The Borgen Project Podcast

Positive Deviance

Clint Borgen and Lynsey Alexander discuss the latest humanitarian developments.Official podcast of The Borgen Project, an international organization that works at the political level to improve living conditions for people impacted by war, famine and poverty. The Borgen Project Podcast seeks to give an informative and humorous look at the biggest issues facing the world. borgenproject.org

Dr. Mimi Syed is an American board-certified emergency medicine physician, Dr. Syed served in Gaza from August 8 to September 5, 2024, and December 3 to December 31, 2024, at both Al-Aqsa Hospital and Nasser Hospital. Follow Dr. Mimi Syed on InstragramOfficial podcast of The Borgen Project, an international organization that works at the political level to improve living conditions for people impacted by war, famine and poverty. The Borgen Project Podcast seeks to give an informative and humorous look at the biggest issues facing the world. borgenproject.org

Clint Borgen and Lynsey Alexander discuss the latest humanitarian developments.Official podcast of The Borgen Project, an international organization that works at the political level to improve living conditions for people impacted by war, famine and poverty. The Borgen Project Podcast seeks to give an informative and humorous look at the biggest issues facing the world. borgenproject.org

Women’s rights activist Gululai Ismail is one of Pakistan’s most prominent human rights defenders and critics of the Pakistani security services. Authorities in Pakistan have falsely accused her of a litany of serious offences including sedition, financing terrorism and defaming state institutions as a result of her advocacy for a grassroots Pashtun rights movement.Ismail was forced to go on the run in 2019, managing to escape to the U.S. despite significant efforts to capture her. Pakistani security services have since targeted Ismail’s parents, throwing her 65-year-old father into jail on charges of sedition and terrorism financing, which human rights defenders say are bogus and thinly-veiled revenge against the family for embarrassing state security services.Ismail is well-known in the global human rights community for spotlighting the rampant abuse of women and girls in Pakistan, especially gang rapes perpetrated by government soldiers. She is the founder of a leading organization called Aware Girls, which focuses on women’s empowerment, peace-building and countering violent extremism.Official podcast of The Borgen Project, an international organization that works at the political level to improve living conditions for people impacted by war, famine and poverty. The Borgen Project Podcast seeks to give an informative and humorous look at the biggest issues facing the world. borgenproject.org

Professor Omer Bartov recently wrote an op ed in The New York Times titled “I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It.” The United States Holocaust Memorial Mueseum has cited him as one of the world’s leading specialist on genocide. Professor Bartov shares his insight.Omer Bartov Bio: Born in Israel and educated at Tel Aviv University and St. Antony's College, Oxford, Omer Bartov's early research concerned the Nazi indoctrination of the Wehrmacht and the crimes it committed in World War II, analyzed in his books, The Eastern Front, 1941-1945, and Hitler's Army. He then turned to the links between total war and genocide, discussed in his books Murder in Our Midst, Mirrors of Destruction, and Germany's War and the Holocaust. Bartov's interest in representation also led to his study, The "Jew" in Cinema, which examines the recycling of antisemitic stereotypes in film. His more recent work has focused on interethnic relations in the borderlands of Eastern Europe. Recent publications include Erased: Vanishing Traces of Jewish Galicia in Present-Day Ukraine (2007), Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz (2018), winner of the National Jewish Book Award, and Tales from the Borderlands: Making and Unmaking the Galician Past (2022). His many edited volumes include Shatterzone of Empires: Coexistence and Violence in the German, Habsburg, Russian, and Ottoman Borderlands (2013), Voices on War and Genocide: Three Accounts of the World Wars in a Galician Town (2020), and Israel-Palestine: Lands and Peoples (2021). Bartov’s novel, The Butterfly and the Axe, will be published in 2023.

Clint Borgen and Lynsey Alexander discuss the latest humanitarian news and developments.Official podcast of The Borgen Project, an international organization that works at the political level to improve living conditions for people impacted by war, famine and poverty. The Borgen Project Podcast seeks to give an informative and humorous look at the biggest issues facing the world. borgenproject.org

Josh Paul is the Co-Founder, of A New Policy, which is focused on transforming American foreign policy toward the Middle East, to reflect American values of liberty, equality, democracy, and human rights.Paul was a Director at the State Department for 12-years and involved with sending weapons to foreign countries. In October of 2023, Paul publicly resigned citing concerns the U.S. wasn’t following its own laws and procedures when it came to supplying weapons to Israel. Paul noted that Israel was requesting a "variety of weapons that have no applicability to the current conflict.”Read Paul's Op Ed in the Washington PostEmail Congress in support of poverty-reduction legislationRemote volunteer ops at The Borgen ProjectDonate

Clint Borgen and Lynsey Alexander discuss the latest humanitarian developments.Official podcast of The Borgen Project, an international organization that works at the political level to improve living conditions for people impacted by war, famine and poverty. The Borgen Project Podcast seeks to give an informative and humorous look at the biggest issues facing the world. borgenproject.org

Clint Borgen and Lynsey Alexander discuss the latest humanitarian developments.Official podcast of The Borgen Project, an international organization that works at the political level to improve living conditions for people impacted by war, famine and poverty. The Borgen Project Podcast seeks to give an informative and humorous look at the biggest issues facing the world. borgenproject.org

Dr. Henryk Szadziewski is Director of Research at the Uyghur Human Rights Project. He lived in the People's Republic of China for five years, including a three-year period in Uyghur-populated regions. Henryk Szadziewski studied modern Chinese and Mongolian at the University of Leeds, and completed a master's degree at the University of Wales, where he specialised in Uyghur economic, social and cultural rights

Tim Hanstad, Vice-Chair of the Chandler Foundation and Co-founder of the land rights organization Landesa and Catalyst Now, the world’s largest global network of social entrepreneurs and innovators. Guest BioTim Hanstad serves as the Vice-Chair of the Chandler Foundation’s Board of Directors. Prior to this Tim was the Chandler Foundation's first Chief Executive Officer, a position he held for five years. Before joining the Foundation, Tim co-founded Landesa with Roy Prosterman and served as its CEO for many years, helping to grow the organisation and its impact from a two-person start-up to a Global Top Ten NGO. He launched Landesa’s programs in China, the former Soviet Union, and India, where he lived for many years.Tim is a Skoll Social Entrepreneur Awardee, a World Economic Forum Outstanding Social Entrepreneur, a Leap of Reason Ambassador, and a Co-Founder of Catalyst Now, the world’s largest network of social entrepreneurs and innovators. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Financial Times, Stanford Social Innovation Review, Foreign Affairs, Scientific American, and beyond. He holds two law degrees from the University of Washington, a bachelor’s degree from Seattle Pacific University where he was Male Athlete of the Year, and has completed certificate programs at Harvard Business School and Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. His greatest learning, however, has come from spending time with those on socioeconomic margins in more than 20 countries around the world. Tim is the proud spouse of Chitra and the father to four adult children from whom he draws inspiration.Official podcast of The Borgen Project, an international organization that works at the political level to improve living conditions for people impacted by war, famine and poverty.borgenproject.org

Dr. Feroze Sidhwa discusses Gaza with Clint Borgen. Dr. Sidhaw is a Trauma Surgeon, based in California, with experience in Gaza, Ukraine, the West Bank, Zimbabwe, Haiti, Dominican Republic, and Burkina Faso. He received his Masters in Public Health from Harvard and his Medical Degree from the University of Texas Medical School.Take Action: Urge Congress to meet with American doctors who served in Gaza.Mentioned: Read the letter U.S. doctors sent to Congress.Official podcast of The Borgen Project, an international organization that works at the political level to improve living conditions for people impacted by war, famine and poverty.borgenproject.orgGuest BioDr. Feroze Sidhwa is a general, trauma, and critical care surgeon in California. He is triple-board certified in general surgery, trauma/surgical critical care, and neurocritical care, and is a Fellow of the American College of Surgeons and of the International College of Surgeons.Feroze is also a humanitarian surgeon. He has worked most extensively in Palestine, but has also worked in Ukraine three times with the International Medical Corps and Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, and in Zimbabwe, Haiti, Dominican Republic, and Burkina Faso. He has helped edit books on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict published by University of California Press (Berkeley, CA), O/R Books (London, UK), and the Institute for Palestine Studies (Washington, DC). He is widely published in the medical literature, including in The Journal of the American College of Surgeons, Annals of Surgery, World Journal of Surgery, Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery, Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, Surgical Infections, Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, JAMA Pediatrics, Journal of Pediatric Surgery, and Journal of Laproendoscopic and Advanced Surgical Techniques, among others. Feroze has spoken on humanitarian relief work and its political implications at the Harvard FXB Center for Health and Human Rights, the University of California San Francisco School of Medicine, as the keynote speaker of the Stanford 31st Annual Trauma Critical Care Symposium, at UChicago Medicine Trauma Grand Rounds, at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine, University of Chicago Law School, Johns Hopkins University and School of Public Health, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, MIT, Kings County Hospital in Brooklyn, SUNY Downstate College of Medicine, NYU, the Hawaii Medical Association, and the University of Hawaii A. John Burns School of Medicine. He has also spoken widely in the community, mostly in the San Francisco Bay Area but also with Jewish Voice for Peace Phoenix and Tucson, Massachusetts Peace Action, the 2024 Democratic National Convention, and elsewhere.Lay publications about Feroze’s humanitarian surgical work and its political implications include:New York Times, October 9, 2024. “65 Doctors, Nurses and Paramedics: What We Saw in Gaza”Haaretz (Israel), October 17, 2024. “65 אנשי רפואה לניו יורק טיימס: אלה המחזות שראינו בעזה”Politico, July 19, 2024. “We Volunteered at a Gaza Hospital. What We Saw Was Unspeakable.”CommonDreams.org, May 23, 2024. “The Atlantic’s Sloppy Reporting on UN Gaza Statistics Jeopardizes Its Credibility”CommonDreams.org, April 11, 2024. “As Surgeons, We Have Never Seen Cruelty Like Israel’s Genocide in Gaza”Columbia Daily Spectator, January 29, 2025. “In Gaza, a ‘political’ ethical problem is still an ethical problem.”Feroze is the primary author of two open letters to the Biden-Harris administration regarding the United States’ role in the Israeli assault on Gaza that followed the October 7, 2023 attacks on Israel, as well as the appendices accompanying those letters. These letters were updated and sent to the Trump transition team on November 15, 2024.Feroze has appeared on CNN’s Amanpour, PBS, MSNBC’s Ayman Mohyeldin Reports, Democracy Now!, CNN international, the Australia Broadcasting Corporation, DropSite News, NPR, and the BBC World News, as well as a variety of radio programs and podcasts. He has been quoted widely in mainstream and alternative media, including on CBS Sunday Morning News, ABC News, Reuters, the Washington Post, Mother Jones, the New Republic, Mainchi Newspaper (Japan), Local Call (Israel), the Huffington Post, the New Statesman, NRK (Norway), the Guardian, the Independent, Pass Blue, and Democracy Now! Dr. Sidhwa serves as a peer reviewer for the Journal of the American College of Surgeons on global surgical topics and as an external expert reviewer for Human Rights Watch.Feroze was born in Houston, TX to Parsi parents who left Pakistan to find a better life. They moved to the UK and then in the United States. Feroze grew up in Flint, MI. After graduating from Johns Hopkins University in 2004 with a bachelor’s degree in public health he lived in Haifa, Israel for one year, working with a Palestinian-Jewish cooperative in the city. He then taught middle school in east Baltimore for one year before starting medical school at the University of Texas School of Medicine at San Antonio. During his time in medical school he also obtained a Master of Public Health from the Harvard School of Public Health.After finishing medical school, Feroze joined the general surgery residency program at Boston Medical Center. During his residency he completed a surgical research fellowship at Boston Children’s Hospital. During that time Feroze treated victims of the Boston Marathon Bombing. After finishing residency in 2018 he began his one-year trauma/surgical critical care fellowship at Cooper University Healthcare in Camden, NJ. After completing his fellowship, he moved to California where he now practices as a trauma surgeon at a county hospital and as a general surgeon in the Veterans Affairs Northern California Health Care System.Dr. Sidhwa critiques the United States’ role in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through a unique lens. He is a secular American with no ethnic or religious ties to the Middle East. He has a broad knowledge of Israeli and American academic work on the conflict, and closely follows the technical humanitarian, human rights, medical, political, economic, and environmental research done on the topic by Israeli, Palestinian, and international agencies. His public health degrees afford him a broad understanding of how these different areas affect the people of the region. He has no interest in any particular political solution to the conflict. And, most importantly to him, he has seen the conflict in person, seen what it is doing to Palestinians and to Israelis, and has treated its victims with his own hands.

Clint Borgen and Lynsey Alexander discuss the latest humanitarian developments.Official podcast of The Borgen Project, an international organization that works at the political level to improve living conditions for people impacted by war, famine and poverty.borgenproject.org

Director Laura Warner discusses her Ukraine War documentary, The Cranes Call and what she's learned traveling to over 100 countries. Warner has covered Libya, Iraq and many of the hardest hit places in the world. Her latest documentary, The Cranes Call follows war crimes investigators from the Clooney Foundation (Anya Neistat and Solomiia Stasiv) who interview survivors and document human rights abuses. The film is backed by Hillary and Chelsea Clinton's production company, Hidden Light.Links:- Watch The Cranes Call- Laura Warner

Africa is a major focus of Chinese foreign policy. Yun Sun, Director of the China Program at the Stimson Center discusses what to expect now that the U.S. is cutting humanitarian aid to Africa.

Clint Borgen and Lynsey Alexander discuss the latest developments.Official podcast of The Borgen Project, an international organization that works at the political level to improve living conditions for people impacted by war, famine and poverty.borgenproject.org

Clint Borgen and Lynsey Alexander discuss the latest developments in Ukraine and eight strategies for ending poverty.Official podcast of The Borgen Project, an international organization that works at the political level to improve living conditions for people impacted by war, famine and poverty.borgenproject.org

Josephine Guilbeau, a former U.S. Army Intel Analyst discusses her approach to activism. Elon Musk and DOGE attack USAID.Take Action: Urge Congress to Protect USAIDUrge Congress to meet with American doctors who served in GazaOfficial podcast of The Borgen Project, an international organization that works at the political level to improve living conditions for people impacted by war, famine and poverty.borgenproject.org

Dr. Ayesha Khan recently worked in Gaza and was on Capitol Hill with The Borgen Project. Dr. Khan specializes in Emergency Medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine.Take Action: Urge Congress to meet with American doctors who served in Gaza.Mentioned: Read the letter U.S. doctors sent to Congress.Official podcast of The Borgen Project, an international organization that works at the political level to improve living conditions for people impacted by war, famine and poverty.borgenproject.org