Show Notes
Welcome back to The Negotiators, the podcast that brings you stories from mediators, troubleshooters, and negotiators around the world. The show is a collaboration between Doha Debates and Foreign Policy, hosted by FP Deputy Editor Jenn Williams.
We begin our second season with a dramatic prisoner negotiation. Danny Fenster is an American journalist who covered the coup in Myanmar in 2021. Months later, while trying to leave the country for a visit with his family in the United States, he was arrested at the airport in Yangon and eventually charged with sedition. He was sentenced to 11 years in prison.
In this two-part story, we hear from Mickey Bergman, who helped negotiate Fenster’s release. Bergman is the vice president and executive director of the Richardson Center for Global Engagement, a charitable organization that helps Americans who are wrongfully imprisoned around the world. On the show, he describes the grueling process of making the right connections in Myanmar and negotiating the deal—at times over the objections of the U.S. State Department.
This isn't Bergman's first time on the show. On episode 4 of season 1, he described negotiating a complicated prisoner exchange with Iran.
More from The Negotiators
In a special season-ending bonus episode recorded live at Doha Forum, International Peace Institute President Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein sits down with former U.S. negotiator Rob Malley to reflect on the collapse of Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts and the fate of the Iran nuclear deal. In this wide-ranging conversation, Malley revisits why earlier talks failed, the realities shaping diplomacy today, and what future negotiators must understand if these conflicts are ever to be resolved.
The United States and Iran have sparred for decades. But in 2015, during President Barack Obama’s second term, the two countries successfully negotiated the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), known more plainly as the Iran nuclear deal. The deal was hailed as a breakthrough in much of the world, but it also had its critics. In 2018, President Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the JCPOA, and Iran went back to expanding its nuclear program.
When her son went missing in Sri Lanka’s civil war, Visaka Dharmadasa began organizing other families of missing soldiers. What started as a search for answers led her and a small group of mothers across front lines to meet with the Tamil Tigers. Soon, Dharmadasa found herself shuttling messages between the Tigers and the Sri Lankan government, opening a rare channel of communication that helped build trust. In this episode, Dharmadasa reflects on loss, shuttle diplomacy, and why women’s participation in peace efforts still matters 25 years after U.N. Security Council Resolution 1325.
In 2000, Sanam Naraghi-Anderlini arrived in New York with a simple yet radical idea: to lobby the U.N. Security Council from the outside and ensure women were recognized as central to peace and security, not sidelined from it.
Developing countries are the least responsible for climate change, but they are the most affected by it. That’s why the Alliance of Small Island States first proposed a fund to mitigate that damage back in 1991.