Cooperadio - The Global Cooperation Podcast

Within the last years, migration trajectories have increasingly expanded as migrants from Afghanistan and other countries have taken the risky and uncertain route to Europe. Prolonged war and life-threatening environments have forced people to leave behind their homes and seek refuge in other countries. On their way, migrants face numerous challenges and hardships that either enable or hinder their movement between borders.

Migrants are confronted with navigating their journey as they try to manage economic interactions and  social relationships in order to facilitate their endeavour despite undocumented migration trajectories. Without the necessary resources - both economic and social networks - undocumented migration is almost impossible and, for many, the reason why they are trapped in their unsafe homes.

Our guest for this episode is Hannah Pool. Together, we talk about the challenges and prospects of refugees and their experiences on their journey to reach Europe and Germany. We follow the routes that people take to seek refuge and how they manage their journey despite everything they encounter. Hannah Pool is currently a post-doctoral researcher at the Max-Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne. She received her PhD at the University of Cologne on migration trajectories of people coming from Afghanistan to Western Europe via Iran, Turkey, Greece, and the Balkan route. Previously, she was a doctoral student at the International Max-Planck Research School on the Social and Political Constitution of the Economy (IMPRS-SPCE) from 2017 to 2021. In her dissertation Hannah examined how social relations facilitate economic interactions among migrants, their families, smugglers and various other actors on the route from Afghanistan, Turkey, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Greece to Germany.

On a global scale, private property rights function as the foundation of our current liberal world order. Laws and regulations provide safety and stability for nation-states and the individual, ensuring social order and free trade by creating accountability and liability. In this ever globalizing world, these pillars have become a reliant tool to turn to in case of fraudulent or unfair activities.

At the same time, not all global citizens have benefited equally from the liberal property regime and legal protection set up during the 19th century. Vulnerable and marginalized parts of the global community are often held to different standards and exposed to unpredictable external dynamics. So the questions remain if first, this liberal legislative framework created in the 19th century is as stable and functioning as we may often think? And second, is it time for improvement and adjustment to create something more sustainable and fair for all?

Our guest for this episode is Dr. Zsuzsanna Török who has been a senior research fellow at the Centre for Global Cooperation Research and part of the research group “Legitimation and De-legitimation in Global Cooperation” from March 2021 until February 2022. At the Center, her research project focused on the Critique of the Liberal State, Private Property and Legal Reform: Late 19th Century Experiences and Their Legacies. Furthermore, she is a Post Doc at the University of Vienna at the Faculty of Historical and Cultural Studies. Zsuzsanna received her Master and PhD in History at the Central University in Budapest. She has extensively researched the history of nationalism, state-building, and the history of the Habsburg Monarchy in global contexts. Her research project focuses on the Habsburger Monarchy and liberal capitalist private property in the 19th century within a transnational framework.

For feedback or questions we welcome your comments directed at @GCR21 on Twitter under the hashtag #cooperadiopodcast or you can get in touch via e-mail: cooperadio@gcr21.uni-due.de.

Further reading & sources:

On Monday, 7 March 2022, Cooperadio hosts Janine Herbert and Julia Fleck spoke with peace researchers Professors Tobias Debiel and Herbert Wulf, about their analysis of the causes and motivations behind the Russian invasion of Ukraine, how to get out of the spiral of escalation, what possible scenarios for an end of the war could look like, and the consequences of the current confrontation for the future of the European security architecture and the international system as a whole. 

Contact us:   

E-mail: podcast@gcr21.uni-due.de     

Twitter: @gcr_21    #cooperadiopodcast

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“Everybody deserves dignity, a place to live and a nationality” - this is the normative approach of the UN Refugee Convention from 1954 as a response to the events of WWII. The convention has set global standards but, undoubtedly, a lot has changed since. According to our guest, Prof. Bidisha Biswas, the convention is not up to date. The valuable idea that there is a collective global responsibility for refugees is not adequate to a reality where the countries that have the most resources to take that responsibility are not the countries that are normally hosting the refugees.

86% of refugees are hosted in developing countries and not in resource-rich countries. The question of who is responsible has to be solved first, otherwise the question of who is a refugee is rather futile. Are countries in the Global North silent about certain circumstances, because they are actually happy about countries in the global south taking refugees? What is influencing refugee and migration policies?

Another weakness of the convention is that it does not include climate and economic refugees. Most people are not destined to be famous or become a surgeon — what do we do with “ordinary” refugees who want a better life for themselves and their families?

And if we believe in human dignity also during a pandemic, how do we get vaccines in refugee camps? These and more questions will be addressed in our mini series on migration and the pandemic.

This episode’s guest Bidisha Biswas joined the research group "Global Cooperation and Diverging Conceptions of World Order" as a Senior Research Fellow at the KHK/GCR21. In addition she is a Professor of Political Science at Western Washington University at the Department of Political Science. She was also a Franklin Fellow in the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor at the United States Department of State. She holds a Doctorate in Government and Politics from the University of Maryland, College Park.

Her project at the Centre is focused on the Global Refugee Regime, looking at how refugees are framed in different countries focusing on the South-Asian region, specifically India, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, who have not signed the UN refugee convention, but are all sending and receiving refugees to various degrees. She is investigating the conditions under which refugees are seen as being deserving and not deserving of refuge and how that shapes national policies. Since South Asia has no regional framework or any kind of mechanisms for refugees (like Europe, Africa and South America have) she is looking at continental responsibilities, India's leadership in migration policy and regional power shifts.

Bidisha’s recent works include:

Online election campaigns, online shopping, working from home, and video conferences with people from all over the world - whether we like it or not, since the start of the pandemic, the internet determines our lives more than ever before, both online and offline. States and international organizations are increasingly confronted with the question of who actually regulates the internet, whether it even can be regulated (and how), and what role companies like Amazon and Facebook play in this.

Our guest for this episode is German Chancellor Fellow Nathalia Sautchuk Patrício, who is doing comparative research about the German and the Brazilian experience with promoting and protecting the open internet through net neutrality and the fight against illegal online content. With her, we talk about the hopes and burdens of net neutrality, which responsibilities internet companies like Facebook should have, and how Brazil can pose as a good example for Germany in terms of internet governance. 

Nathalia has a passion for technology and using it to improve peoples' lives. She has been working in the field of internet governance for 7 years, for the DiploFoundation or LACNIC (Latin America and Caribbean Network Information Centre), and she has given lectures at institutes including the Universidade Presbeteriana Mackenzie, the Virtual University of State of São Paulo, and the Senac University, among others. She has published extensively on topics related to Internet Governance Initiatives and internet usage mainly in Latin America.

While it seemed that the big climate issue had finally gained momentum both nationally and internationally, the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic appears to have diverted public and political attention again. However, there are upcoming negotiations regarding climate and biodiversity addressing the larger sustainable development arena. And the incentive, at least from the stakeholder side, is to bring the climate issue back to the centre of attention. Our guest for this show is Felix Dodds. We talk with him about the role of agencies, the changes of online negotiations due to the pandemic and the use of corridors for the COPs.

Felix brings years of experience with climate conferences and the involvement of stakeholders from civil society to the table. Currently, he is a Senior Fellow at the Global Research Institute and a Senior Affiliate at the Water Institute at the University of North Carolina. For 20 years, he was the executive director of the NGO 'Stakeholder Forum for Sustainable Future'. 

Questions touched upon in this episode include: 

What do insurance companies have to do with climate change?

Which role plays the global market when it comes to better climate regulations?

How has the pandemic and the use of online-communication tools changed/ impacted negotiations  and the inclusion of stakeholders?

How can stakeholders influence the arena of negotiations and make their voices heard?

And finally, why should you definitely bring a multiple socket to a climate conference?

Was the Covid-19 crisis the boost the world needed to come back together?

Covid-19 was a very significant incident in bringing global cooperation back on the table at a time of enormous national egocentrism. The crisis confronted industrialized countries with an existential threat - something that countries in the so-called “Global South” were experiencing all along. So, on the one hand it was a rare equalizing moment in international relations. On the other hand it also reinforced existing asymmetries: rich countries were able to quickly shut out the global dimensions of the problem through their policy options and helped themselves to vaccines, leaving the rest once more at the mercy of their charity.

With our guest expert, Prof. Siphamandla Zondi, we discuss his evaluation of global governance from the perspective of countries in the Global South and the BRICS group in particular. We learn about the added value of supranational organizations, such as the United Nations, as a platform to make all interests visible. And we look at how the current crisis cautions us not to turn our back’s on multilateralism but actively seek it out when the next global crisis hits.

While in regions like Europe and North America national vaccination campaigns have been picking up speed over the past months, the less well-off majority of the world has seen little to no vaccine supplies.

Why does it have to be like that?

Is there a moral obligation to make health innovations easily available globally?

What about the intellectual property rights of the researchers and creators of these innovations, should they not profit from their work?

Podcast host Prof Sigrid Quack discusses these and other questions with our guest expert, Professor Susan Sell, who echoes a growing consensus that our intellectual property regime, that is so essential for 21st century intellectual monopoly capitalism, is hampering global health outcomes - not just in the current pandemic.

By 2100, it is projected that 80-90% of the world population will live in cities. What will these cities look like? What will people's lives in those cities look like? 

The answers to these questions will be largely determined by how cities respond to many of the global trends and challenges they already face today: migration and demography, globalization, climate change, and of course contagious diseases. 

After all, large cities around the world were the places where the Covid-19 pandemic hit first and its impact was probably felt most strongly. This applied not only to the social and economic function associated with city centers, but also to their cultural and civic role as spaces for communal engagement and creativity. The drastic impact on city dwellers' lives has led many to question the "urban normal" and revitalized the idea of cities as hubs for innovation and experimentation for a more sustainable future. What can we learn from the experiences and the experiments of municipal authorities and urban communities over the course of this crisis to better face the challenges of our coming urban 21st century? 

With the spread of the SARS-CoV2 virus, the World Health Organization (WHO) quickly found itself caught between calls to resolve the crisis and accusations of having delayed an efficient pandemic response in the interest of certain member states. While expectations were high for the WHO to deliver on its mandate as guardian of global health, countries with self-interested agendas undermined the WHO‘s role by providing insufficient funding and engaging in forum shopping.

How can the WHO rise to the enormous challenge of  promoting good health and well-being globally in spite of these impediments? What role do other actors of the global health architecture play, and how do they interact with the WHO? And what impact do private-public-initiatives or other less formal institutions like the G20 have on the future of global health governance?

We had the chance to discuss these and other questions with Prof. Dr. Anna Holzscheiter, Chair of Political Science with a focus on international politics at TU Dresden and the head of the research group 'Governance for Global Health' at the Social Science Research Center Berlin (WZB).

COVID-19 has uncovered the interdependencies of our globalized era and revealed how quickly interruptions in this system translate into peoples everyday lives all around the globe. So how has “the world” fared in (politically) managing this challenge as a whole? Have we succeeded in cooperating globally to overcome this crisis? And what does our response to this one tell us about any challenges of the future, such as the climate change emergency?

For over a year now, Covid-19 and its effects have taken centre-stage in the life of people around the world. From day-to-day private matters to big decisions of international politics and the global economy, few things are left unchanged by the pandemic. It has uncovered the extreme interconnectedness and mutual interdependence of our globalized era. So how has “the world” fared in managing this challenge? Have we succeeded in cooperating globally to overcome this crisis, and what does our response to this one tell us about any challenges of the future, such as the climate change emergency?

To our first guest on “Cooperadio”, Professor Thomas Hale of Oxford University, the Coronavirus pandemic is a “wake-up call to the weakness of our current efforts in cooperation and the need to strengthen them to anticipate the crises to come.” It has demonstrated just how unprepared the international system is to deal with such fundamentally transnational threats and exposed once more the problematic effects of (overt or covert) nationalism and national self-interest.

With show host Professor Jan Aart Scholte, he discusses different actors' and institutions' potential for managing the global crises of the 21st century. They look, among other things, at how the pandemic challenges our preconception of the appropriateness of states intervening in societies for “the greater public good”, and what lessons we can draw from this for the analysis of global governance in the future.

In our ‘Research Feature’ segment we talk to Alena Drieschova about her work on Representants and International Orders and about how international politics can be witnessed in our everyday lives.

Timestamps: 

00:00 - Introduction

02:43 - Interview with Thomas Hale

22:33 - Research Feature: Alena Drieschova