This spring marked the thirtieth anniversary of the election of Nelson Mandela as South Africa’s president and the end of apartheid, the system of legalized racial segregation that had existed in South Africa for decades.

Around the same time as that anniversary, there was another momentous event in the country: South Africans went to the polls in May, and for the first time in 30 years, the African National Congress — the political party of Nelson Mandela — lost its parliamentary majority.

These two events — the anniversary of Mandela’s election and the unprecedented defeat of his party today — bring up important questions about South Africa’s politics since the fall of apartheid and where the country will go from here.

This will be the first in a two-part special looking at South Africa 30 years after the end of apartheid. Wilmot James, a senior advisor at Brown University’s Pandemic Center, a former member of the South African parliament and former advisor to Nelson Mandela will be Trending Globally’s guide for these two episodes.

To start this episode, we’ll hear some of Wilmot’s story and how his life intersected with the rise and fall of apartheid in his home country.

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Transcript coming soon to our website

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On June 4, results came in from the largest democratic election in history. Over 640 million people voted in India’s election, which took place at over one million polling places across the country over the course of six weeks.

Many predicted that India’s prime minister Nerandra Modi and his party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) would dominate the election, grow their ranks in Parliament, and further impose their Hindu-nationalist ideology on the country.

However, that wasn’t what happened. Modi was reelected, but his party lost over 60 seats in the lower house of Parliament. The BJP will have to govern as part of a multi-party coalition, and most likely moderate their Hindu-nationalist aspirations.

On this episode, you’ll hear from Ashutosh Varshney, a political scientist at Brown University and director of the Watson Institute’s Saxena Center for Contemporary South Asia, about this historic election: what led to its surprising outcome, what it means for the Hindu-nationalist movement embodied by Prime Minister Nerandra Modi, and what it might tell us about the struggle for democracy occurring in countries around the world.

*Trending Globally will be taking a brief summer hiatus, but we’ll be back in July with all-new episodes*

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Transcript coming soon to our website

For this week’s show, we’re sharing an episode of “Humans in Public Health,” a podcast from The Brown School of Public Health. It makes a great follow-up to our episode earlier this month about Rhode Island’s first-in-the-nation legally approved proposal for a safe injection site (also known as an overdose prevention center) and how such programs will hopefully fit into the fight against America’s overdose crisis.

Host Megan Hall spoke with Brandon del Pozo, an assistant professor of medicine and health services at Brown (and a former police officer), about the relationship between America’s overdose crisis, law enforcement’s drug policies, and the growing interest in safe injection sites around the country. They discuss how safe injection sites in New York City have affected the overdose crisis there and what lessons Rhode Island can learn as the state plans to open its first safe injection site later this year.

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At the Watson Institute, the beginning of summer means commencement festivities, moving trucks, and bittersweet goodbyes. In American politics, the beginning of summer means something very different: the approach of the Supreme Court's summer recess and, with it, the handing down of the Court’s final decisions from this term. This year’s cases will have profound effects on the 2024 election, gun rights, reproductive rights, and more.

While it’s nothing new for the Supreme Court to weigh in on contentious issues in society, as our guest on this episode sees it, something profound has shifted within the Court over the last few years. The decisions they hand down are not only increasingly transformative, they’re also lining up more and more clearly with our partisan politics. And no matter your politics, that should be a problem.

Kate Shaw is a constitutional law scholar and professor at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School and a 2001 graduate of Brown University. She is also the co-host of the podcast “Strict Scrutiny,” which explores the Supreme Court — the cases, the people and the culture surrounding it.

On this episode, Dan Richards spoke with her about how the Supreme Court fits in our politics today, how that role has changed over time, and what Kate thinks its role in our society today should be.

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Mexico, like the United States, has a gun violence problem. It has one of the highest murder rates in the world, and most of those murders come from firearms. In 2019, for example, almost 70% of the country's 35,000 murders involved firearms.

But unlike the U.S., Mexico doesn’t have tens of thousands of licensed firearms dealers.

It has two.

So how do so many guns make their way into Mexico? And how do these guns shape Mexican society?

These are two of the questions Ieva Jusionyte explores in her new book “Exit Wounds: How America’s Guns Fuel Violence across the Border.” Jusionyte is an anthropologist at the Watson Institute and spent much of the last few years following people whose lives are shaped by guns in Mexico. Guns, which, by and large, come from the United States.

On this episode, Jusionyte discusses the impact of American firearms on Mexican society and the role they play in spreading violence and trauma on both sides of the border.

Learn more about and purchase "Exit Wounds: How America’s Guns Fuel Violence across the Border"

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Photo credit: Tony Rinaldo

In February of this year, Providence became the first city in America to approve opening a state-sanctioned overdose prevention center. Sometimes known as safe injection sites, these are facilities where people can bring illegal drugs and consume them under the supervision of trained volunteers and health professionals.

It’s one of the boldest experiments in the U.S. of an approach to addressing the drug overdose crisis known as “harm reduction,” which is focused less on forcing people to stop using drugs and instead on helping people use them more safely.

It might sound counterintuitive that such an approach could help stem our country’s drug overdose epidemic, which killed over 112,000 Americans in 2023. But as our two guests on this episode explain, overdose prevention centers — along with many other “harm reduction” interventions — work. Studies have shown that they not only help reduce drug-related deaths, they also help people recover from drug addiction more broadly.

On this episode, Dan Richards talks with two public health leaders in Rhode Island about this new overdose prevention center — how it will work, why it matters, and what it says about the future of addressing America’s drug overdose crisis.

Guests on this episode:

• Colleen Daley Ndoye, executive director of Project Weber/RENEW, the organization that will be overseeing Rhode Island’s overdose prevention center
• Brandon Marshall, chair of epidemiology at Brown University.

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In the 1970s in Nicaragua, left-wing rebels, calling themselves the Sandinista National Liberation Front, fought to overthrow their country’s dictator.

It worked. The Sandinistas led a coalition that took over the government in July 1979, in what became known as the Sandinista Revolution.

However, within a few years, the Sandinistas faced a violent backlash, which pushed the country into a state of unrest that lasted for almost a decade.

This period of violence, from roughly 1982-1988, was known as the Contra War. To many Americans, it’s often associated with the Cold War and Ronald Reagan. It’s been described as a proxy battle between the Soviet-supported Sandinistas on one side, and the U.S.-supported counter-revolutionaries, or Contras, on the other.

But in this episode, we’ll go beyond that Cold War framing of the conflict, to uncover a fuller explanation of why the Sandinista Revolution was successful in Nicaragua in 1979, why it was replaced by a liberal democratic government in 1990, and why that democracy has since fallen apart.

Mateo Jarquín is a historian and author of The Sandinista Revolution: A Global Latin American History.” Through interviews with former Sandinistas and archival research conducted across Latin America, Mateo tells the story of this momentous decade in Latin American politics from the perspective of those who lived it. In doing so, he challenges our understanding of the Cold War’s impact on Latin America, from the 1980s straight through to the present.

In the second half of the episode, we’ll talk with Watson Senior Fellow Steven Kinzer about Nicaragua’s repressive political regime today, and a surprising act of resistance whose full effects are yet to be seen.

Learn about and purchase “The Sandinista Revolution: A Global Latin American History”

Listen to episode 1 of “Revolution Revisited” a limited series on the history of the Sandinista Revolution, from Trending Globally

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Here’s a depressing fact: it takes longer to travel from Boston to Los Angeles today than it did 50 years ago. Getting to the airport, getting through the airport, the flight itself — just about every part of the process takes longer than it once did.

According to New York Times senior writer David Leonhardt, this is just one example of the stagnation defining so many aspects of America’s society and economy today. From life expectancy to education outcomes to rates of income inequality, by so many measures, American society simply isn’t improving for as many Americans as rapidly as it once did. By some measures, it’s not improving at all.

In other words: the American dream is increasingly out of reach.

Leonhardt’s newest book, “Ours Was the Shining Future: The Story of the American Dream,” explores the data and the history behind this dimming of the American dream. This spring, he came to the Watson Institute to discuss the book with Jeff Colgan, director of the Watson Institute’s Climate Solutions Lab. In this episode of Trending Globally, Colgan talks with Leonhardt about the cultural and political shifts that have contributed to this change, and about what needs to be done to make widespread prosperity attainable in the decades to come.

Learn more about and purchase “Ours Was the Shining Future: The Story of the American Dream”

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