Summary
How much emotion should you show if you are a diplomat, a news reporter or a conciliation expert? Anne McElvoy chairs a Free Thinking Festival debate at Sage Gateshead with Gabriel Gatehouse, Gabrielle Rifkind and William J Burns.
In the world of international affairs, the overriding philosophy for global professionals has been one of restraint and rationality – whether you are negotiating, mediating or observing. So how is this traditional idea of “being diplomatic” and even-handed faring in a more emotional and expressive age?
Psychotherapist Gabrielle Rifkind works in conflict resolution in the Middle East. She directs The Oxford Process, a conflict prevention initiative specialising in managing radical disagreement. Her books include The Psychology of Political Extremism: What would Sigmund Freud have thought about Islamic State and The Fog of Peace: How to Prevent War.
William J Burns’ book The Back Channel - American Diplomacy in a Disordered World charts his career as an American diplomat for over 3 decades. involved in negotiations with President Putin and secret nuclear talks with Iran. He is now President of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Gabriel Gatehouse is a BBC reporter whose work includes the Panorama programme Marine Le Pen: Who's Funding France's Far Right? (2017) and Our World A Tale of Two Swedens. His reporting has included investigations in East Africa, the Ukraine and Russia, Libya and Iraq and the BBC Radio 4 series The Puppet Master
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right? |
| 0:23.3 | It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music when it's out of ice cream. |
| 0:28.8 | Listen to evil genius on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:33.3 | BBC Sounds, music, radio podcasts. |
| 0:36.9 | Hello, I'm Anne McElvoy and this is BBC Radio 3's Arts and Ideas podcast, bringing together leading artists, writers and thinkers, in discussions which try to answer a range of questions, from should we keep pets to what does it mean to belong, or what can Nietzsche teach us? So stay with us for one of those |
| 0:56.8 | conversations, coming up right after this short message. Why does music move us? How does it do it? |
| 1:04.1 | Well, if these are questions that have been firing you up, I've got the very podcast for you. |
| 1:09.6 | I'm Tom Service from BBC Radio 3 and from |
| 1:12.4 | Schubert's symphonies to video game music from how to start a piece of music and when to end it. |
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| 1:37.9 | and learn more about the music we all love. |
| 1:49.4 | Hello. |
| 1:53.7 | One of Winston Churchill's oft-quoted aphorisms has it that George is better than war-war. |
| 1:57.1 | But how much of a role should emotion play in that? |
| 2:00.3 | I'm joined today by former US diplomat William J. Burns, |
| 2:04.0 | conflict resolution expert Gabrielle Rifkind, and BBC foreign correspondent Gabriel Gatehouse. |
| 2:09.9 | We're going to be talking about how desirable it is to reveal your true feelings when you're |
| 2:14.6 | engaged in sensitive negotiations or perhaps reporting on them or other |
| 2:19.2 | challenging events. So I'd like to start by asking you all for the benefit of our audience |
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