Inside Geneva SWI Podcasts

Send us a Text Message.Four years ago, our lives were upended by the Covid-19 pandemic. Countries locked down, millions became ill, millions died. And when the vaccine finally arrived, it was not fairly distributed. Rich countries bought too many, poor countries waited, with nothing. “What we saw during the Covid-19 pandemic was collapse. Basically, a complete failure of international cooperation,” says Suerie Moon of Geneva Graduate Institute’s Global Health Centre. Surely we can d...

Send us a Text Message.In the wars in Ukraine and in the Middle East, new, autonomous weapons are being used. Our Inside Geneva podcast asks whether we’re losing the race to control them – and the artificial intelligence systems that run them. “Autonomous weapons systems raise significant moral, ethical, and legal problems challenging human control over the use of force and handing over life-and-death decision-making to machines,” says Sai Bourothu, specialist in automated decisio...

Send us a Text Message.The world is marking 30 years since the Rwandan genocide. Inside Geneva talks to those who witnessed it. “We came to one village where there were a few survivors and a man came to me with a list and said ‘look, the names have been crossed out one by one, entire families, they were killing everybody from those families,’” says Christopher Stokes, from Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders). Charles Petrie, former United Nations (UN) humanitarian coo...

Send us a Text Message.In Inside Geneva this week we get an eyewitness account of a mission to supply Gaza’s hospitals. Chris Black, World Health Organisation: ‘People have told me oh you must be very brave for going to Gaza. I don’t think so, I think what’s brave is the people who have been doing this work since early October, and who go back every day, to do it again and again and again.’ Aid agencies say nowhere is safe in Gaza Chris Black, World Health Organisation: ‘A woma...

Send us a Text Message.In 2024, four billion of us can vote in elections. Can democracy survive artificial intelligence (AI)? Can the UN, or national governments, ensure the votes are fair? “Propaganda has always been there since the Romans. Manipulation has always been there, or plain lies by not very ethical politicians have always been there. The problem now is that with the power of these technologies, the capacity for harm can be massive,” says Gabriela Ramos, Assistant Director-Gen...

Send us a Text Message.The UN’s refugee agency for Palestinians, UNRWA, is the focus of major scrutiny after Israel claimed some UNRWA staff were involved in the October 7th attacks, and thousands more were members of Hamas, or supportive of it. Now one of two UN investigations has concluded that UNRWA does need to improve its measures to uphold the humanitarian principles of impartiality and neutrality, but that Israel has offered no supporting evidence for its claims that many UNRWA staff s...