All Episodes
Departures with Robert Amsterdam — 210 episodes
Africa's unique ideological history and its impact on unity
How race and identity became sacred taboos
A discussion on religious freedom with Robert Destro
Identities, Rivalries, and Schisms in the modern Middle East
Why Sanctions Often Backfire
Our relationship with the past is in big trouble
The ignominious track record of Africa's foreign saviors
Reconsidering the Western Response to China's Global Rise
Kant, Borges, Heisenberg and the Nature of Observation and Knowledge
How the Ukraine war has altered the direction of globalization
A pivotal election brings uncertainty to Japan
Fears, miscalculations, and mistakes which led to the war in Ukraine
The great rebalancing of the West
How the Congolese view their relationship to the global big tech supply chain
Russia's burning ambition for global power
The beginning of the end of the old Ottoman world order
Ukraine and its challenges to the international system
When nothing is important, everything is at risk
A Bold New Era for Japan
The devastating human toll of Russia's war in Ukraine
Vienna and the birth of the knowledge economy
How the Ukrainian Left Views the War
The Future of Taiwan's Silicon Shield
Understanding the Ukraine War through the Lens of Greek Tragedy
You can't understand the Soviet system without understanding the daily lives of its people
The enduring legacy of the Great Arab Revolt
When China gave up on its peaceful rise
The more a Canadian academic learned about China, the less the West wanted to hear
How a decade of street protests changed the world
The US is trying to get the Cold War band back together
The Economic Aims of Russia's Invasion of Ukraine
An assassination, a coup, and thwarted independence in Congo, 1960
What does the post-neoliberal world order look like?
Crisis at the Ukrainian Orthodox Church
A dispatch from Israel
What We Know 50 Years after the Yom Kippur War
The weaponization of memory and nostalgia in Russia
The fragile ties that bind Eastern Europe
The legal wasteland of UN sanctions
The fallacy of empires
Inside the mind of George F. Kennan
Is China challenging the world order or contributing to its stability?
MAGA Stands for 'Make Attorneys Get Attorneys'
Russia's fragile but important presence in Africa
The brazen deceptions of wartime collaborators
A toolkit for defeating dictatorships
Zelensky: From TV president to real president
The evolving history of the Holocaust
The legal cases that birthed the civil rights movement
The Murderous Ideology of Franco's Spain
Surviving Putin
Italy's indulgent nostalgia for Mussolini
Nobody wants a war fought over the South China Sea
Manipulating Information and faking democracy
Playing in the grey in the shadow economy
Inside the Kremlin Groupthink that led Russia into a disastrous war
Drinking, sex, and journalism on the cusp of WWII
Endgame for Vladimir Putin?
There is nothing inevitable about the war in Ukraine
China's ambitious future in Central Asia
In China's political history, numbers don't always add up
Mafias matter, especially with state formation
Departures LIVE on Russia, Ukraine, and the future of the rules-based order
How supply chain logistics are inseparable from daily life in Central Africa
Not a "Red Wave," but a Ripple
Critical minerals and conflict in the DRC
Xi's the one
How we misunderstood China before Xi
The reactive sequence of authoritarian regimes
US domestic instability is undermining its global influence
Colonialism does not define Africa
Successions in the wake of Mao and Stalin
Why democracies must prepare for political violence
Why authoritarians prefer to be surrounded by incompetence
Tyranny and autocracy are on a winning streak
Historical memory on trial
The founding mythology of global economic governance
Zimbabwe's Democracy Deficit
Thugs for hire: How China enlists nonstate actors to do the dirty work
Cyber warfare and the risk of regulatory failure
Modern Central Asia: empires, revolutions, and the remaking of societies
The economic underpinnings of global disorder
From Syria to Ukraine, the era of decivilization
From the frontlines of Kyiv, Dispatch #2
Congo's invisible war
Four days that changed the course of World War II
The past is a foreign country
So little time, so many kinds of wars to wage
Oil, gas, and coal as the lifeblood of the Russian polity
Summiting Everest for climate change
Irregular warfare is becoming the new regular
The rise of the Beijing consensus
We aren't ready for the weaponization of space
What Uganda shows us about modern authoritarianism
Preparing for the geopolitical conflicts of tomorrow
Trust, Credibility, and COP26
One spy's burden of accountability
That feeling when we are between world orders
Punctuated equilibrium: how the 1490-1530 period changed the world
Despite British colonialism, Nigeria is a success story
Did Russia win the Cuban Missile Crisis?
The deep roots of the Cuban Missile Crisis
Is America back, or are we seeing America's back?
"We don't do windows" - How the Bush administration sold the Iraq War
Why we should look at China in shades of grey
NXIVM and the expanding influence of cults
Why the catastrophes of 2020 should prompt a rethinking of America's role in the world
China's high-tech gulag archipelago
What Germany fails to understand about Russia
Even dictators have to play by (some) rules
EPISODE 100: The fools and villains who prevented peace in 1916
How the pandemic creates opportunities for global change
The most powerful political machine ever created
Why elections in Russia still matter
We are all 'Homo Sovieticus'
How China's foreign policy is shaped
The innovation and resilience of the Mongol Empire
Who 'belongs' in a nation, and who is allowed to wield state power?
A veteran intelligence agent shares his perspective on Russia
Why we are losing the cyber-weapons arms race
The adventurous lives of Imperial Russian spies
Why Putin's power is far from absolute
The good, the bad, and the populists of Latin America
Emergency Pod: The Crisis in Israel
Rwanda's Potemkin democracy
The tragic story behind #BringBackOurGirls
Chinese supremacy is no fait accompli
The shifting dynamics of Turkey-China relations
The mundane and extraordinary lives of special advisers
The joys of high treason
The political culture which gave rise to Atatürk
When bloggers become open source intelligence officers
The rise and fall of Qassem Soleimani
Anti-Americanism without Americans in Central Asia
The weaponization of distrust
Bob Gersony's master class in diplomacy
How conflict unites and divides the US and Philippines
Rethinking our engrained assumptions about Russia, Stalin, and Stalinism
Critical thinking in the age of truth decay
After the failed putsch, we talk antitrust
How China's memory of WWII evolved from victim to hero
Why America chose hegemony
A Turkish diplomat's view of global politics
Syria almost built a democracy in 1920, until the West came along
What we failed to see in 1933
Peering into the online abyss of anti-Semitism, white nationalism, and incel misogyny
What an expert on coups d'état has to say about the situation in the United States
The disastrous misadventures of US-led regime change in the Middle East
When the news industry becomes an instrument of state power
Election Special: American Democracy under Attack by the President
The complex legacy of Shinzo Abe
The audacity of election rigging in Tanzania
How victims of Argentina's Dirty War sparked a global campaign to end torture
Compressed modernity and the burden of being Korean
What the showdown between Roosevelt vs. JP Morgan tells us about the Trump era
TikTok on the Auction Block
Without virtue of the people, you can't run a democracy
The stagnation of nostalgia in the twilight of the Trump era
Trump may be sick, but he's not broke
The not-so-special relationship
The global reach of Russia's intelligence services
The narcissism of small differences
The Republican Party's plutocratic populism and ethnic outbidding
China's Eurasian misadventures
How we should respond to foreign election interference
How hacking became an essential tool of statecraft
How Postwar Europe pioneered a unique phase of democracy
How the liberal international order was built on blood
In postwar Japan, a dramatic trial of a show trial
Tanzanians are living in fear of Magufuli
How Syria has rapidly accelerated the development of international law
The unraveling of the US-China détente
How US diplomacy failed South Sudan
A perfect vehicle for chaos
Make America competent again
The strategic advantage of democracies
The soul inside the legal thriller
Competitive coercion and the need to rebuild the US alliance system
The war on international justice
The Jewish dynasties that built modern China
The obstacles to Africa's prosperity
A world without "The West"
Russian kleptocracy as a business model
The future is not a right, but a commodity
China's long road to democracy
The intoxicating power of nostalgia
The US can't seem to kick its addiction to regime change
Will the killing of George Floyd change America?
The inevitability of tragedy
Who cares about the sword if you can manipulate the hand that wields it?
Rumors of democracy's demise are greatly exaggerated
Democracy is great if you can get there, but first let's prioritize governance
How technology could save us, if we don't mess it up first
The unique burden of being Russian
Is Putin making Russia great again?
The travel industry will never be the same
Will rule of law withstand the age of pandemic?
The incredible shrinking US influence
Take-it-or-leave-it diplomacy
Offshore balancing acts in the age of Trump
With friends like these - corruption as an organizing principle in Putin's Russia
The assumed notion of permanence
Breaking the Schools to Prison Pipeline in the United Kingdom
Doing business in the new Chinese world order
Why the West looks away from Uganda's deepening political violence
Italy's financial dysfunction and rise of populism
To rise as the most angry, forceful critics of the system
More Tsarist than Soviet
A Nobel Prize for Trump?
Once you believe in the impossible, Russia starts making sense