and the strange "parochial-ness" of this lone superpower, and many other interesting questions unearthed across this period of history.

On this week's episode of Departures with Robert Amsterdam we're pleased to invite our friend and colleague of many years Jakob Edberg, the co-founder of The GR Company, a government relations consultancy headquartered in Tokyo, Japan, and with offices in Osaka, Seoul, London, and Washington DC.

Jakob's unique perspective on the rapidly evolving leadership role of Japan in the region and, increasingly, in global affairs are shaped by more than 20 years of experience advising some of the world's largest companies on politically sensitive matters in the region.

According to Edberg, Japan's new role as a primary actor and top ally of the United States has been an intentional and gradual process dating back to before Shinzo Abe's ascedency and the current diplomacy-forward administration of Prime Minister Fumio Kishida.

In international finance, the difference between what is legal and normal and what is criminal and corrupt is often unclear, a disparity made worse by an overlapping series of laws and regulations which in some cases can put U.S. competition at a disadvantage.

These networks of illicit finance, shell corporations, and offshore structures used by global elites to create, move, and conceal vast amounts of wealth is explored in great detail by Prof. Kimberly Kay Hoang in her new book, "Spiderweb Capitalism: How Global Elites Exploit Frontier Markets."

Hoang's investigation, which involved some 350,000 miles of travel and dozens of field interviews with executives and market players, sheds light on this secretive and poorly understood corner of the global economy.

In her discussion with Robert Amsterdam, Hoang explains how shell corporations can be set up to move funds from statelets like Guernsey, to more well known offshore havens like the Cayman Islands, as well as Singapore, Vietnam, Cambodia, Myanmar, and Delaware, among many others. Her investigaiton brings fresh insights to the shortcomings of laws like the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), which has imposed very high compliance costs on US companies but has done little to halt the activity of other players.

After almost 23 years in power, Russian President Vladimir Putin currently appears more weakened and vulnerable than during any other period of his presidency, thanks in large part to his disastrous decision to invade Ukraine.

On this week's Departures, we bring back the veteran journalist Luke Harding, who for years serving the Guardian's correspondent in Moscow before being expelled. Harding's latest book, "Invasion: The Inside Story of Russia's Bloody War and Ukraine's Fight for Survival," takes readers on a trip along the various battlefronts of this conflict, bringing rich detail and color to the main protagonists on both sides. As a reporter on the ground in Kyiv when the invasion started, Harding describes the sense of unreality surrounding the war, and the astounding resilience and leadership shown by the Ukrainian people and their leadership in resistance to Russian aggression.

In this discussion with host Robert Amsterdam, Harding shares his views on Putin's health concerns and decisionmaking, how the conflict has reordered global affairs, especially in European security cooperation, and has contributed to a further isolation of an increasingly intolerant, totalitarian state in Russia.

Before Russia invaded Ukraine, it intervened in Syria in 2015 to shore up the beleaguered regime of their ally, Bashar al-Assad. How did this experience inform upon Vladimir Putin's catastrophic decision to invade and attempt regime change of the democratically elected government in Kyiv?

This week's episode of Departures features Joby Warrick, a Pulitzer Prize-winning national security reporter for the Washington Post, and author of the book, "Red Line: The Unraveling of Syria and America's Race to Destroy the Most Dangerous Arsenal in the World." 

In their conversation, Bob Amsterdam and Joby Warrick discuss the contrasting experiences of Russia's relatively successful military intervention in Syria, with the catastrophic setbacks they have encountered in the invasion of Ukraine, which in recent days has called attention to horrific war crimes committed by the Russian military.

Through the indiscriminate targeting of residential areas and hospitals, Putin's destruction of infrastructure is designed to cripple Ukraine. Instead, the outcome has been devastating for Russian forces. Warrick argues Russia's systems are not just corrupt at the official level, but importantly at the military level, where platoons lack command and control, and forces can't operate ground support for armored battalions.

But do these corrupt institutions explain Russia's failures? Or was the chaos of the Ukraine invasion primarily an issue of poor intelligence and the isolation of the Russian leader? Warrick and Amsterdam debate how the blame falls and how it will make peace negotiations more difficult and more protracted.

For more than one thousand years, the Roman Empire ruled over a vast territory that was  unprecedented in both scope and scale. When it finally did fall under pressure from barbarian invasions and internal political divisions (among many other factors), many historians argue that the Romans sowed the seeds of their own demise.  Is the same set of processes now happening in the West?

The historian Peter Heather and the political economist John Rapley have come together to interrogate this question in their excellent new book, "Why Empires Fall: Rome, America, and the Future of the West."

In their discussion with Departures host Robert Amsterdam, Heather and Rapley explain how the forms of antiquity and modernity may have changed dramatically between the fall the of the Roman empire and the current buckling of Western hegemony, but nevertheless, how so many parallels continue to bear truth. Chief among them has been the global pivot towards nationalist populism, with the movement of labor and capital to the periphery, there's been a traditionally destructive rush to preserve the status quo ante.

What may be done about the current trends, as much as they resemble the fall of Rome, remain quite unclear.

In early December, the administration of US President Joe Biden convened a mostly virtual democracy summit, in which some of the world's largest economies were invited to participate and provide a clear framing of the agenda - and a clear poke in the eye of China and Russia.

In response, Chinese state media trolled Biden with Harry Potter jokes about the fallibility of democracy as a system, and then went back to their regular efforts to redefine international norms and present its top-down authoritarian system as not just legitimate but ideologically superior to liberal multiparty democracies.

This week we're very excited to have Toronto Star reporter Joanna Chiu join the podcast to discuss her book, "China Unbound: A New World Disorder," which presents eight different case studies of recent tensions and conflicts Western countries have had with China's rise which help illustrate this fundamental question of how Beijing is reacting to a series of challenges.

Chiu's book examines Canada's infamously naive experience with China and the arrest of the "two Michaels," but also looks at the encroachment on Hong Kong, the persecution of underground churches, Australia's economic dependence, and the vast expansion of China's surveillance police state.

Taken altogether, we can see China's drive toward authoritarianism as being shaped from the distrust of past colonial experiences, but the new world order they are creating - with little effective resistance - leaves many questions open.

As we approach the one-year anniversary of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, a number of journalists and authors have published highly detailed chronicles from the battlefield, stories of resilience and heroism of the Ukrainian resistance, and geopolitical analyses across the spectrum. But quite few of these books view the war through Russian eyes, understanding the thinking that motivated the decision to declare war, and how everything thus far has so clearly defied their expectations.

This week we're pleased to feature the veteran foreign correspondent Owen Matthews, whose new book, "Overreach: The Inside Story of Putin and Russia’s War Against Ukraine" investigates the historical roots of the conflict from Moscow's perspective, detailing the fog of extreme paranoia around Vladimir Putin and how perceptions of the Western threat and convictions of Ukrainian weakness led the country into disaster.

"What is objectively bad for Russia is not necessarily bad for the siloviki - the men of power around Putin," says Matthews in his conversation with Robert Amsterdam. "Why is that? Because they got the Russia they wanted, they want a Russia that is cut off from the West, with an elite that does not have divided loyalties that does not earn its money in the West or spend its money in the West. (...) They really are convinced that this is a defensive war against Western aggression."

Less than Putin being driven by imperial ambitions to rebuild a new Soviet Union, Matthews sees more evidence of his ethno-nationalist orientation, that he genuinely believes that he is "saving" the Russian speaking world from Western aggression - and from there, a cascading series of miscalculations begin to take shape.

A fascinating book on the world's most pressing geopolitical crisis, Owen Matthews writes with clarity and a personal presence that brings deeper understanding to this most important conflict.

In the past, when insurgencies challenged the power of the state, they did so from a position of occupying physical territory. But in today's wildly unregulated post-truth environment and hyperconnected society, the space that they occupy is virtual - and most democracies are not well prepared to deal with these often violent threats to the hegemony of representative government.

Dr. David Ucko, a Senior Visiting Research Fellow at King's College, has recently published a fascinating new book addressing these issues titled, "The Insurgent's Dilemma: A Struggle to Prevail." Joining Robert Amsterdam in this podcast discussion, Ucko explains how extremist groups have become increasingly successful at challenging the preexisting norms and agreements that societies have, often using clever humor and familiar tropes to "break down the memetic defenses" of their audience and get people to entertain anti-democratic messaging, among other toxic ideological positions.

"The image that my work on infiltrative insurgency conjures up is that of a Trojan horse," said Ucko, drawing comparisons with political parties which have ties to armed wings. "You have a strictly anti-democratic party using the democratic openness of the state to achieve power in the government, but then they follow its anti-democratic agenda to dismantle the system from within."

Amsterdam and Ucko further discuss the challenges of how democracies must attempt to balance the participation of parties which do not pose a threat to the system itself, how democracies can sustain the myth of a nation state while dealing with rampant Russia-sponsored social media campaigns, and how counter-insurgency now has to involve "deeply epistemological questions of trust in authority."

In October of 1973, Israel's existence as an independent state was shaken to its core when Egyptian and Syrian forces crossed into the Sinai Peninsula and Golan Heights, triggering a conflict of sprawling geopolitical scale. This week, in October of 2023, following an unprecedented series of violent terror attacks against Israel by the Palestinian group Hamas, the nation once again finds itself in existential crisis - with similarities to the past conflict too numerous to ignore.

Five decades later, public understanding of the conflict, its causes, and its protagonists is evolving as more and more materials and archives are declassified and made available to researchers. Taking advantage of these incredibly valuable resources comes the first new book on the Yom Kippur War in decades, authored by Uri Kaufman, titled, "Eighteen Days in October: The Yom Kippur War and How It Created the Modern Middle East."

Speaking with Robert Amsterdam on the Departures podcast, Kaufman explains how the book represents a culmination of 20 years of research, including deep dives into English, Hebrew, Arabic, Russian, and German archival source material to draw exceedingly detailed and unforgettable portraits of the main characters who found themselves at the center of the war.

Kaufman also shares his perspective and analysis of the current turmoil and commentary on the complicated political scenario making further escalation likely. The author points out that "the first casualty of war is not truth, although that is a close second. The first casualties are the assumptions you had going into the conflict."

Faced with challenging and intractable problems from climate change to civil conflicts to terrorism, it is tempting for many of us to look to the heavens, with billionaires pouring their resources into space exploration, expansion, and even dreams of colonization. 

But this is a major mistake, argues Professor Daniel Deudney of Johns Hopkins University in his fascinating new book, "'Dark Skies: Space Expansionism, Planetary Geopolitics, and the Ends of Humanity."

Deudney's perspective is that the "space age" race toward developing these technologies has mainly resulted in multiplying risks for the survival of humanity itself, from hypersonic missiles being seen as space weapons, to competition for control and influence far beyond our atmosphere.

"Space is an inherently violent environment," Deudney argues in his conversation with Robert Amsterdam. We are occupying a miraculous oasis of life, an enormously unique and special place, surrounded by trillions of miles of desolate and inhospitable vacuum. In terms of the complex geopolitical questions, our society is very ill-prepared for the conflicts that will be associated with space activity.

The counterintuitive argument of Deudney's book? Forget about space, and get our ship in order here on earth first.

There's an old Soviet joke that goes something like "the future is certain; it's the past that is unpredictable" which continues to have an eerie resonance today, as revisionism seems to be on a constant assault against past events which are challenging or complex for some people to accept based on modern social mores and values.

In his new book, "The War Against the Past: Why The West Must Fight For Its History," the renowned sociologist Frank Furedi takes aim at those commiting these acts of cultural vandalism and denounces, in quite strong terms, the damage and disservice they are doing to our society by projecting these modern sensibilities upon the historical record.

In this conversation with Robert Amsterdam, Furedi expands on his thesis and delves into some of the examples of victimhood and "grievance entrepreneurs" surrounding the twisting of narratives from events more than two centuries ago. When the past is rendered toxic, Furedi argues, we begin to live in an inhumane society, one where time is divided into a bad past and a rightly engineered future, and which splits people into shamefaced identities and victim identities. The author makes a call to arms to fight back, to celebrate heroes, to stop apologizing, and to embrace history, warts and all.

Throughout the most recent intensifying conflict between Russia and the West over Ukraine, there is a common assumption that the Russian leadership is wielding its "energy weapon" to break apart European unity and advance its interests.

While that may be partly true, it would be a huge mistake to assume that such a vast industrial chain of inputs, labor, refining, and transportation of these goods lay in the hands of so few people, argues Prof. Margarita Balmaceda in her new book, "Russian Energy Chains: The Remaking of Technopolitics From Siberia to Ukraine to the European Union."

In her conversation with Robert Amsterdam, Dr. Balmaceda of Seton Hall University argues that for many, the flow of Russian energy exports of oil, gas, and coal often represent opportunities which are happily exploited more than constraints and threats as energy weapons.

The rise of numerous Ukrainian oligarchs who took advantage of energy transit were able to transfer this to political influence, forever shaping regional dynamics that we can see playing out today, among numerous other examples. Oil and gas certainly are the lifeblood of Russian politics - but it is not a force under the sole discretion of Vladimir Putin.

As this coming February will mark the third anniversary of Russia's invasion and occupation of Eastern Ukraine, there is already a clear and tangible impact upon the geopolitical challenges faced by the United States and her allies in Europe in terms of their roles in the international system.

This week Departures with Robert Amsterdam is pleased to welcome back past guest Michael Kimmage, noted historian, former State Department official, and Associate Professor of History at the Catholic University of America in Washington DC. In this conversation we review his excellent new book, "Collisions: The Origins of the War in Ukraine and the New Global Instability," which critically examines the contributing causes to the outbreak of the war and measures the irrevocable ways in which the conflict has altered the course of US strategic engagement in the international sphere.

In his book, Kimmage argues that the war has shattered three critical assumptions - that European peace was permanent, that Europe could continue to sustain this stability without heavy US involvement, and lastly, that Russia would be consigned to a peripheral role. With those assumptions now gone, Kimmage and host Robert Amsterdam discuss what we can expect next.

Ilya Ponomarev is one man who knows the costs of crossing Vladimir Putin. In 2014, he was the only member of the Russian Duma who voted against the annexation of Crimea, and then was forced into political exile, eventually becoming an entrepreneur in Kyiv, Ukraine.

Tonight, as Russian tanks began entering the outer neighborhoods of the Ukrainian capital, we speak with Ilya again to get a sense of how people are preparing for the worst and hoping for the best in this besieged city, and what we can expect to happen in the coming days.

We are no longer living in a unipolar world of US dominance, argues India's brilliant former Foreign Secretary Shivshankar Menon in the latest episode of Departures with Robert Amsterdam, but neither have we transitioned to multipolarity or whatever is coming next.

Former Ambassador Menon's new book, "India and Asian Geopolitics: The Past, Present," is slightly misleading in its title, in that it implies a regional study, when in fact his insights, analysis, and proscriptions are truly global in their validity.

In this discussion with Robert Amsterdam, Menon addresses the sweeping changes which have undergone Asia in the past few decades, including the rebalancing between India and China, and makes a strong argument for the enhancement and expansion of Mumbai's integration and engagement with the international system.

Menon expresses his concern over the spread of rising nationalism and nativism in many countries, which he argues often restricts their ability to negotiate and successfully engage with other nations to make progress on the world's most pressing issues.

A truly fascinating discussion with one of the world's most experienced diplomats.

The saber-rattling from Moscow over Ukraine has grown deafening in recent weeks. Hours before we recorded this episode, Vladimir Putin appeared on television threatening "retaliatory military-technical" measures while amassing some 175,000 troops on the border of Ukraine, asserting that Russia "has every right" to invade and start a war. Evelyn Farkas, a former Obama administration defense official, summarized the West's response in a tweet "Putin just declared war on Ukraine (pretending it's war against the US and its allies, provoked by us)."

To get some meaningful insight, we turn to our man in Kyiv, Ilya Ponomarev.

Ilya Ponomarev is a former member of the Russian Duma who most famously was the only member to vote against the annexation of Crimea - an act for which he was effectively expelled from the country. 

In this conversation with Robert Amsterdam, Ponomarev shares his views about the potential scenarios of a second Russian invasion, why he sees the human and military costs as forbiddingly too high, but how nevertheless we are living through an attempt by Putin to cement a legacy and upend the post-Cold War world order.

The early period of the Cold War in Africa includes some of the most shocking episodes of foreign intervention by the US Central Intelligence Agency, to the point that many of these histories would seem a bit too farfetched for Hollywood. 

Such was the chaos in 1960-1961, right around the time that Congo achieved its independence from Belgium. American and Soviet paranoia was an all-time high. Sidney Gottlieb, a CIA scientist who would later become famous for his LSD mind control experiments, found himself meeting with the station chief in Léopoldville carrying vials of poison, with a promising young head of state named Patrice Lumumba viewed as a potential threat.

This is the incredible tale explored in rapturous detail in the new book by Foreign Affairs editor Stuart A. Reid, "The Lumumba Plot: The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War Assassination." Reid's book presents one of the most compelling narratives from this period of time, tracing the involvement of the CIA before, during and after the chaos surrounding the assassination of Congo's first Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba, an event which would send Congo on a sharply different path of misgovernance and squandered opportunity for less than clear benefits.

In his conversation with Amsterdam, Reid discusses his process of writing the book and some of the most surprising revelations, from Soviet incompetence to American miscalculation, and the catastrophic outcomes which followed.

Before becoming one of the world's most recognizable heads of state, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was a comic actor and entertainer, whose most famous show, "Servant of the People," imagined him in a role he would one day, unbelievably, come to hold in real life.

But how was it possible for someone with so little political experience to unify and mobilize such an intense outpouring of patriotism of his fellow citizens and, arguably, the creation of a new Ukrainian civic identity in response to the Russian invasion?

According to a new book by co-authors Olga Onuch and Henry Hale, Zelensky's rise is one that was paralleled by that of Ukraine's post-Soviet development as a culture and society. In many ways, the authors argue, it could be any Ukrainian president to wear this mantle, as it is a public force. Zelensky is “a product of a Ukrainian culture steeped in the same sense of civic national belonging and duty that he advocates, advances and now symbolizes.” 

Henry Hale joins in conversation with Robert Amsterdam about this exciting new book and how they see the conflict playing out with some difficult realities on the horizon.

Many of us have wondered what it would be like to be a real spy. Not necessarily the James Bond-esque car chases and shootouts, but the real practice of exercising tradecraft in the field, recruiting and handling assets, and maintaining such a complex web of relationships between your colleagues, family, and sources.

There could possibly be no better book to take us deep into this world than the latest release by Douglas London, titled "The Recruiter: Spying and the Lost Art of American Intelligence."

London, who was a 34-year veteran of the CIA, shares highly personal and courageous details in this memoir, which makes for such a fascinating read.

London takes us from his earlier Cold War days up through 9/11 and the dawn of the war on terror, which saw an unfortunate shift within the intelligence community toward more militaristic covert action and paramilitary operations that undermined traditional espionage. And with this shift, also came a decreasing level of accountability for who is responsible when things go wrong, something London wrestles with clear moral clarity and no excuses for the mismanagement he witnessed.

Along with this memoir comes a series of clear-eyed recommendations that should be taken very seriously to reform and recover the reputation of the clandestine service.

To rise to power within the rigidly authoritarian party bureaucracies of the Soviet Union and China is a feat accomplished only with great strategic acumen, backhanded political maneuvering, and, sometimes, with a certain level of violence.

On this week's episode of Departures with Robert Amsterdam we are very pleased to feature Joseph Torigian, an assistant professor at the School of International Service at American University in Washington and the author of the new book, "Prestige, Manipulation, and Coercion: Elite Power Struggles in the Soviet Union and China after Stalin and Mao."

Drawing on fresh insights from historical archives and expansive field research, Torigian's book picks apart the commonly assumed myths of how these reformers came to power via intra-party democratic processes and instead highlights the often flawed and aggressive personalities which shaped these elite power dynamics - with more than a few inferences which can apply to today's leadership in Moscow and Beijing.

There is a certain trend of narratives regarding the Russia's invasion of Ukraine that are understood as gospel in the West. And when analysts or academics stray outside those narrative lines, they are targeted with intolerance and all sorts of unfounded accusations. The fact is that we don't seem to be able capable of a wide range of debate of events in Ukraine during wartime given the extraordinary stakes of the conflict and the immoral, expansionist violence propagated by Vladimir Putin's Kremlin. But this extreme position robs of further understanding.

This week's Departures podcast features Glenn Diesen, a Norwegian professor of political science and the author of "The Ukraine War & the Eurasian World Order."  In this conversation with host Robert Amsterdam, Prof. Diesen discusses Russia's war in Ukraine from different perspectives, seeking to understand how the conflict has placed new pressures on the international order. Diesen argues that we have entered into a period of absolutism, with social divisions being ignored within Ukraine, and both Russia and the United States increasingly acting within a zero-sum game of total victory or total defeat which disincentivizes peace, which is very unfortnate and very dangerous for the wider world.

The tremendous velocity of history that Ukraine has experienced since independence to the Maidan revolution to the catastrophic war brought on by Russia's aggression often tends to be sold and told in neatly packaged narratives to the West - a heroic tale of a plucky democracy breaking from from the yoke of an authoritarian past. But the reality, as always, is much more nuanced, complex, and messy.

This week we are pleased to feature an interview with Volodymyr Ishchenko, the author of the fascinating collection of essays, "Towards the Abyss: Ukraine from Maidan to War." Ishchenko, a sociologist based at Berlin’s Freie Universität, offers a critical examination of Ukraine's trajectory post-Maidan revolution and asks probing, intimate questions about moral leadership and the future political model that the people of this nation at war are still seeking and negotiating.

While making no excuses for Russia's brutality in the war, in this conversation with Robert Amsterdam, Ishchenko brings criticism to bear on the leadership from the left-leaning school of thought, examining the costs of ignoring history, misrepresenting identities, and other factors which have fed the growth of nationalism in Ukraine at the cost of other sectors of the society.

Formulated by PRC think tanks in the mid-1990s, China's official slogan of the "peaceful rise" sought to calm Western fears regarding its blossoming economic, military, and political power as the nation resumed an outsized role in global affairs. However the mood did not last long, as in the later years of President Hu Jintao's administration, policies hardened into a more aggressive, militaristic stance, and then was continued by the personalistic regime of President Xi Jinping, as China sought to project power abroad to boost popularity of the regime at home.

There are few people more qualified to examine this period than Susan Shirk, a professor at the University of California San Diego and the former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State in the Bureau of East Asia and Pacific Affairs. In her latest book, "Overreach: How China Derailed Its Peaceful Rise," Shirk takes apart some of the most common myths and narratives held by observers of China - namely that the "peaceful rise" was a deception instead of an intention, but this was not the case.

Shirk explores the numerous and complex domestic factors guiding of Chinese foreign policy, while rejecting the premise that all decisions stem from the personal whims of Xi Jinping and his agenda for Chinese primacy. Xi does not enjoy any sort of full control over China, Shirk argues, but sits atop a complex, competing system of institutional imperatives, such as weiquan (sovereignty rights defence) and weiwen (stability maintenance). These imperatives often produce policies at odds with Xi's preferences, and leave China with a government that shouldn't be considered a rational unitary actor.

In crafting policy responses to China's growing power and influence, Shirk warns against overreacting in ways that weaken the ability of the US to compete. In other words, stay true to the principles of a free and open market democracy.

The state behaves in ways that are not directed by and are sometime at odds with the preferences of the leader, particularly in the areas of , or, broadly, international and domestic security.

 She takes a contrary view to those who would locate the source of Beijing’s behaviour purely in terms of Xi Jinping’s mission to centre China on the world stage. Instead, she notes that friction over the same issues analysts now frequently associate with Xi began much earlier than his term. These tensions have worsened under Xi, but they are not merely a product of his leadership. Nor, she argues, is Xi totally in control.

The role of foreign correspondents, especially during times of war, can be extraordinarily important not only in shaping public perceptions and strategic decisionmaking at the highest level, but also in informing on revolutionary shifts in social norms, as these reporters find themselves bringing their personal lives into the public and the newsmaking process into their own relationships.

In Deborah Cohen's kaleidoscopic ensemble biography, "Last Call at the Hotel Imperial," the reader is given unprecedented access to the personal lives of legendary American reporters John Gunther, H. R. Knickerbocker, James Vincent “Jimmy” Sheean and Dorothy Thompson as they reported on the rise of fascism in Europe and the gradual impending horror of what was to come.

In her conversation with Robert Amsterdam about the book, Cohen, who is a history professor at Northwestern University, discusses the incredible intimacy of how her subjects experienced the cultural changes that were taking place in the background in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. Cohen describes it not only as a geopolitical history told through these colorful and glamorous journalists, but a book of personal history, of people discovering that they could not live the way that their parents did, and how the actualization of these new personal freedoms interacted with their careers.

Several years ago, Hakan Bulgurlu was at the top of his game. He was serving as CEO of Arçelik, a multi-billion dollar corporation. He and his family, including three young children, were enjoying a great life with frequent international travel. But he was also deeply troubled by the raw data he was seeing professionally concerning the rapidly deteriorating climate situation. And when he would speak up about these concerns, he found that people wouldn't listen and wouldn't act. So, he made a momentous decision to prepare himself to summit Mount Everest and bring attention to the cause.

In his new book, "A Mountain to Climb: The Climate Crisis: A Summit Beyond Everest," Bulgurlu takes us deep inside the harrowing details of his trip to Everest in 2019, which turned out to be one of the most deadly years in terms of climber fatalities. 

Interspersed with the tale of the expedition, Bulgurlu's book explores the roots of the environmental crisis we find ourselves in, including interviews and commentary from climate activists and campaigners, biologists, scientists, filmmakers, academics, economists, entrepreneurs, global leaders and innovators. In this gripping account of his journey, Bulgurlu describes the challenges he faced in reaching the summit, and the challenges we all face in protecting the planet and the future of humanity. 

Ilya Ponomarev, a former member of the Russian Duma, joins Robert Amsterdam to discuss recent developments in Russia's war in Ukraine and the rapidly diminishing prospects for Vladimir Putin.

Some autocracies come and go, but others have a seemingly infinite shelf-life, showing a structural resiliency to any efforts at reform or democratic change that is strong, durable, and long lasting.

More than 20 years ago, the rock star political scientists Lucan Way and Steven Levitsky wrote a paper examining the characteristics of successful autocratic countries, and advanced a hugely influential theory of competitive authoritarianism and hybrid regimes.

Now, in 2022, they are back with a terrific new book called, "Revolution and Dictatorship: The Violent Origins of Durable Authoritarianism," which explores why the violent social revolutions in countries like China, Cuba, Iran, the Soviet Union, and Vietnam led to durable regimes.

Co-author Lucan Way, a professor at the University of Toronto, joins the Departures podcast today to discuss the book with Robert Amsterdam, exploring their idea called the "reactive sequence," referring to how the intensity of international reaction and pressure ends up strengthening these regimes.  Prof. Way and Amsterdam discuss how this relates to the current predicament of balancing sanctions with accommodation, and how successful foreign policy and support for improving rule and law democracy lies somewhere in between.

The story of the rise of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco in 1936 is often overshadowed by that of the country's civil war and its entanglement across the other major developments in Europe at the time. But Spanish fascism was also driven by an enduring set of beliefs - which were so thoroughly odious and absurd - that it is a significant challenge to unravel how so many came to support the dictatorship and permit its genocide.

Sir Paul Preston is among the greatest living historians on this period in Spain, and the Departures podcast was fortunate to host him on a discussion of his most recent book, "Architects of Terror: Paranoia, Conspiracy and Anti-Semitism in Franco’s Spain."

In his conversation with Robert Amsterdam, Preston explores the rather insane alleged scheme for world domination by a non-existent "Jewish-Masonic-Bolshevik Conspiracy," and how so many people bought into this false propaganda leading to the slaughter of half a million people. Despite the fact that Spain had only a tiny minority of Jews and Freemasons, Franco and his inner circle were ardent believers in this fabricated conspiracy and spread the notion that the survival of Catholic Spain. With this conspiracy, there were also the establishment's economic interests, which required the complete elimination of all Jews.

A harrowing history of a hidden holocaust, Preston's book highlights how so much danger comes with disinformation, and how the most extreme ideologies can enter the mainstream.

From the late-nineteenth century until the mid-1930s, Vienna was Europe's undisputed powerhouse of ideas. But along with the exhilirating achievements of Freud, Wittgenstein, Mahler, and Klimt, there were also darker forces emerging in parallel which have had their own negative impact on modernity, from organized anti-Semitism to ethnonationalism ideologies.

These complex tensions are explored in detail in Richard Cockett's excellent new book, "Vienna: How the City of Ideas Created the Modern World." In this discussion with Robert Amsterdam, Cockett explains how the Habsburg emperor, Franz Joseph, permitted such intellectual flourishing to occur, as the rapid influx of Jews and other groups and their assimilation into the Austrian middle class via commercial and educational success augmented intellectual curiosity, discovery, and experimentation throughout the city.  Viennese café and salon culture also helped to foster schools of thought, as students and professors would furiously debate disputed major questions of the day into the wee hours.

The conditions for this fervent intellectual incubation of course was not to last, and we're all aware of what followed. Cockett's thoughtful history of the city in this period highlights what we can learn about encouraging greater intellectual vitality, pluralism, and civilizational development.

In the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks, a sweeping transition took place across the international counter-terrorism space. Instead of responding to threats with law enforcement, numerous multilateral bodies instead respond with preemptive actions based on uncertain information - lists of names for sanctions are drawn up, very often directly violating basic due process and rights of individuals.

This week on Departures we are proud to feature Gavin Sullivan, the author of "The Law of the List: UN Counterterrorism Sanctions and the Politics of Global Security Law." In his conversation with Robert Amsterdam, Sullivan discusses how his practice as legal counsel to individuals who had been unproperly listed by the UN Security Council informed his approach to analyzing and defining this sanctions list, and the often devastating impact the clumsy procedure can have on people's lives.

Featuring numerous interviews with officials directly involved in the UN counter terrorism response apparatus, Sullivan's book presents a unique and valuable interdisciplinary study of global security law - law which is constantly changing and evolving before our eyes today.

As the war in Ukraine grinds into yet another brutal winter, narratives are shifting in Western capitals regarding the nature of the conflict, its goals, and the longer term meaning of the war in terms of the balance of power on the European continent. Looking back to the war's origins, it is important not only to examine the build-up of Russia's aggression against the sovereignty of its neighboring states, but also the decades of miscalculations and lost opportunities specifically by the United States during the post-Cold War period.

This is the central focus of the new book published by Jonathan Haslam, Professor Emeritus of the History of International Relations at the University of Cambridge and one of the UK’s most distinguished and respected experts on the former Soviet Union.

In his latest book, "Hubris: The American Origins of Russia's War against Ukraine," Haslam observes that a gross and systemic lack of understanding by Western allies concerning Russia’s intentions and likely actions is ultimately to blame for the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian War. In this discussion with Robert Amsterdam about the history of NATO expansion and covert US activity within Ukraine, Haslam argues that even up to the Maidan crisis of 2014, the US could have backed away and avoided the negative outcome which will be dealing with for generations.

There is a strong argument to be made that the root of Palestinian identity can be traced back to the 1936-1939 Great Revolt, which united rival families and communities, melded urban with rural, and joined rich and poor together in a struggle against Zionism and the British Empire.

This is the starting point in Oren Kessler's exquisitely detailed new book, "Palestine 1936: The Great Revolt and the Roots of the Middle East Conflict," which takes the reader inside the earliest days of Jewish migration from Europe during the interwar period, and raises numerous questions about the key events which continue to shape the modern Middle East conflict today.

In this conversation with Robert Amsterdam, Kessler approaches the protagonists in this history with great care and empathy, and sheds light on the numerous complexities behind critical "what if" moments, from the Balfour Declaration and the White Paper of 1939. In light of the horrific October 7 attacks and the continuing conflict in Gaza, an interrogation of the historical roots of statehood in the region such as Kessler's book are a revelation and education.

As China approaches the 20th Party Congress to be held at the end of the year, President and CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping is aggressively promoting his government's superhuman achievements and infallible contributions to the glory of the state, making his case for an inevitable third term, and perhaps, leadership for life.

But the problem with long-running leaders of authoritarian systems is that after a while, the people they surround themselves with are no longer the most trusted, the most competent, and the most influential - instead a pattern emerges that the leader prefers to be surrounded by weak, marginal officials who pose no threat to their leadership.

This is the core argument of a fascinating book by Victor Shih of the University of California San Diego called, "Coalitions of the Weak: Elite Politics in China from Mao's Stratagem to the Rise of Xi."

In his conversation with Robert Amsterdam, Shih shares fresh insights and fascinating details of the late Mao period based on a deep investigation of archival documents and data, showing how the most well networked officials were pushed aside in favor of politically tainted and incapable functionaries, leading to two generations of weak central leadership - a vacuum which provided the opening for the rise of Xi.

Forget tanks, missiles, and soldiers. The forms of warfare predominantly being used against the United States today are much more often unconventional and irregular, such as large-scale offensive cyber actions, disinformation campaigns, spying, economic subversion, and smaller armed conflicts via proxies. 

This is a deeply worrying trend, argues Seth Jones, author of the terrific book "Three Dangerous Men: Russia, China, Iran and the Rise of Irregular Warfare," because the United States is very poorly prepared to defend itself and is instead still stuck in the old world and over-invested in the means of traditional military conflict.

In this conversation with Robert Amsterdam, Jones discusses the main findings of his book, exploring various similarities from China to Russia to Iran in terms of how irregular warfare is used and deployed in support of their interests on a daily basis, and how response and countermeasures from Washington have been uninspiring.

Jones and Amsterdam also discuss the problematic disregard the United States has shown toward its allies in recent years and the waning influence of its soft power. Jones argues that there has been a corresponding impact on the challenges of forging successful partnerships to withstand the onslaught of irregular warfare tactics, and the many areas in which the US should look to improve to address these security gaps.

The Muslim world, despite its sprawling and complex history, is largely understood by outsiders to fall within the Shia or Sunni category, or among the conflict between. This is not just misleading, but also obscures a much more fascinating and colorful human history of the Middle East which continues to shape events today.

In this episode of Departures with Robert Amsterdam, we're pleased to feature Barnaby Rogerson, the author of "The House Divided: Sunni, Shia and the Making of the Middle East." Rogerson, who is a seasoned British author, television presenter and publisher explores these complex themes and history, sharing stories dating back to the death of the Prophet Muhammad in 632, the accidental coup against his son, and fast forwarding right up to the Iranian revolution to draw insights on the religious cleavages which have taken root in the region in modern times.

In a week in which most eyes are on the US election, there are other meaningful elections which also merit close examination.

On October 27 Japanese voters expressed their pent-up frustration with the growing list of scandals associated with the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and ended the party's near 70-year long rule. LDP and their partner Komeito failed to reach a majority in the lower house of the Diet, earning just 215 seats out of 465. With most of the other ascendent parties refusing to enter into coalitions with LDP, the new Prime Minister Ishiba Shigeru faces serious vulnerabilities to his agenda, and for the first time in decades, a new level of uncertainty has been introduced to Washington's top ally in Northeast Asia.

The reality, however, is altogether much more subtle in terms of what Japanese voters are saying. This week we welcome back Tobias Harris, who is the founder of political risk advisory firm Japan Foresight and the author of the Observing Japan substack. Tobias last appeared on Departures in 2020 to discuss his excellent book, "The Iconoclast: Shinzo Abe and the New Japan."

Issues of religious freedom, in theory, should not be controversial or disputed - there is a general consensus among public opinion that all peoples should have the right to worship according to their beliefs. And yet, it seems that we are going backwards on this basic right, with governments and political parties all around the world seeking to weaponize divides among faith communities to their partisan advantages and dubious agendas.

This week on Departures we are very privileged to have the special guest Robert Destro, law professor at the Columbus School of Law of Catholic University, who served as Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor at State Department from 2019-2021.

Destro discusses with host Robert Amsterdam many of the global challenges he faced in his official role in the previous administration, from China to the Middle East, as well as the Ukrainian government's campaign of persecution against the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. (Disclosure: Robert Amsterdam is an international lawyer representing the UOC).

During one specific week in December in 1941, a series of events and calculations led to Adolf Hitler's disastrous decision to declare war on the United States, putting the conflict on the eventual path toward the outcome we now regard with familiarity.

The sequence of events leading from the bombing of Pearl Harbor by Japan to the entry of the United States into the war were of course very far from clear cut or certain at the time, and instead played out with the high-tension drama of a Hollywood thriller.

The story of what happened during these four days is examined and retold with unusually gripping detail and surprising revelations by historians Brendan Simms and Charlie Laderman in their excellent new book, "Hitler's American Gamble: Pearl Harbor and Germany's March to Global War."

Simms and Laderman's book takes readers inside the blow-by-blow strategic thinking by Hitler and his advisors that led to this momentous and ultimately catastrophic decision with extraordinary and engaging detail, as well as the reaction to events in the Roosevelt White House.

Hitler's American Gamble invites readers to imagine a broad range of potential alternative outcomes which could have taken place during this week, many of which were just avoided by the slimmest of margins. As news of the attack in the Pacific spread, leaders among the various countries did not all have the same access to information or understanding of the meaning of the events - and in the end, it would be these asymmetries that would prove critical.

As the war in Ukraine rages on into its second year, there remains little consensus or understanding of how the conflict could be resolved outside of military outcomes, and a persisting misunderstanding on behalf of the West regarding Ukraine's own internal preexisting social divisions.

This week we're pleased to have a special guest, Dr. Nicolai Petro, a professor of political science at the University of Rhode Island, whose new book, "The Tragedy of Ukraine: What Classical Greek Tragedy Can Teach Us About Conflict Resolution," tackles these questions with unique literary framing.

The conflict can not be understood merely on an institutional or rational level, but also must be considered in light of the emotional dimensions, Petro argues. Diving into the texts of Greek tragedies, Petro finds numerous illuminating parables from ancient Athenian society which can serve as frameworks to heal deep social trauma and create more just institutions. In this fascinating conversation with host Robert Amsterdam, Petro explores how he got the idea to approach the war from this perspective, how he responds to recent changes in Ukraine since the outbreak of war, and how the country may endeavor to secure its future.

The end of slavery in the United States was an arduously complex process, which beyond simply the issues surrounding cultural and social norms, not to mention the conflicts remaining at the end of the Civil War, the dismantling of established racist institutions began with critical cases going through the courts.

In historian Kate Masur's new book, "Until Justice Be Done: America's First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction," this history is explored with unprecedented detail and archival research, bringing to light the stories of the African American activists and their white allies, often facing mob violence, courageously built a movement to fight these racist laws.

Discussing her book on the podcast with Robert Amsterdam, Masur explores the politically courageous pursuit of the 1866 Civil Rights Act and the Fourteenth Amendment by the Republican Party, and how the movement’s ideals became increasingly mainstream in the 1850s despite a series of rigged court decisions.

Throughout the global supply chain, there are chokepoints where states and stakeholders exploit an opportunity to extract rents - and this includes nearby the origin of critical minerals, diamonds, and other natural resources in relatively ungoverned areas of Africa such as the Eastern Congo. Peer Schouten, who is a senior researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies and who has spent years working in the DRC and the Central African Republic, has now published one of the first studies comprehensively documenting these roadblocks, how they are politically managed, and what they mean in terms of funding rebel groups and violent conflicts which have become such a high-profile geopolitical concern.

With more than a decade's worth of field work, Schouten's excellent book, "Roadblock Politics: The Origins of Violence in Central Africa," challenges a number of longstanding Western presumptions about state formation and conflict in the region. His findings highlight connections between multinational corporations selling you cell phones and electric vehicles with the hyper local economies nearby mining sites, from women-run restaurants and bars to basic state services like healthcare and schools.  In this critique, Schouten's book finds much to be desired with efforts by the donor community and foreign governments to restrict trade of goods associated with conflict, finding that rebel groups have easily circumvented such attempts to influence power dynamics. International observers have failed to understand, Schouten argues, that logistics in the region is not characterized by chaos, but instead by “rather consistent rules and logics of control."

Throughtout the post-colonial period in Africa, there has been no shortage of economists, non-governmental organizations, diplomats, and aid organizations flying in from the United States and Western Europe with an astonishing array of prescriptions and reform plans to dramatically transform the economies and governance structures of these young nations. With few exceptions, these interventions failed miserably, and arguably made things much worse in a number of countries.

This is the focus of Bronwen Everill's new book, "Africonomics: A History of Western Ignorance and African Economics," which explores the history of how the well intentioned foreigners often "enforced specifically Western ideas about growth, wealth, debt, unemployment, inflation, women’s work and more, and used Western metrics to find African countries wanting."

In this discussion with Robert Amsterdam, Dr. Everill discusses the findings of her book, explores how new players such as China and Russia are now taking over influence in the region, and what the future role should be for collaborative economic development and trade with the region.

In June 2013, the journalist Vincent Bevins found himself covering a mass street protest in São Paulo, originally sparked by a rise in bus fares. As the tear canisters rained town and violent clashes with police began, the protesters began chanting "Love is over. Turkey is here," making a intentional connection to another uprising taking place across the world in Gezi Park in Istanbul. These parallel events, along with other major upheavals such as the Euromaidan movement in Ukraine, mark the highlights of a critical decade in modern history in which more people took place in mass protest events across the world than at any other time. And what we are left with after these disruptive, destabilizing events take place, how it reshapes the state and reconfigures political representation in the aftermath, is quite far from predictable and much less clear in terms of the public understanding of their meaning.

This is the focus of Bevins' excellent new book, "If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution," which ambitiously presents a history of the 2010s, globally, through the lens of popular uprisings and their discontents. Bevins, who also joined the Departures podcast in 2020 to discuss his other book, "The Jakarta Method" (more relevant now than ever, read it!), explains how he wrote If We Burn with distinct openness and neutrality, which allows readers to approach the work from many angles, and draw their own understandings of how these popular uprisings so often failed to produce the outcomes that they aspired to, and what can be learned for the future.

As tensions continue to rage between Russia and the West over its build-up on the Ukrainian border, Departures turns to expert Mark Galeotti for his analysis on the situation and a discussion of his brand new book, "The Weaponisation of Everything: A Field Guide to the New Way of War."

Galeotti, who has spent years researching and writing about Russian organized crime and the security state, argues that despite the buildup of a traditional military conflict potentially in Ukraine, overall the world is seeing the practice of warfare change.  Shooting wars are much too costly, from both an economic and social aspect, and hybrid warfare, disinformation, hacking, assassinations, sanctions, cultural exchanges, and even business and financial press provide a whole new series of battlefronts where rivals may clash.

Galeotti and Amsterdam talk about the limits of sanctions, and why in many cases they don't work against larger nations like Russia. Although politically palatable, making the appearance of action at little cost to the policymaker, it sidesteps issues which are much more important.

As Russia's catastrophic war in Ukraine lurches its way toward another winter, an interesting debate is emerging regarding some of the fundamental ideas of Russian nationalism which has underpinned Vladimir Putin's casus belli, often including specifically misleading characterizations of history being used as a mobilizing force.

In considering the relative complacency if not broad support for the war among the general public in Russia, there has been a consistent narrative spun out by the state - one of Western conspiracies, distrust, and patriotic duty.

This week on the podcast we welcome Dr. Jade McGlynn, the author of the excellent new book, "Memory Makers: The Politics of the Past in Putin's Russia," who has accomplished a seminal work of research on the subject.

In her conversation with host Robert Amsterdam, Dr. McGlynn argues that peope's understanding of the past is becoming a core part of their identity, and this in turn becomes a security issue. "A historical disagreement is not just a historical disagreement, but instead is seen as almost an existential attack," Dr. McGlynn says, and this is a type of mobilization that can be observed in many countries outside of Russia as well.

"Most people want to belong to a community, they want to feel like they have somewhere they belong that can trace its heritage into the past, and feel good about that belonging," McGlynn argues. Unfortunately, many of the more traditional political figures appear to have lost touch with the importance of belonging, she argues, and left this space open for manipulation by demogogues and other extreme forces.

There is no historical precedent for a former US president who is facing a more complicated web of both civil and criminal liabilities than Donald Trump, let alone for a former president who again intends to run in the upcoming election. To help sort through this mess and understand what the cases mean and what kind of risks they pose to his candidacy, Departures is pleased to welcome special guest Karen Friedman Agnifilo. Friedman Agnifilo is a deeply experienced lawyer, the host of the Legal AF podcast, a guest legal analyst for CNN and other media, and formerly served as Chief Assistant District Attorney of the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office.

This week we're doing something different at Departures - Robert Amsterdam surrenders the host chair and joins as the interviewee to discuss Amsterdam & Partners LLP engagement on behalf of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, which is facing an existential threat following the Rada's passage of Draft Law 8371. Amsterdam discusses how the draft law represents a blatant violation of basic human rights and how this persecution conflicts with Ukraine's EU ambitions.

Every day in the media we are told that the United States is irreparably polarized. That lines have been drawn, political opinions have been weaponized into tribal identities, and that apart from an ever-slimming section of undecideds, we are locked into this dreadful stalemate.

That's why it's so refreshing to read a more optimistic take on how people can still be persuaded, how hearts and minds can still be won over despite the algorithms and toxicity of our public discourse. Today we're very honored to feature a special guest, the author and journalist Anand Giridharadas, whose new book, "The Persuaders: At the Front Lines of the Fight for Hearts, Minds, and Democracy," presents a very thoughtful take on what it takes to make change in US politics at the local level.

We spoke to Anand the morning after the 2022 US midterms, which brought a surprisingly stronger performance from the Democrats than expected in key races, though certainly not  universal. In his discussion with Robert Amsterdam, Anand highlights some key takeaways from this election, discusses his research of "deep canvassing" in campaigns, and gives some insights into why so many candidates focus on "mobilizing the faithful rather than wooing the skeptical."

In a space that is usually consumed by anger, rage, and contention, Giridharadas' book offers positivity, making an important argument for candidates, parties, and movements to broaden their outreach, not by diluting their principles but by communicating effectively to include instead of exclude.

The period during which 'Il Duce' Benito Mussolini ruled Italy as prime minister from 1922 to 1943 remains as confusing and contested today as it did during the disastrous postwar years, due mainly to a series of myths about the man, his government, and facism in general.

In the new book from the decorated historian Paul Corner, "Mussolini in Myth and Memory: The First Totalitarian Dictator," the author ruthlessly interrogates these myths, and explores what it means when we have such a large section of the Italian population continue to live in a fictional memory of a past "when the trains ran on time."

Speaking in his interview with Robert Amsterdam, Corner explains that his book is about illusion, about the creation of towering myths. "We don't remember things to get them right," he says, "we remember them to get them wrong."

Addressing the mistaken claims that Mussolini was somehow "strong" and "decisive" in memory, Corner documents all the incredibly inefficiencies, incompetence, corruption, and violence perpetrated by his highly repressive regime during these decades. There was not a sliver of "good governance" in fascist Italy, but a chaotic and intolerant regime which sought power, first under revolutionary socialism before switching to far-right nationalism, and has benefitted improperly from a historical narrative that has wrongly rehabilitated by parties seeking to benefit politically in today's environment.

Though we often view China's increasingly activist foreign policy in its trade wars, territorial disputes, and frequent collisions with Western states, less attention is paid to its gradual and quiet expansion of influence in the 'Stans of Central Asia.

But it is here, among the populations of Kazakhstan, the Kyrgyz Republic, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan where one can see the true evolution of the Belt and Road Initiative, and watch the in progress departure of Russian influence over these former Soviet republics which has only accelerated since the war in Ukraine.  In this episode of Departures we welcome the Raffaello Pantucci, the co-author along with the late Alexandros Petersen of the remarkably unique book, "Sinostan: China's Inadvertent Empire."

Pantucci and Petersen, the latter of whom was tragically killed in an attack in Afghanistan before the book's publication, underwent more than 10 years of field research and travel to draw this incredibly detailed portrait of the evolution of China's geo-economic footprint in the resource-rich Central Asian basin. With a highly visual narrative story-telling framework, Sinostan offers readers an unprecedented look inside how many Central Asian citizens and officials feel as this accidental empire has been built up around them.

As Russia's conflict with Ukraine grinds deep into year 2, there are signals of impatience and exhaustion among the country's key supporters in the United States and Europe, and increasing chatter about "stalemate" and pushing Kyiv to the negotiating table. But even for the staunch isolationists who view the outcome of the conflict through the short-term lens, there are deep and profound implications for the future of the global economic system at stake, argues journalist Maximilian Hess in a new book.

Hess's new book, "Economic War: Ukraine and the Global Conflict between Russia and the West," does not dwell long on the political motivations or the strategic calculations of the military conflict, but instead focuses on how the response after the 2014 annexation of Crimea prompted a rapid expansion of sanctions, trade disputes, and barrage of financial weapons between Russia and the West. 

These tensions have escalated to the point that the current war shouldn't be viewed so narrowly as merely a land grab or a NATO-phobia in Moscow. Instead its meaning is much broader. it should be seen as a war against the primacy of the US dollar, the Bretton Woods system, and the overall economic order which has guided commercial relations among nations for the past half century. The response to the February invasion, beyond providing assistance for Ukraine to defend its sovereignty, has been to collectively punish Russia and damage its economy - a strategy that is loaded with future liabilities.

"Even if one doesn't accept all those arguments, or is a US isolationist, the argument I try to put forward is that if we lose this war, particularly if it then drives a wedge between the United States and Europe, that will be the beginning of the end of the international economic order which not only the West but so much of the world has benefitted from," argues Hess in this interview with Robert Amsterdam.

Eastern Europe, from the northernmost reaches of of the Baltics and down to the Balkan statelets strung along the Adriadic Sea, is one of the most perplexing, conflicted, and interesting regions of the world which still today remains the subject of myths and misunderstanding. Since the end of the Cold War, one could say that the region barely exists as a concept except in historical memory - but it also stubbornly clings to numerous shared cultural features and experiences that continue to bind it together.

In historian Jacob Mikanowski's fascinating new book, "Goodbye, Eastern Europe: An Intimate History of a Divided Land," the author tackles a subject of almost impossible proportions and approaches it with a taut, elegiac personal history, painting an unforgettable portrait of the region.

In this conversation with host Robert Amsterdam, Mikanowski discusses how he approached the research of such a challenging and diverse geopolitical subject, sweeping from the dark ages to the more modern political faultlines which have seen bloodshed, barbarism, and incredible human resilience and innovation.

China's recent political history has taken place at breakneck speed. A historic economic transformation, the consolidation of centralized power not seen since Mao, and the eager but then later truculent participation in the global economy. How do we measure this progress and its costs, and how do we measure its shortcomings?

The numbers matter, and they are rarely presented at face value. This is the point of the most recent book by Jeremy Lee Wallace, "Seeking Truth and Hiding Facts: Information, Ideology, and Authoritarianism in China."

Wallace argues that China's system of excessive control has created numerous statistical distortions which lead to numerous blind spots. These blind spots only seem to be expanding in recent years.

In his discussion with host Robert Amsterdam, Wallace talks about how Xi's responses have only made it worse with "aggressive anti-corruption campaigns, reassertion of party authority, and personalization of power--is an attempt fix the problems of the prior system, as well as a hedge against an inability to do so."

The gradual breakdown of the prevailing geopolitical order has brought to the fore numerous far right parties and politicians across Western democracy, bringing with them some very old (and very dangerous) tropes of anti-Semitism.

In light of these frightening trends, it is more important than ever for us to confront the often difficult and challenging reality of the Holocaust, how this "irrational emotive energy" allowed it to happen, and also analyze some of the early signals that were ignored.

On this week's episode of Departures, we're pleased to host the accomplished historian Dan Stone of the University of London, whose new book, "The Holocaust: An Unfinished History," takes the reader on a riveting journey into some of the most unforgettable narratives and archival findings, challenging many of the assumptions carried by most of us.

In his conversation with Robert Amsterdam, Stone speaks at length about the Nazi's demonization of Jews as a some sort of root cause of modernity's problems, and how this absurd narrative took hold despite clear evidence of the Jewish community going through their own ideological and cultural splits over many of the same issues.

A fascinating and fresh history of a well known but poorly understood dark period of history, Stone's book brings enlightening arguments with a clear and lucid voice.

Is Xi Jinping the most powerful political figure in the world? Or are his efforts to secure tighter control at home and project influence abroad more a sign of underlying weakness?

As Xi sails toward an unprecedented third term at the 19th Party Congress in China, Departures is pleased to feature special guest author Frank Dikötter whose new book, "China After Mao: The Rise of a Superpower," presents a compelling and detailed portrait of the major events which led us to today.

In his discussion with Robert Amsterdam, Dikötter discusses how China presented its recovery plan on 40 years of economic transformation based on reform and opening up to the world, but finds that there was actually very little reform and even less opening up.

"There's a major misconception that I hope will be corrected when readers go through my book," Dikötter says. The idea that Xi Jinping is some sort of dictator who wants to go back to the Mao period - and if only we could go back to where we were before Xi Jinping, maybe there was a chance for China to develop in a different direction. Highly unlikely, Dikötter argues, as since as far back as 1972 the party has shown a very clear commitment to the monopoly on power and controlling the economic means of production.

"What we are getting from Xi Jinping is hardly a departure from what has happened under other leaders," he says.

Dikötter's rigorous examination of rare government archives makes this book stand out for its detailed and colorful history of this period, and contributes enormously to understanding how the West has failed to anticipate China's vision for the world order.

As Xi Jinping concludes the 20th Party Congress and becomes the first Chinese leader to secure a third term, there is arguably no one in a position quite so powerful and influential in global politics. But who is Xi Jinping and what does he really want? 

This is the question tackled by two veteran German journalists, Stefan Aust and Adrian Geiges in their terrific new book, "Xi Jinping: The Most Powerful Man in the World."

With clear-eyed analysis which avoids some of the usual pitfalls found in US approaches to China, Aust and Geiges draw a deeply detailed portrait of Xi's rise and the foundations of his ideological drive. In this conversation with Robert Amsterdam, the two co-authors discuss the level of risk Xi has encountered by pushing China's growth into a more aggressive, confrontational posture, and debate the various scenarios we can see coming in the new several years as the third term gets underway.

It was once the dream of starry-eyed proponents of globalization that the increasing pace of trade, travel, and exchanges of ideas would lead to a "borderless" world of reduced conflict and cosmopolitanism. Instead, the opposite has happened, as the lines and demarcations between nations struggling to manage their conflicts have become paramount and subject to escalating risk.

Whether it's China building islands in the South China Sea or Russia seizing the arctic or even the UK having a Northern Ireland problem after Brexit, borders are increasingly becoming more hostile environments. Professor Klaus Dodds explores the issue with tremendous clarity in his fascinating new book, "Border Wars: The Conflicts that Will Define Our Future."

Joining Robert Amsterdam on this episode of Departures, Prof. Dodds argues that even though we have international legal frameworks such as the Law of the Sea, it has already been demonstrated that some countries pick and choose legal principles as lawfare (such as building islands), we don't always choose to penalize violations, while there is a constant reshaping and reinterpretation of borders making it much more difficult to separate and demarcate sovereign territories with clarity.

Dodds' book provides a fascinating look into the future, where climate change, pandemics, and digital surveillance are all contributing to changes in our physical world that are certain to be the source of challenging conflicts in the years to come.

In the age of information and with growing calls around the world for democracy, Vladimir Putin, Lee Kuan Yew and Alberto Fujimori are redefining what it means to be a dictator in the 21st century. Through the manipulation of information, media, and using censorship, this new breed of despots are covertly monopolizing power under the guise of democracy. 

Sergei Guriev and Daniel Treisman's new book, "Spin Dictators: The Changing Face of Tyranny in the 21st Century," explores these new methods of discipline, postmodern propoganda, and global pillage to control the masses, while counselling the way forward for democracies and the global community at large. 

In his discussion with Robert Amsterdam, Guriev explains the difference between spin and fear dictators, and how free societies tendencies towards innovation can save democracy; as well as current political structures in Israel and Georgia, debating how they could be at risk of sliding into this new version of authoritarianism.

His research highlights the importance of current democracies holding themselves accountable for missteps as a means to reduce whataboutism by these dictators for the purpose of mass manipulation. 

Following the October 7 attacks on Israel by Hamas terrorists, President Joe Biden began to refer to America's support for the Israeli offensive into Gaza as one that was equally aligned with US support for the war in Ukraine. This was a narrative that proposed that in both cases evil forces had attacked the innocent, and that it was America's role to help them both defend themselves.

But the analogy is only partly legitimate, and also opens up room for quite a lot of criticism of the direction of American foreign policy generally in the post Cold War period. This brings up difficult questions about what Washington is trying to accomplish in these conflicts, and also points to the weakening level of public and moral support for those goals.

Today we are featuring a very special and distinguished guest, Samuel Moyn, who is  the Chancellor Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University. Moyn is the author of the recent book, "Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War." 

During this podcast interview, we discuss his most recent article for Prospect Magazine, titled, "America’s undoing."

That article can be viewed here: https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/world/united-states/64135/americas-undoing

When we think of networks of organized crime, we tend to place them in their own category, occupying an "underworld" of its own rules separate from the norms and laws that guide our states operate in societies.

In his new book, "Gangsters and Other Statesmen: Mafias, Separatists, and Torn States in a Globalized World," Danilo Mandić, a political sociologist at Harvard, challenges this assumption and points to numerous examples of crime and criminal networks being interwoven and overlaid on numerous governments and separatist movements, which of course often has a major impact in terms of how these states are formed, how peace is brokered in conflicts, and how national identity is formed.

Mandić's book presents fascinating first-hand field research from some of the world's most contested regions, including disputed territories of Kosovo and South Ossetia, where he was interviewed mobsters, separatists, and policymakers along major smuggling routes. In this interview with Robert Amsterdam, Mandić discusses how often mainstream academic discourse has ignored the influential role of non-state actors in the criminal world, and argues that these groups can be a fateful determinant of state capacity, separatist success, and ethnic conflict.

As China and the U.S. increasingly compete for power in key areas of U.S. influence across the Middle East and African continent, competition has grown in linear succession, and is increasingly adversarial. Often cynical of Chinese involvement and intentions, the U.S. points to blunders of the Belt and Road initiative, fears of neocolonialism, and the support of nations of interest that might lead to the resurgence of terrorist groups, as justification for criticisms.

But are Beijing's ambitions really so nefarious?

In her new book, “China's Rise in the Global South: The Middle East, Africa, and Beijing's Alternative World Order,” Dawn Murphy posits that China’s growth in Africa and the Middle East in the post-cold war era, should be understood as evidence of its desire to develop an alternative world order that will allow China to interact with these two regions on its own terms; and that China is mostly cooperative with the liberal order—particularly within the security and military realms.

In this podcast discussion with host Robert Amsterdam, Murphy highlights China's record as a business competitor, its foreign policy approach (including divergence in norms around corruption and political meddling), how its foreign policy plays out in public perception across the globe, and why US policy towards the country seems to remain mostly unchanged across administrations, even when ideologies vary greatly between Democratic and Republican administrations. 

In the weeks following the October 7 Hamas terror attacks against Israel, Departures with Robert Amsterdam welcomes special guest Prof. Ron Robin, the President of the University of Haifa in Israel, who provides an assessment and analysis of what the country is going threre and what paths we see coming ahead.

Amsterdam and Prof. Robin discuss the absence of governance which has taken root in recent years, the challenges facing a society under strain, as well as the rising tides of international anti-Semitism we've seen in response to the terror attacks.

When we talk about the gig economy, we usually are referring to rideshare drivers, errand runners, and all sorts of service industry freelancers. But we rarely think about the freelancers and non-state actors which take part in wars and armed conflict, doing the sometimes violent fighting and often disruptive hacking, as playing a very important role in how some of the world's most intractable competitions for influence develop into hybrid wars and eventually into conventional wars between nation states.

Joining the podcast this week is the author and journalist Anna Arutunyan, whose new book, "Hybrid Warriors: Proxies, Freelancers and Moscow's Struggle for Ukraine," explores the myraid ways in which Vladimir Putin's approach to the invasion of Ukraine earlier this year was colored by his history of deploying a chaotic and decentralized network of "rogues, businessmen, enthusiasts, mercenaries and political technologists" into the separatist conflict.

In her discussion with Departures host Robert Amsterdam, Arutunyan offers her vision of Moscow's rationale at the time which led to the decision to invade, how Putin's decisionmaking process left open several blindspots, and what happens when hybrid wars escalate out of control.  Arutunyan's book offers surprising insights to many Western readers, drawing the granular relationships between civilians, non-state actors, and the Kremlin, which is often lost in our wider understanding of how Putin’s administration works and how it has strategically approached its war on Ukraine.

With the global economy going through an unprecedented energy transition away from fossil fuels, demand is exploding for critical minerals essential for batteries and electrification, such as copper, cobalt, lithium, and rare earths. Accompanying this demand is a new geopolitical playing field, most commonly dominated by China, taking place in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

In his excellent authoritative new book, "Conflict Minerals, Inc.: War, Profit and White Saviourism in Eastern Congo," expert researcher Christoph N. Vogel unpacks the complex causal relationships between so-called "digital minerals" and the corruption and violent conflicts which have radically disrupted stability in the region.

In his conversation with Robert Amsterdam during this episode, Vogel draws from a richly detailed history of colonialism to the formation of the current state to shine a harsh light on failed efforts by Western NGOs and governments, pointing toward new thinking about the sorts of standards which could be implemented that may be more effective in developing safety and stability for the communities living near these incredibly lucrative mineral reserves.

In recent years, the theme of decolonization has become a thriving industry. It dominates academia, it frames historical narratives, and makes its way into the deepest corners politics and culture to the point that it is inescapable. But what has decolonization done for us lately, asks Cornell University Professor Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò in his new polemic, "Against Decolonisation: Taking African Agency Seriously."

In his conversation with Robert Amsterdam, Táíwò explains how the decolonization narrative lost its way, its meaning, and its purpose when it has been so indiscriminately applied to everything from literature, language and philosophy to sociology, psychology and medicine. This relatively short period of history, Táíwò says, has been overwhelmingly exaggerated to the point that it has deprived Africans of agency and continues to hamper thought and innovation.

Pointing to the example of South Korea forming a national identity and history in which Japanese colonalism was an episode, not an origin story, Táíwò and Amsterdam also discuss the many ways in which modern authoritarians and despots in Africa use the decolonization narrative to engender further abuses upon their populations.

Táíwò's book challenges traditional thinking, and demands the reader to consider whether today’s ‘decolonization’ truly serves African empowerment, or if we need to broaden our understanding of a more complex history.

Today there are currently fewer global citizens living in open and free democratic systems than in 1989, a sobering fact underlining the rapid global expansion of authoritarian regimes around tthe world.

According to Moisés Naím, the world has made itself safer for tyrannical leaders to install themselves, often using the "three Ps" of populism, polarisation and post-truth, putting both fragile and established democracies at risk of extinction.

In Naím's latest book, "The Revenge of Power: How Autocrats Are Reinventing Politics for the 21st Century," it is argued that these environmental factors of propaganda and polarization are compounded by harsh economic circumstances, including inflation and inequality, placing greater pressure on democracies and raising public discontent with the state, paving the way forward for authoritarian opportunists.

In this podcast conversation with host Robert Amsterdam, Naím discusses and contrasts his experiences in Venezuela with the tragedy of January 6th in Washington DC, and points to the utmost importance of having a well informed citizenry and what can be done to regulate disinformation while exploring what other options should be explored to better protect the world's remaining democracies from tyranny.

From the Russian Revolution of 1917 to the chaotic disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991, there is a dazzling and disorienting array of histories. While many books detail the lives and politics of Soviet leaders, Karl Schlögel invites us to better understand the experience of the country through the lives lived by more common Russians, from the depredations of communal apartments, repression, and violence, to the more prosaic aspects of Soviet life - the relics and rituals of museums, the grandeur and intensity of gigantic public works projects.

In his new book, "The Soviet Century: Archaeology of a Lost World," Schlögel, who is one of Germany's most authoritative historians on Russia, presents a history that is not comprehensive or categorical, but instead personal. In this conversation with Robert Amsterdam, Schlögel discusses his approach to such a vast period with selection of coloful vingettes, taking the reader inside the Soviety experience with extraordinary depth and detail.

We can all agree that the global world order has become rather disorderly. We also seem to have trouble coming up with consistent and convincing explanations of what brought about this disorder, pointing useless at shocks such as the passage of Brexit to the Trump to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

But for political scientist Helen Thompson, the author of the excellent book, "Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century," the makings of our current geopolitical problems were cast deep in the faultlines of history going back to the end of the Cold War and, more recently, the departure from global economic orthodoxy observed from 2005-2008. 

Thompson argues that the process of democratization in many countries did not quite go as planned. There was not a massive enfranchisement of lower classes in many nations - instead we saw the rich and powerful become more rich and powerful, with a greater concentration of wealth and inequality taking place within democratic societies. 

"What we see by the 1990s is once again the rise of aristocratic excess," Thompson says in her conversation with Amsterdam. "We can see it in the United States with the growing importance of finance in campaigns and elections. (...) In terms of European countries, this aristocratic excess was primarily shaped through the technocratic elements of the European monetary union."

Thompson argues that the financialization of society laid the faultlines for the disruptive events we are currently experiencing and struggling mightily to overcome. A fascinating conversation with a deep thinker.

“Imagine that all of humanity stands before you and comes to this court and cries. These are our laws, let them prevail.” -Sir Hartley Shawcross, War Crimes Trials, Nuremberg, Germany, July 27, 1946

After discovering a former Nazi who belonged to the same killing unit as her grandfather and was the subject of a posthumous criminal investigation and concurrently a rehabilitation petition in Latvia, author Linda Kinstler began to deconstruct what these laws really mean when people are removed by time and memory from historical truths.

A phenomenal non-fiction debut, in “Come to this Court and Cry” Kinstler explores both her family story and the archives of ten nations, to determine what it takes to prove history in the uncertainty of the 21st century.

In this week’s Departures podcast, Robert Amsterdam and Kinstler discuss the implications of the neoliberal memory boom and unravel the perversions of law, when revisionism, ultra-nationalism and denialism can alter history and open rehabilitation to those who were never formally oppressed. As a new generation reckons with the crimes of the Holocaust and the shadows of the Cold War in a post-truth era, they examine what justice means when we no longer have a shared agreement of the basic facts.

The tremendous velocity with which modernity and technology has encroached on our social lives is underappreciated, shaping our understanding not only of critical events but also ourselves, as the world is flattened. A teenager in France or Brazil may see violent footage of the Ukraine war fed to them on TikTok, only to be replaced a moment later with dancing, music, and comedy, whatever they want - to the point that nothing matters, there is a lack of reaction, and there are no clear system of signals of do's and don'ts, and our society becomes untethered from collective community and public live.

These are some of the questions that the renowned French intellectual Olivier Roy wrestles with in his fascinating new book, "The Crisis of Culture: Identity Politics and the Empire of Norms."

In this interview with Robert Amsterdam, Dr. Roy discusses how in modern culture people no longer seek meaning, no longer seek explanation, and how there is no longer any desire to think in terms of values. The perceived correlation of two disparate events or traits is simply accepted with interrogation, the very concept of meaning is missing, and this presents a psychological crisis, Roy argues. 

In the absence of a shared culture, identity gets whittled down to a handful of traits, and everything becomes an explicit code of how to speak and how to act. And this becomes the driving engine of the politics of culture, polarization, and, in some cases, political extremism.

As world leaders gather in Scotland for the COP26 climate change summit this week, there's a tremendous level of scrutiny not over the ambitions but the shortcomings of the world's biggest sources of emissions.

This week, Departures is pleased to invite David Claydon, the founder of Kaya Group, which is an advisory firm which helps companies, investors, and governments navigate climate change policy and the decarbonization process.

Claydon, who will be among the delegates in Glasgow, is clear-eyed about the stiff challenges facing the major players. Xi Jinping will not be attending, so little progress can be expected from China. Russia shows only a passing interest and little ability to transition away from its fossil fuel economy, while India is not expected to deliver much in the way of promises. US President Joe Biden, meanwhile, arrives with a dearth of trust and credibility, with his reconciliation budget package held up by the Republicans and members of his own party.

Claydon points out that the pandemic has made COP26 all the more challenging.

"There was a lot of hope that the COVID vaccine distribution question would be a great test of solidarity between developed countries and developing countries," says Claydon. "But if it was a test, Western countries have failed it. The lack of distribution of vaccine has been another factor undermining trust between countries."

But we "shouldn't be too pessimistic," Claydon argues.  The US may not have the credibility to go to COP26 and issue demands, but that's not what COP26 is all about, it's all about each nation declaring what they intend to achieve and then keeping to that. And President Joe Biden, Claydon says, should be able to muster "just enough" credibility to follow through with the decarbonization goals set out this past Earth Day.

Following the end of World War II, Josef Stalin and Russia's leadership had a certain vision of the postwar order, one which ended up being quite different from reality. They had expected to maintain control over the whole of Europe, and have these gains of war legitimized and recognized by the United States - with specific emphasis on the carve up of territory concluded in the Yalta conference of 1945. But these burning ambitions for global power continued long after in the Khruschev and Brezhnev eras and came to define the cold war.

On this week's episode of Departures we are very excited to feature the noted historian Sergey Radchenko, whose book, "To Run the World: The Kremlin's Cold War Bid for Global Power," is a tour de force detailing the history of Kremlin thinking throughout this critical period.

With a strong focus on archival sources, Radchenko avoids ideological framing in his analysis of Kremlin decision-making, focusing instead on some of the surprising motivations and long-held beliefs of Russian leadership, prompting decisions which eventually turned the tide of US and global opinion against detente. Radchenko's book leaves open a number of questions about Russia's unmet desire for recognition on the global stage, many of which continue to provide relevant insight into Vladimir Putin's current appetite for war.

In an increasingly complex and fractured international system, the norms and expectations of how nations and markets interact is changing from one era into the next before our very eyes. 

That is the main focus of inquiry for Gary Gerstle, whose new book, "The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era," chronicles the 50 years of primacy of neoliberal thought in American politics before crashing onto the rocks of new ideological movements with the emergence of Donald Trump-style authoritarianism and Bernie Sanders-style anti-capitalism.

In this conversation with Robert Amsterdam, Gerstle, who is the Paul Mellon Professor of American History at the University of Cambridge and the winner of the "Book of the Year" by the Financial Times, explains that not everything that happens in politics can be understood in short election cycle periods, but instead we should be looking at the overall conceptions of political economy and the order these beliefs sustain.

Pointing to continuities of these orders, such as Eisenhower carrying on the New Deal system and Bill Clinton carrying forward with many core assumptions about trade inherited from Reagan, Gerstle argues we are in a moment of fragility and uncertainty, as once marginal voices in Sanders and Trump have now entered the mainstream. We are without a political order currently, and neither is democracy in a healthy state of competition, so what shall emerge next is unlikely to look similar to the past, as both left and right have lashed out against the free movement of capital, free movement of people, and both have different ideas of the role of the state in economic and social affairs.

The imposition of economic sanctions has become Washington's preferred method of expressing disapproval over the conduct of other states. But how effective are sanctions in changing behavior or achieving desired outcomes?

This week on Departures with Robert Amsterdam, we are pleased to feature the brilliant former diplomat Vali Nasr, the Majid Khadduri Professor of Middle East Studies and International Affairs at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in Washington, DC. Professor Nasr is a co-author, along with Narges Vajoghli, Djavad Salehi-Isfahani, and Ali Velez, of the book How Sanctions Work: Iran and the Impact of Economic Warfare.

In this insightful conversation, Nasr explores why Iran serves as a pivotal case study for understanding the role of sanctions in foreign policy, their limitations, and why they often fail to deliver the intended results. He also shares his expert perspectives on several critical geopolitical developments, including Israel's Gaza offensive, the fall of the Assad regime, and the internal dynamics within the Islamic Republic.

As 2023 draws to a close, it has become increasingly clear that there are profound misunderstandings and misapprehensions running amok in Western media narratives regarding the pecularities of the current state in China. That's precisely why there should be a high level of interest in a book of personal experience, nuanced narrative, and thoughtful observation from a Canadian academic who for a time played a unique role within China's state bureaucracy.

In 2017, Daniel A. Bell was appointed dean of the School of Political Science and Public Administration at Shandong University—the first foreign dean of a political science faculty in China’s history. The story of his time in this position is enormously illuminating, highlighting both the immense challenges and also the occasional positives, and told with a certain level of humor and empathy often missing from accounts of politically sensitive jobs in the era of Xi Jinping.

His book, "The Dean of Shandong: Confessions of a Minor Bureaucrat at a Chinese University," is a riotously fun, informative, and eye-opening tour through modern Chinese academia. In his interview with Robert Amsterdam, Bell recounts how if some of his more "constructive" takes on events in China were found to be inconsistent with the predominant narrative, he encountered isolation from Westerners who preferred their current understanding.

Often dismissed as the edge of the Russian or Chinese empires, Central Asia hosts a complex history that informs on present day atrocities including the Russian invasion in Ukraine, and the Uyghur concentration camps in China. It is through these current events, that Central Asia has become one of the most important geopolitical regions in the world. 

This week’s episode of Departures features Adeeb Khalid, the Jane and Raphael Bernstein Professor of Asian Studies and History at Carleton College, and author of the book, “Central Asia: A New History from the Imperial Conquests to the Present." 

In their discussion, Bob Amsterdam and Khalid dive deep into historical tensions between Russia and China for influence in Central Asia, particularly as the Belt and Road Initiative and other Chinese directed infrastructure projects take hold; and Russia's once favorable reputation is losing value throughout the region in light of their military attack in Ukraine.  

But will Russia's assault on Ukraine create an opening for China to increase its leverage over Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and the region at-large? Tune into this week's episode for expert commentary. 

A popular meme in Kenya goes something like this: everytime China visits, we get a hospital. When the US visits, we get a lecture. 

That's of course not an accurate picture of the competition between the West and China in the global South, but it does highlight a certain disconnect that can be perceived widely among many in these regions which have been included in the Belt and Road projects, or who have otherwise fallen out of favor in terms of their previous allies.

This week on Departures we are pleased to feature a conversation with the author Dr. Oriana Skylar Mastro, a Center Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and a Courtesy Assistant Professor of Political Science at Stanford University. Dr. Mastro's new book, "Upstart: How China Became a Great Power," is a tour de force examining how China was able to climb to great power status through a careful mix of strategic emulation, exploitation, and entrepreneurship on the international stage - which ended up being not so different from a startup business aiming to disrupt a ringfenced status quo.

Dr. Mastro's book is enormously helpful in challenging how we understand China's success and aims to offer insights on how the response from Washington and other Western allies to adjust to the geopolitical realities that lie beyond the newspaper headlines.

The Democratic Republic of Congo is one of the most resource-rich nations in the world, holding the largest deposits of critical minerals which will be key to the coming industrial transformation. But it is also a nation that is well into its third decade of war - a war that in many ways is forgotten, ignored, and buried away from public attention.

But one person who has been paying attention is Jason Stearns, a Senior Fellow at the Center on International Cooperation and Chair of the Advisory Board of Congo Research Group. In his exhaustively researched excellent new book, "The War That Doesn't Say Its Name: The Unending Conflict in the Congo," Stearns explores how the conflict has continued despite the 2003 peace agreement, with the fighting becoming a structural economic activity.

In his discussion with Amsterdam, Stearns doesn't hold back on the enabling role he has seen in the donor community, flooding the country with millions of dollars of aid while a narrow elite class has emerged among the military and security bureaucracy while the country has remained mired in war and poverty.

Stearns' sharp and insightful on the crisis in the Congo is informed by more than a decade of experience working there on the ground in human rights organizations, leading him to present very compelling theories of how conflict has subsisted, why peacekeeping efforts have failed, and how we should start to think differently about intervention in Africa writ large.

A highly recommended publication - go pick up a copy.

Amid a slew of headlines highlighting Vladimir Putin's efforts to expand Russia's footprint in Africa since the beginning of the Ukraine war, a certain narrative is emerging regarding Moscow's aims, tactics, and results in this crucial but often neglected region.

Is Russia's presence in Africa a threatening menace or merely an empty gesture? As it turns out, it is neither, argues Samuel Ramani, author of the excellent "Russia in Africa: Resurgent Great Power or Bellicose Pretender?"

Emphasizing the long established playbook and historical memory of the Soviet Union's support of decolonization and anti-apartheid stance, Ramani speaks with Robert Amsterdam about the underpinnings of current Russian policy in Africa, based on cyclical themes abandonment and return.

Beyond the recent high profile engagements of Wagner Group in countries such as the Central African Republic, Amsterdam and Ramani discuss the strategic shortcomings of Western sanctions policies, competition and cooperation with China, and intra-elite maneuvering following Yevgeny Prigozhin's criticism of Russian military leadership.

Democracy, in terms of its branding, has had a fairly rough decade.

Numerous authors we have had on this podcast have highlighted and explained its global decline, discussed the expansion of nationalist movements which have eaten away at rule of law and institutional integrity, and the frustrating resilience of some of the world's most established authoritarian leaders, who seem to weather every storm keep their grip on power intact. 

So it's such a refreshing change to pace to receive such a well researched and sharply argued case for optimism for the power of democracy to continue attracting those seeking freedom and opportunity from Charles Dunst in his new book, "Defeating the Dictators: How Democracy Can Prevail in the Age of the Strongman."

Dunst, who is deputy director of research and analytics at The Asia Group and an adjunct fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), says that he approached his book with the goal of offering a tangible roadmap for combatting autocracy, focusing on practical and commonsense ways that US foreign policy (and foreign policies of other leading Western nations) can be marshalled toward producing better democratic outcomes.

In this spirited discussion with Robert Amsterdam, Dunst explains how he sees immigration playing such a crucial role in helping democracies thrive, and how Washington, despite having to take a nuanced approach in dealing with allies which have hybrid qualities of both democracies and dictatorships, nevertheless has seen clear evidence of the enduring value of its soft power, continuing to be a promoter of rule of law, human rights, and equality. 

It was just three years ago when the Economist magazine ran a cover story on Taiwan, describing it as "the most dangerous place in the world." With intensifying competition with China and deteriorating global security following Russia's invasion of Ukraine, there are many arguments that continue to support that negative outlook. But that's not the vision for CY Huang, a veteran investment banker with FCC Partners and an expert in the semiconductor industry.

According to Huang, Taiwan benefits from its "Silicon Shield," the principle being that as long as the world needs Taiwan's dominant semiconductor production, Taiwan should be safe from foreign threats - though that level of security is tenuous and dependent on many other factors.

In this fascinating coversation with Robert Amsterdam, CY shares his perspective on the geopolitics of semiconductor production, how the new era of AI is driving demand for more high-end chips which can only be manufactured in certain locations, and the recent history of the island's relations with the mainland.

To celebrate the 150th episode of Departures, we held a live recording with a terrific group of invited guests in London.

We're grateful to John Lough, a former NATO officer, a Senior Vice President at the consultancy Highgate, and the author of the book, "Germany's Russia Problem," who provided introductory remarks.

Our longtime friend and colleague David Satter provided a presentation of his most recent book, "Never Speak to Strangers and Other Writing from Russia and the Soviet Union," and responded to questions from the audience.

And we were also fortunate to enjoy a special appearance by Ilya Ponomarev, a Kyiv-based entrepreneur and political advisor, who was able to offer unparalled insights into the conflict and give his take on how Putin is going to respond to the increasing pressures all around him.

The quality of the recording is unfortunately not the best we have had, but we are grateful for the strong showing of listeners who came out for the breakfast forum as well as grateful for all of regular audience listening from afar.

Among the slew of books that have come out recently on the war in Ukraine, there are few which take as broad a scope of the human experience of the soldiers, victims, and communities living on the front than the latest entry written by the war correspondent Christopher Miller.

In his book, "The War Came To Us: Life and Death in Ukraine," Miller bears witness to the brutality of this remarkable, unprecedented conflict, bringing the stories of those involved with profound empathy and vivid detail - not only from pivotal scenes on the front, but also going back more than a decade to the seeds of the war, the meaning of Ukraine's struggle for nationhood, and the propulsive resilience that binds the survivors from Bucha to Bakhmut and Mariupol and beyond.

In this conversation about his book with Departures host Robert Amsterdam, the FT correspondent comments: "I think this is a war that is more black and white than any war we have experienced since the Second World War. I do think this is a war that is more 'good vs. evil' than anything we have seen in the last 80 years."

In explaining his approach to war reporting and the complexity of objectivity in the midst of violent conflict, Miller comments: "I think it is powerful enough in some cases to explain what you are witnessing. In the book, I was able to do some things that I am not able to do in my daily reporting, which is to provide some context, some personal context and analysis based on my personal experiences and knowledge. (...) I do try to separate myself from the events, but there are moments where you just can't. Sometimes you do have to help, sometimes that means carrying someone. (...) At that point you can't say, 'sorry, I am a reporter.'"

A truly outstanding book from one of the greatest young war correspondents of our current era, we hope that listeners of Departures will pick up a copy.

War doesn't always look like it used to, with just tanks, missiles, ships, and planes. It also takes place online, and observers in the West are becoming increasingly aware of the need to increase cyber defense capacities as authoritarian states like Iran and China rapidly advance. 

This poses important questions for democracies around the world: do open societies have more difficulty in mobilizing cyber defense than closed societies? And if so, why and what can be done to course correct?

In this week's podcast we're pleased to feature special guest John Arquilla, co-founder of the Defense Analysis Department at the Naval Postgraduate School, and author of “Bitskrieg: The New Challenge of Cyberwarfare."

In their discussion, Amsterdam and Arquilla explore these questions and discuss Arquilla's condemnation of U.S. leadership's lack of mobilization towards cyber defense.

Arquilla argues that democracies have become canaries in a coal mine, as their reliance on cyber warfare mechanisms have been delegated to the market-based solutions of Silicon Valley and Boston area tech firms; and watered down legislation in government. 

Can the U.S. adopt a more nimble and effective approach to cyber warfare - or will authoritarian regimes continuing their rapid advances to gain the upper hand in cyber in the long run? 

Have a listen to the show and get in touch to let us know your thoughts.

The modern world's bottomless demand for precious metals originating in the mines of the Democratic Republic of Congo is covered daily in the news, from the supply chains underpinning the most common consumer electronics in our pockets to the most critical national security and future energy questions. But rarely are these extractive industries understood from the perspective of the people most directly involved on the ground.

In his excellent new book, "The Eyes of the World: Mining the Digital Age in the Eastern DR Congo," University of California Davis Professor James H. Smith explores how policy changes in the West aimed at eliminating blood minerals ended up engineering catastrophic civil conflicts and upended social frameworks. In this conversation with Robert Amsterdam, Dr. Smith shares how his ethnographic research informs on a different aspect of the digital age than what we are ordinarily confronted with, bringing light to the understanding of their role in global capitalism from those who dig the minerals from the ground to those who sell, process, and refine them.

It takes a certain kind of person to become a collaborator for Axis powers during World War II - a level of self-delusion and survival instinct that is off the charts.

In Ian Buruma's latest book, "The Collaborators," he paints in-depth portraits of three such figures - Felix Kersten (masseur to Heinrich Himmler and others in the Nazi elite), Yoshiko Kawashima (a cross-dressing Manchurian princess who spied for the Japanese) and Friedrich Weinreb (the “fixer” whose fellow Jews paid him to secure reprieves from deportation to concentration camps, only to be turned over to Nazi police). The strands that braid these individual's lives together often represent shocking moral failings - but also deeply human experiences.

In his conversation with host Robert Amsterdam, Buruma describes how he approached the structure of writing the book, what drew him to these three seemingly disparate figures, and how often first tellings of history are shrouded in self-deception by the subjects which can translate to common misapprehensions of who they really were.

History is not a single continuum. There are certain stretches in which momentous change occurs in a very compact timeframe. The forty-year period between 1490 and 1530 is one of these bursts of revolutionary change. In The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World, Patrick Wyman, a historian and the host of the popular podcast Tides of History, argues that the turn of the 16th century was a momentous moment in history when Europe began to break off from the rest of the world and “became recognizably the global power,” ushering in the era of imperialism and colonialism – “the central problem of world history in the last 500 years.”

Rather than studying the centuries-long process that brought us into the modern era, Wyman looks at a particularly eventful period which began this “Great Divergence.” Europe at the turn of the 16th century featured the invention of the printing press, great sea voyages, the rise of modern finance, extreme taxation, among other revolutionary developments. Of these, Wyman argues, the printing press – which allowed for the creation of mass media – is the single most important of these developments. Indeed, Colombus’ voyages were “a media event as much as they were a historical event. The two aren’t really separable.”

The period of 1490-1530 is especially notable for what Wyman describes as the “scaling effect.” While in the 21st century it seems almost obvious that a revolutionary invention would lead to rapid and massive scaling up. But at the turn of the 16th century, the rapidity of the scaling effect of everything from mass media to sea voyages “scaled in a way that would have been extremely foreign at this time.”

The Verge also tells its story through individuals which Wyman links with a broader theme. Famous figures such as Christopher Colombus and Martin Luther feature, as do lesser-known individuals such as the banker Jakob Fugger and printer Aldus Manutius. Wyman delves into an extraordinarily important period of European history that shaped our globalized present from multiple angles and refreshing nuance.

Ilya Ponomarev, who was forced into self-exile from Russia following his solitary vote against the annexation of Crimea, has spent years living in Kyiv supporting governance efforts and leading new ventures.

As someone who has directly interacted with Vladimir Putin and who has an intimate knowledge of the government's functioning and processing, his analysis of the current situation is both important and alarming.

According to Ponomarev, Putin is a "dead man walking," without option to escape his current predicament, but this of course still makes him very dangerous.

On the disastrous decisionmaking which led to the invasion, Ponomarev points out the Covid-19 pandemic as having severely narrowed Putin's available sources of information, leading him to depend on just two of his most hawkish advisors and relying on numerous low-quality history books which he has frequently cited in statements to media.

What direction will the war take from here? What can be the possible negotiated outcomes? Amsterdam and Ponomarev discuss in detail.

"100 billion people have lived on planet earth since our species evolved, and for all our archives, all our libraries, and all our museums, we have only the tiniest little sliver of any record of who these people were and what their lives were like," says Jon Grinspan in his conversation with Robert Amsterdam. "So the challenge of history is to live in the present, and try to connect with these human beings who came before us, try to understand what their meaning was."

And it is with this tremendous care and attention to detail that brings all the characters to life in Grinspan's excellent new book, "The Age of Acrimony: How Americans Fought to Fix Their Democracy, 1865-1915," which examines one of the most turbulent, polarized period of America's political history.

In their podcast discussion about the book, Grinspan and Amsterdam explore the striking similarities between the late 19th century and more contemporary events in the United States since Donald Trump's takeover of the Republican party, the 2021 insurrection, and the seemingly intractable partisan tribalism prevalent in politics today.

Though many people have described the past five years as "unprecedented" in US history, that's actually not true, argues Grinspan.

There is a deeper history of democracy in America that has been much more contested, he writes, focusing on the characters of radical congressman William “Pig Iron” Kelley and his progressive daughter, Florence Kelley. Looking at this family over the course of a critical half-century, one can see numerous lessons of what it cost the country to exit a period of tremendous dysfunction into a period of relative stability.