Kate Ferguson: Before the Violence Starts cover art

Kate Ferguson: Before the Violence Starts

Kate Ferguson: Before the Violence Starts

Listen for free

View show details

Kate Ferguson co-founded Protection Approaches after working on genocide prevention in Rwanda — and noticing, with some alarm, that the warning signs looked oddly familiar back home. She's a foreign policy strategist working to stop mass violence before it starts, by raising the alarm on how identity grievance is weaponised to cause harm.

She's just finished consulting 250 security and defence experts across Europe on the threats we face, and she comes bearing a dread trio — a homegrown far-right which has "breached thresholds of concern" including a "pogrom in Belfast"; Russian aggression; and a third that would have been unthinkable even a year ago — the United States itself, now "demonstrably practising from an authoritarian playbook."

So what can be done? Should social cohesion be part of our critical infrastructure rather than a "nice to have"? Is the "hollowing out of the BBC" damaging to that cohesion? And is the point of politics to change the world — or is that an old trope?


Please do check out my latest book, A Dead Cat On Your Table – available online and in all good book shops.

@peteryork.bsky.social

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

adbl_web_anon_alc_button_suppression_t1
No reviews yet