Pod Bless Canada

As threats emerge from Russia, China, and other authoritarian actors, are Western democracies prepared to rise to the challenge? With NATO set to update its framework for defining security challenges facing the Alliance and the political and military tasks which must be undertaken to address these challenges, this question is both timely and critical. MLI Senior Fellows Balkan Devlen and Alexander Moens (who also serves as the Chair of the Political Science Department at Simon Fraser University) discuss NATO’s new strategic concept, the history of that policy document, why it matters, what we can expect to see in further updates to NATO’s strategic concept, and whether Canada should play a more active role in shaping that framework.

This program was originally recorded as Democracy Matters on April 22, 2022. Danielle Pletka joins us today to discuss how the US can institute a Pro-Democracy foreign policy, which she argues has been lacking. Danielle Pletka is a distinguished senior fellow in foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where she focuses on US foreign policy generally and the Middle East specifically. Until January 2020, Ms. Pletka was the senior vice president of foreign and defense policy studies at AEI. Concurrently, she also teaches US Middle East policy at Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service. Before joining AEI, Ms. Pletka was a senior professional staff member for the Middle East and South Asia for the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations.

This program was originally recorded as Democracy Matters on February 8, 2022. Mariam Memarsadeghi interviews Bill Browder, author of Red Notice, investor, and anti-corruption activist, to discuss the role of sanctions in influencing oligarchs. Mr. Browder was the largest foreign investor in Russia until 2005, when he was denied entry to the country and declared “a threat to national security” for exposing corruption in Russian state-owned companies. In 2008, Mr. Browder’s lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, uncovered a massive fraud committed by Russian government officials that involved the theft of US $230 million of state taxes. Sergei testified against state officials and was subsequently arrested, imprisoned without trial and systematically tortured, dying after one year of imprisonment in 2009. Since then, Mr. Browder has sought justice outside of Russia and started a global campaign for governments around the world to impose targeted visa bans and asset freezes on human rights abusers and highly corrupt officials. The US, Canada, the UK, the Baltic states, the European Union and most recently Australia have passed their own versions of the Magnitsky Act.

Independent Ukrainian journalist Olga Tokariuk joins us today to discuss her wartime journalism, stories coming from the frontline, the greater meaning of Ukraine’s fight for freedom and democracy, and to debunk Russia’s narratives about Ukraine. Olga Tokariuk is a Non-resident Fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) and an independent journalist and researcher based in Ukraine. Olga has vast experience working with Ukrainian and international media, such as EFE news agency, RAI, ANSA, BuzzFeed News, NPR, ABC, and RSI. She is a former head of the foreign news desk at the independent Ukrainian Hromadske TV. – Talkin’ in the Free World is a conversation series on the future of democracy and countering the threat from resurgent authoritarianism across the globe. The series is hosted by MLI Senior Fellow Mariam Memarsadeghi and features prominent thinkers, practitioners and political leaders committed to safeguarding freedom.

Azar Nafisi, who is the critically acclaimed author of Reading Lolita in Tehran, a New York Times bestseller that is published in thirty-two languages. Nafisi reflects on the effect of education, ideology, and the corporate mentality on the preservation of democracy, focusing particularly on political divides in the US. Mariam and Azar dive into the philosophical underpinnings of freedom, democracy preservation in the US, and the fight for democracy in Iran. Nafisi is also known for her other works including, Things I’ve Been Silent About, Republic of Imagination, That Other World: Nabokov and the Puzzle of Exile, and most recently The Subversive Power of Literature in Troubled Times. She has held various teaching posts across the world including at Johns Hopkins University, Oxford University, and Free Islamic University and Allameh Tabatabai.