Danube Institute Podcast

Religion, state and society - where we look at issues of religious conflict, religious violence and reconciliation. How did Hungary help more than 500.000 persecuted Christians to return or remain in their homeland? We asked the distinguished special guest of the first episode, Tristan Azbej, State Secretary for the Aid of Persecuted Christians and the Hungary Helps Program.

Criminologist Simon Cottee discusses his 2021 book, Black Flags of the Caribbean: how Trinidad Became an ISIS Hotspot, and his new book, Watching Murder: ISIS, Death Videos, and Radicalisation, which will be published by Routledge in June 2022.

Journalist Heather Mac Donald discusses her book The Diversity Delusion, and her concerns about the growth of identity politics on campus and beyond.

Cultural Historian Professor Jeffrey Kaplan discusses his career studying extreme, radical, millenarian, and apocalyptic movements and cults.

In this episode, historian and biographer Andrew Roberts discusses the nature and process of historical biography. Is the course of history determined by impersonal forces, or 'great men'? What can historical biographies teach us? And is the outcome of war determined on the scene or behind the scenes - in battle, or in logistics?

Advocate David Curry, cultural historian Jeff Kaplan, and political scientist Sáron Sugár discuss and debate the nature of communal violence, with a particular focus on violence against and persecution of Christians worldwide. What sorts of violence and persecution do Christian communities experience? How widespread is the problem? What are its causes? How does it compare to that experienced by other religious groups? And what can be done about it?

In this episode of Matter of Perspective Danube Institute research fellows Fanni Korpics, Dávid Nagy and Tamás Orbán discuss their latest research project related to the question of neutrality. The moderator of the discussion is Anton Bendarzsevszkij Director of Research at the Danube Institute. In this episode, speakers compare the different models of neutrality and whether any one of them could be applicable in shaping the future status of Ukraine.

This is The Matter of Perspective - geopolitical podcast of the Danube Institute. In this episode we touch upon the questions related to the French presidential elections, the two rounds of which are taking place on 10, and on 24 April. We discuss the current statistics revealing voting intentions of the French population and compare the popularity and electoral chances of the candidates. Our invited speakers in this episode are Thibaud Gibelin, Essayist and Visiting Fellow at the Matthias Corvinus Collegium; and Eszter Petronella Soós expert on French politics, she teaches at the Milton Friedman university, and is the editor of Franciapolitika.com. The moderator of the discussion is Fanni Korpics, Research Fellow at the Danube Institute.

In the second episode of the Chain Bridge Podcast, Dr Paul Gilfillan joins us to reflect on his life as a researcher in modern British universities. Taking inspiration from Friedrich von Hayek's Nobel Prize Lecture, "The Pretence of Knowledge", Gilfillan reminds us that the search for knowledge always requires courage, and humility.

Mark Krikorian, the Executive Director of the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington DC, discusses with Calum Nicholson, a Fellow of the Danube Institute, in Budapest, and John O'Sullivan, the Institute's President, how the experience of mass immigration into the United States and other Western countries since the Cold War ended in 1989 has changed American and European society, challenging earlier concepts of national identity and international law, re-defining the relationships between citizens, non-citizen residents, and the state, and creating a new set of post-national institutions and treaty obligations that compete with the nation-state in determining and enforcing expanded ideas of human rights. Has the nation-state lost the power to determine laws that govern its own society to UN bodies, the EU, NGOs, and international courts? How is the nation-state handling the problems of mass immigration in this new post-national context? Can it regain some or all of the powers it has lost to post- and trans-national bodies? Is this new structure of post-national law and political authority viable? Or democratic? Or capable of functioning effectively without the traditional tools of the nation-state? And how is democratic politics coping with these new and fundamental challenges to nation and democracy?