Arab Digest podcasts: Recent Episodes
Arab Digest
Arab Digest is where business leaders and experts on the Middle East and North Africa come together to share analysis and insight about the issues in the region that matter most. contact email: editor@arabdigest.org
As the limits of Donald Trump's transactional approach to foreign policy becomes all too dangerously clear Arab Digest editor William Law welcomes the Iraq expert Renad Mansour on to the podcast. With the old world order evaporating almost overnight state and non-state actors have rushed to fill the vacuum. This week's conversation reveals how in this new and emerging multi-aligned world the Middle East is sliding into chaos and a catastrophic regional war.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.
With rapid change sweeping a region still in the throes of wars the Kurdish people spread across four nations see an opportunity to secure if not their dream of a nation then autonomy within national federal structures that would secure their rights and culture as a people. Arab Digest editor William Law invites the Kurdish-American journalist Sirwan Kajjo onto the podcast to discuss the possibilities and the promises that lie within reach of the Kurds.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.
The Iran expert Sanam Vakil joins Arab Digest editor William Law to discuss the likelihood of Washington and Tehran striking a new nuclear accord. What sort of a pact will the Ayatollah and the self-proclaimed ‘dealmaker in chief’ arrive at and what will America's Gulf friends, to say nothing of the Israelis make of it? The White House has said it has put a proposal on the table. What it looks and how likely it would be to hold are questions today's podcast takes a hard look at.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.
Arab Digest editor William Law's guest this week is the energy analyst and Digest regular contributor Alastair Newton. Their conversation focusses on how Saudi Arabia is seeking to shape oil prices and the market to meet their financial requirements as Saudi Aramco profits dip and the costs for Mohammed bin Salman's multiple giga-projects continue to be a significant drag on the kingdom's purse.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.
Two top Washington Middle East analysts join Arab Digest editor William Law to discuss President Trump's recent trip to the Gulf. Annelle Sheline and Jon Hoffman reflect on the deals made, Trump's meeting with the former jihadist and now president of Syria Ahmad al-Sharaa and the significance of the president deciding to bypass Israel and Prime Minister Netanyahu as he swept through Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.
Arab Digest editor William Law is joined by Middle East Eye's Dania Akkad and the focus of their conversation is GHF - the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation - which popped up fully formed and already seemingly underway with a plan that closely mirrors Israeli strategy to use humanitarian aid to force Palestinians out of most of the Gaza Strip and into a tiny sliver of land from whence it will be possible to expel them.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.
Arab Digest editor William Law welcomes the Libya specialist Tarek Megerisi back to the podcast to discuss Libya and the dangerous stalemate it has settled into. Two families preside over an extraordinary level of corruption that further impoverishes the Libyan people. Their criminality is aided and abetted by foreign players who see in the political stalemate an opportunity to advance geopolitical objectives and plunder the country of its wealth.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.
The podcast returns after a short break with Arab Digest editor William Law in conversation with the Yemen expert Helen Lackner. As the world focusses on Donald Trump's egregious trampling of the rule of law and his destruction of the prevailing world order little notice is given to US strikes on claimed Huthi targets that are occurring on a daily basis while humanitarian aid has all but dried up. The consequences of both actions are devastating for the Yemeni people.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.
Arab Digest editor William Law's guest this week is the Levant expert Dr Lina Khatib. Their conversation focusses on new hope building in Lebanon after the crushing blow Israel delivered to Hezbollah and the collapse of the Assad regime in Syria. With a new president and a new prime minister in place hope is running high that the country will find the political will to move away from the sectarianism that has inflicted so much damage on the Lebanese people.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.
Syria expert Malik al-Abdeh joins Arab Digest editor William Law to discuss the latest developments in Syria as the country's new leadership struggles with internal sectarian rivalries and pressures from outside players in the neighbourhood including Israel and Türkiye. They explore too the role of Putin and Trump and what will happen as Washington pursues an isolationist approach to foreign relations.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.
Arab Digest editor William Law's guest this week is the New Lines Institute's Caroline Rose an expert on the illicit drug Captagon. With the fall of Bashar al-Assad his family's hold on the lucrative trade has suddenly evaporated but the drug hasn't disappeared from Syria and other actors and other countries are eying up opportunities as the Trump administration freezes US engagements in the global fight against illicit drugs.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.
Arab Digest editor William Law welcomes George Kanaan to this week's podcast. His book Beyond Lebanon's Peaks: An Odyssey is a fascinating memoir of a businessman and banker who though he has travelled the world in a storied career has never left behind Suq el-Gharb and his Levantine roots. In a wide ranging conversation he reflects on the book and on the current situation in Lebanon and what he calls Trump's 'cruel idea' for Gaza.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.
In this week's podcast Arab Digest editor William Law is joined by the North Africa expert Francis Ghilès to discuss the reasons why the Moroccan economy is in good health while its Maghreb neighbours Algeria and Tunisia are struggling. Part of the answer is its geography: Morocco sits as a linchpin between Europe and Africa. The rest though has to do with strong macroeconomic policies and a resilient, confident and outward looking approach from the kingdom's business sector.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.
William Law, Arab Digest editor welcomes the Cato Institute's Jon Hoffman to the podcast to discuss his just released book Islam and Statecraft. Jon lays out how the Gulf ruling families have used Islam as a political tool to enhance foreign policy thrusts, ensure regime security and project power. With the West embracing the Gulf's so-called "moderate Islam" and Donald Trump in the White House Islamophobia, he argues, is set to rise.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.
Arab Digest editor William Law's guest this week is the European Council on Foreign Relations' Kelly Petillo. While the world is fixated on Trump and tariffs the refugee crisis in the Middle East gathers pace as Europe pushes to remove Syrian refugees under the assumption that now that Assad is gone Syria is safe. Meanwhile President Trump muses on relocating Palestinians to Egypt and Jordan, in other words an ethnic cleansing that Israel is eager to embrace.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.
Arab Digest editor William Law's guest this week is the jihadist extremism expert Dr Elisabeth Kendall. Their conversation focuses on Yemen's Huthis and Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP.) Both have benefitted from the Gaza war in terms of popular support and propaganda messaging while a peace deal to end the nearly ten years of civil war slips further and further away.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.
Arab Digest editor William Law welcomes analyst and author Andreas Krieg back on the podcast to discuss the ceasefire between Hamas and Israel. Both sides claim a victory but unless the ceasefire holds and until it moves into the second phase and beyond that into its third phase of full withdrawal of the IDF and the beginning of reconstruction of war-destroyed Gaza fear and anxiety will continue to stalk a fragile hope for peace.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.
Arab Digest editor William Law's guest this week is the director of Airwars Emily Tripp. Airwars has methodically detailed the civilian casualties caused by the thousands of air strikes carried out by Israel on Gaza in its prosecution of the war against Hamas. The body of evidence assembled tells a story unprecedented in the annals of contemporary warfare with the killing of civilians becoming an accepted new normal. The evidence is there to bring about accountability, the challenge is to use it.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.
Arab Digest editor William Law's guest this week is the Turkish writer and analyst Aslı Aydıntaşbaş. With the victory of the Salafist HTS in Syria both Türkiye and Israel see opportunities to accelerate their regional ambitions but the two may be heading toward an intense new rivalry as Netanyahu woos the Kurds of Northeast Syria and Erdoğan weighs up whether to offer them the hand of peace or to unleash the hounds of war.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.
The editor's choice for 2024 is our 18 September podcast Palestine and a new awakening with the writer and commentator Amal Ghandour. When we spoke with her then 41000 Palestinians had been killed and 96000 wounded. As Israel's genocide against the Palestinian people continues that number has now reached more than 45000 killed and 107000 wounded. The podcast aired before the assassination of the Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and Israel's invasion of Lebanon where more than 4000 have been killed.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.
Arab Digest editor William Law's guest is the analyst and commentator Sami Hamdi. In a rapid fire run through the Middle East headlines of 2024 they cover a lot of ground from an ISIS massacre to the Sudan war, from the ICJ decision on Israel's seizure of Palestinian land to the triumph of Trump and the fall of Assad with several stops in between and a forecast from Sami about what 2025 may bring.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.
William Law's guest this week is Arab Digest's resident energy analyst Alastair Newton. In a tumultuous and violent year in the Middle East and elsewhere OPEC has seen its market relevance continue to decline raising concerns for Saudi Arabia as its bid to diversify away from hydrocarbons falters. Questions too about whether the cartel itself will survive. And from the analyst who called it spot on in 2024 an informed prediction about where the price of oil will be in December 2025.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.
With the stunning success of HTS and its leader Abu Mohammed al-Jolani in bringing down the Assad regime Syria enters a new era. How al-Jolani chooses to structure the country and how Syria's neighbours in the Middle East respond will determine whether instability and new war fronts emerge or whether the Syrian people finally secure lasting peace and a government answerable to them. As the aftershocks of an Islamist victory in the Levant continue to reverberate Arab Digest editor William Law is in conversation with the Syrian analyst Malik al-Abdeh.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.
William Law's guest this week on the Arab Digest podcast is the Gulf expert Kristian Coates Ulrichsen. They look back at the year that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has had, one where he has strengthened his diplomatic ties with Iran, holds the upper hand in the normalisation with Israel game and looks set to gain essential time on delivering Vision 2030 with the looming announcement that the Fifa World Cup will come to the kingdom in 2034.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.
Arab Digest editor William Law's guest this week is the Egyptian analyst and author Maged Mandour. They explore the reasons behind President Sisi's virtual silence as the IDF conducts its genocide in Gaza while increasing land seizures in the Occupied West Bank and enlarging the war into Lebanon. Maged Mandour reveals that economic and ideological factors are behind Egypt's abandonment of Palestine and the Palestinians. The podcast was recorded before the ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah was announced.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.
When the French president recognised Morocco's claim to the disputed territory of Western Sahara he sought to burnish his tarnished reputation in North Africa. Francis Ghilès joins Arab Digest editor Wiliam Law to discuss why Macron's efforts are likely to produce few if any positive results and he argues that the situation won't change unless France - and Europe - see North Africa through a different set of lenses.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.
Arab Digest editor William Law welcomes back the Libyan analyst Tarek Megerisi for a wide ranging conversation about the criminal activities of the two families that rule in a divided Libya squandering the country's wealth while playing Europe and the EU for patsies in the lucrative, ever growing and utterly ruthless industry of human trafficking.
Arab Digest editor William Law's guest this week is Jon Hoffman a research fellow in defence and foreign policy at Washington's Cato Institute with a particular specialism in US policy in the Middle East. Donald Trump's emphatic victory in this week's presidential election comes at a time when the MENA region is convulsed by war. In his triumphal victory speech Trump promised peace but will his erratic and transactional approach drive the region ever closer to all out war?Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.
Arab Digest editor William Law is joined by the Kurdish American journalist Sirwan Kajjo. A recent parliamentary election in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq featured a high turnout and a strong showing by a new party, both indications that the grip of the two families that have controlled the region for decades is beginning to slip. Meantime Iraqi Kurdistan continues a delicate balancing act as the war in the Levant between Israel and Iran's proxies burns on.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.
Arab Digest editor William Law is joined by the Sudanese political analyst Kholood Khair. Their conversation focusses on a war that has gone on for 18 months and has caused the worst humanitarian disaster in the world. Sudan's people are the victims of two generals vying for dominance backed by outside players who like the generals have no concern for them. Nor judging by its silence does the rest of the world.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.
Arab Digest editor William Law's guest this week is the Quincy Institute's Annelle Sheline who quit the US State Department in protest at her government's Gaza policy. She argues that rather than restraining Israel the Biden administration is backing Netanyahu's efforts to provoke a major war with Iran in order to redraw the map of the Middle East.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.
Arab Digest editor William Law's guest this week is the head of the Middle East programme at London's Chatham House Sanam Vakil. Their conversation focusses on Iran and Israel as the confrontation between the two edges ever closer to a hot war. Also on the agenda are Saudi Arabia and the UAE and the efforts they are making to avoid such a war. What too should the UK be doing to champion diplomacy rather than weaponry in the search for regional security and peace?Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.
Arab Digest editor William Law is joined by the security and defence analyst Andreas Krieg. As the intensity of Israeli attacks increases Dr Krieg - who has written a groundbreaking book on the weaponisation of narratives by state and non-state actors - details how such narratives are driving the Middle East toward all out war and he offers proposals about what the UK and the Starmer government could do right now to help avert a looming catastrophe.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.
With tensions rising daily in the region, Arab Digest editor William Law welcomes the Cato Institute's Jon Hoffman to the podcast. As Israel pounds Lebanon and Hezbollah fires rockets back the slide into a full scale war looms but Washington's response is the same as it ever was: call for restraint while backing Israel to the hilt.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.
Arab Digest editor William Law speaks with Hasan Ramadan. Before the 7 October war Hasan was a teacher at a school in North Gaza where he lived with his wife and three sons. Now he and his family are among the nearly 2 million IDPs in Gaza. After several attempts we were able to reach him at an IDP camp in the south of Gaza.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.
Arab Digest editor William Law's guest this week is the Beirut-based author and commentator Amal Ghandour. Their conversation explores the impact of the Gaza war on the Levant and beyond and looks at how young Arabs have been galvanised by Israel's genocidal conduct into a new sense of themselves and the role they will play in securing what Amal calls a "rewrite" of the Middle East narrative. The podcast was recorded before pager attacks occurred across Lebanon leaving 12 dead and nearly 3000 wounded.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.
Arab Digest editor William Law kicks off a new season with the editor of a new book titled The Queer Arab Glossary, the graphic designer, artist and writer Marwan Kaabour. Art book, Arab gay slang glossary and essay collection from a diverse and distinguished group of Arab artists, writers and activists The Queer Arab Glossary is both a provocative statement of independence and a declaration of resistance.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.
Summary: the IDF’s prosecution of the war in Gaza and attacks on Palestinian communities in the West Bank have revived popular support in Arab states for Palestine, forcing MENA governments to back away from further normalisation with Israel.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.
Summary: Israel with the support of its Western backers consistently violates international law and the rules-based order on which democracies are founded to impose its violent military will on Palestine and the Palestinians.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.
Summary: a book published last year explores the way in which the UAE and Israel have weaponised narratives to undermine and sabotage civil society efforts in the Arab world that are aimed at challenging authoritarian rule.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.
Summary: Saudi Arabia and the UAE have developed a strategy of promoting a version of Islam branded moderate as a soft power tool designed to reassure Western allies while advancing their regional interests and continuing domestic repression.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.
Summary: a prescient podcast that detailed the failures of US foreign policy in the Middle East under the Biden administration and correctly foresaw how unqualified military support for Netanyahu and the region’s authoritarian regimes was leading to consequences that would prove disastrous.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.
Summary: backed by Western democracies, Arab Gulf states and a steady flow of weapons dictatorships and warlords are flourishing in MENA and creating new and dangerous levels of instability in an already deeply unstable region.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.
Summary: a recent book by a leading Gulf analyst argues that the Gulf monarchies have successfully ridden out threats posed by the Arab Spring to their autocratic rule with an adept use of multipolar alliances and effective governance.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.
Summary: a new book by Maged Mandour details the ways in which President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has used hyper nationalism and the military to create a new form of dictatorship, hitherto unseen in Egypt.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.
Summary: Iraqi Kurdistan remains at odds with the central government in Baghdad over oil revenues and within KRG two families tussle for power and divide the spoils between them with ordinary citizens continuing to be denied their rights as corruption runs rife.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.
This Arab Life: Author and blogger Amal Ghandour joins editor William Law as his guest on the Arab Digest podcast. Their conversation about Lebanon, Jordan and the wider Arab world takes as its point of departure Amal's latest book This Arab Life which is both an intensely personal memoir and a ruthlessly honest assessment of the past, the present and the near future of a region riven by social, political and economic crises.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.
Editor William Law is joined by Arab Digest's resident energy analyst Alastair Newton. Their conversation drills down on the current state of the oil market and where it is headed in the second half of 2024 ranging across peak oil, grey rhinos, net zero, the looming possibility of a war between Israel and Hezbollah, the Biden decision to stand down, the state of the Gulf's national oil companies, China. And yes Alastair is standing by his call of $70 a barrel at year's end.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.
Arab Digest editor William Law's guest this week is Annelle Sheline. She quit the US State Department in protest at the Biden adminstration's unqualified support for the Israeli government's ongoing war of genocide in Gaza and she tells Arab Digest that the road on which America is embarked could spark a wider catastrophic war in the Middle East.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.
Arab Digest editor William Law's guest this week is the North Africa energy and political analyst Francis Ghilès. Their conversation looks at the Maghreb states of Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria and Libya and explores how each one is delivering on the economic opportunities the current global geopolitical landscape is offering up. Morocco is proving both adept and resilient in seizing those opportunities while the other Maghreb countries lag far behind.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.
Arab Digest editor William Law is joined from Washington by the Middle East analyst and writer Aslı Aydıntaşbaş. The focus is on Türkiye's President Erdoğan and how he has positioned himself in the Gaza war and in his relations with Middle East states. In a US election year when the signs are growing of a Trump return to the White House Aslı Aydıntaşbaş reflects on what that will mean for the Middle East and for President Erdoğan.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.
Defence and security analyst Andreas Krieg is Arab Digest editor Willliam Law's guest this week. The Gaza war has laid bare a regional security and stability crisis, one that impacts Middle East states as much as it does Israel. It is a crisis that the Biden administration has allowed to burgeon as state and non-state actors vie for ascendancy in the vacuum caused by a collapsing US hegemon and Israel's blind pursuit of a war it has already lost.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.
Arab Digest editor William Law's guest this week is the New Lines Institute's Caroline Rose. The trade in the illicit synthetic drug Captagon continues to boom and much of it is run by Syria's Assad family. The Assads have built up a manufacturing and distribution network that brings them more than $2 billion a year. Despite Bashar al-Assad's promise to curtail the trade in return for being allowed back into the fold of the Arab states, captagon remains king as the Middle East's drug of choice.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.
Arab Digest editor William Law is joined by the Egyptian journalist and blogger Hossam el-Hamalawy. Their conversation traverses the relationship between Egypt and Israel from the point of the signing of the 1979 peace deal to the present Gaza war. With each passing decade Egypt's influence has waned to the point that, as the Gaza genocide continues, Cairo is forced to bow to Israel while playing second fiddle to tiny Qatar in peace talk negotiations.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.
Arab Digest editor William Law welcomes Gulf analyst and author Kristian Coates Ulrichsen back to the podcast. Their conversation is a preview of Kristian's latest, soon to be released book The Kingdom of Football. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has used the purchase of Newcastle United FC and the stocking of the Saudi premier league with expensive foreign talent to refurbish an image badly tarnished by systematic human rights abuse and the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.
The broadcaster, journalist and filmmaker Zeinab Badawi joins Arab Digest editor William Law to talk about her new book An African History of Africa which charts the history of Africa from the very beginnings of human life on earth to the present. In a wide-ranging conversation with a focus on North Africa and Sudan Zeinab Badawi explores the history of the continent from an African perspective embued with her own deep knowledge.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.
Arab Digest editor William Law's guest this week is Giorgio Cafiero, CEO of Gulf State Analytics. The Washington-based geopolitical analyst considers how America's enemies are strengthening their presence in the Middle East even as President Biden weakens his bid for re-election by continuing to back Israel as voters who would otherwise support him turn away angered that he is allowing and arming a genocide in Palestine.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.
Arab Digest editor Wiliam Law's guest this week is the Kurdish American journalist Sirwan Kajjo. Their conversation focusses on the Kurds in three countries - Syria, Iraq and Iran - as they explore the impact of the Gaza war and the ongoing pressures Kurdish people are experiencing from both outside forces and in the case of Iraq and Iran the governments that rule over them controlling so many aspects of their lives while delivering so little to them.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.
Sudanese political analyst Kholood Khair joins Arab Digest editor William Law for a conversation about the war in Sudan which has become the world's worst humanitarian disaster. While global attention has focussed on Ukraine and Gaza a vicious civil war grinds on with outside players becoming increasingly prominent and the people of Sudan paying an appallingly high price.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.
Renad Mansour joins Arab Digest editor William Law as his podcast guest this week. Renad is a Senior Research Fellow and the Project Director of the Iraq Initiative at London's Chatham House. Their conversation looks at the flaws in US and other Western nations' managing of the challenges posed by the Axis of Resistance and notes that even as the region descends further into instability sparked by the Gaza war there are signs in Iraq that progress toward a stable and secure state, albeit limited, is starting to happen.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.
Arab Digest editor William Law welcomes back Dania Akkad, Senior Investigative Editor at Middle East Eye. Their conversation focusses on the extraordinarily high death toll of aid workers in Gaza and the claim by the IDF that it does not target aid organisations or their employees, a claim the facts belie. Dania examines the recent attack on World Central Kitchen that killed seven and notes the simple steps the IDF could take were it to be seriously committed to the protection of humanitarian aid workers.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.
Arab Digest editor William Law's guest this week is Caroline Rose, the Director of the Strategic Blind Spots Portfolio at Washington's New Lines Institute. In the midst of the Gaza war America continues to weigh up whether to remove its remaining troops on the ground from Syria and Iraq. A difficult call at any time but with growing uncertainty about the direction the Middle East is headed towards and in an election year that could return Donald Trump to the White House whatever the US decides will have profound implications for the region and beyond.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.
Arab Digest editor William Law's guest this week is the human rights campaigner Areej al-Sadhan. Her brother Abdulrahman al-Sadhan languishes somewhere in a Saudi jail. Forcibly disappeared for more than six years, his family have had no word of him save for a one minute phone call. He is but one of thousands of prisoners of conscience detained in the kingdom. Meanwhile the world's democracies embrace a rehabilitated Mohammed bin Salman choosing to ignore the gross human rights violations carried out under his leadership.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.
Arab Digest editor William Law's guest is the European Council on Foreign Relation's Cinzia Bianco. After a tumultuous and violent start to his de facto leadership of Saudi Arabia the crown prince has pivoted the kingdom toward a new diplomacy at a challenging and dangerous time in the world's most volatile region.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.
Arab Digest editor William Law's guest this week is the Iranian historian Arash Azizi whose latest book What Iranians Want: Women, Life, Freedom has just been published. Their conversation focusses on the struggle of ordinary Iranians against a theocratic dictatorship and how it is in the interests of both Arab states and America to rethink strategies in order to defuse the multiple threats the Khamenei regime poses to the region and to the world.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.
Mona Seif is the sister of the jailed Egyptian-British writer and activist Alaa Abd El-Fattah. Her audio profile of him speaks of the person that he is, the injustice of his sentencing and incarceration and the inept failures of the UK government to support efforts to secure the release of a British citizen whose name has been described as synonymous with the 25 January 2011 Egyptian revolution. She concludes by reading his evocative call from prison to Gaza and to the Palestinian people.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.
Arab Digest editor William Law's guest this week is the Middle East analyst and Chatham House Associate Fellow Lina Khatib. With so much focus on the war in Gaza little attention has been paid to how the conflict is affecting the countries of the Levant. The conversation reflects on impacts in Syria, Jordan and Lebanon and, as Israel weighs up a northern front engagement, what could happen should the war against Palestine widen out into the greater Levant.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.
The European Council on Foreign Relations' Tarek Megerisi joins Arab Digest editor William Law for a conversation about North Africa. The people living in the Maghreb and Egypt are facing severe challenges but their governments, supported by Western institutions and political leaders, are disconnected from the citizens they rule over. Nowhere is that more starkly clear than in how North African regimes are responding to the war in Gaza.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.
The Yemen expert Helen Lackner joins Arab Digest editor William Law to discuss the ways in which the war in Gaza have impacted on Yemen including the Huthis targeting of Red Sea shipping, the impact on efforts to finally secure a peace deal in Yemen's nearly ten year old war and how the humanitarian crisis in Gaza as well as crises elsewhere have placed Yemen's people into an even more precarious position than they found themselves in before 7 October.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.
Arab Digest editor William Law welcomes back the Middle East and North Africa analyst Francis Ghilès. Their conversation focusses on how persistent misreadings of the Middle East over decades have lead both America and Europe down a road that has repeatedly led to disasters culminating in the current war in Gaza where, unless rational thinking prevails, an unimaginable bloodbath will follow with the potential to engulf the region in an all-out war with enormous consequences for the world.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.
Arab Digest editor William Law's guest this week is the energy analyst and author Jim Krane. In a wide ranging conversation they discuss how shifts in global energy patterns are altering relations between the US and Saudi Arabia, how Gulf hydrocarbon producing states' move towards transition is proceeding and how the Gaza war is impacting the Gulf energy sector.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.
Middle East security, foreign affairs and defence analyst Tobias Borck joins Arab Digest editor William Law to talk about his new book Seeking Stability Amidst Disorder, an examination of how Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Qatar have used foreign policy sometimes to good effect, sometimes not, to attempt to secure stability in a volatile neighbourhood that with the war in Gaza has become ever more unstable.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.
Arab Digest editor William Law's guest this week is the Syrian analyst Malik al-Abdeh. As with the earthquake that devastated northwest Syria one year ago Bashar al-Assad is once again using disaster to strengthen his grip on the roughly two-thirds of the country he controls. Carefully steering his regime clear of any support for Hamas or for the Palestinians trapped and being massacred in the Gaza Strip, Assad is securing growing acceptance of his regime in Europe.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.
Arab Digest Editor William Law is joined by Middle East analyst Sami Hamdi to talk about the growing threat to the region and the world as Israel continues its brutal prosecution of the Gaza war.Their conversation looks at outside players and how they are responding to the scorched earth policy the IDF is carrying out. Will diplomatic pressure and the world's outrage be enough to stop the Israeli onslaught or will this war continue down an apocalyptic road?Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.
Arab Digest editor William Law welcomes Sanam Vakil director of the Middle East and North Africa Programme at Chatham House.Their conversation focusses on the role of Iran and the Axis of Resistance in the Gaza war. As Israel continues its brutal assault there is a growing risk that tit for tat responses in other theatres of action will blend into a full-blown regional war. The podcast was recorded 22 January before the UK, for the second time, joined the US in strikes on Yemen's Huthis.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.
Arab Digest editor William Law's guest is the author and Gulf states analyst Kristian Coates Ulrichsen. Their conversation focusses on the cycle of violence that has hit Red Sea shipping lanes as the region slips into a wider arena of conflict with the Gaza war as a catalyst. They interrogate the assumptions in Washington, London and other Western capitals that bombing the Huthis will end the threat rather than escalate it.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.
Arab Digest editor William Law's guest this week is the Sudanese political analyst and broadcaster Kholood Khair. Sudan's civil war has been ongoing since April as two generals battle to see who will prevail in a brutal struggle that has shown no regard for the people of Sudan. Their peaceful revolution of 2018-19 that threw a dictator out has been usurped by two men driven by greed and a lust for power contesting between them to see who will become the country's next dictator.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.
On 27 September we podcast Helen's Lackner's insightful analysis of Yemen as the now almost nine year conflict continues to ravage the Yemeni people. Helen, a regular AD newsletter contributor is one of the world's foremost Yemen experts and the author of several books on a country she has worked in over several decades. Her most recent book published by Routledge is Yemen: Poverty and Conflict. We are proud to select her podcast for the Arab Digest Editor's Choice 2023.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.
Arab Digest editor William Law is joined by the Brooking Institute's Aslı Aydıntaşbaş for a look back at a tumultuous and violent 2023. It was a year that has seen the Middle East and North Africa riven by multiple wars that challenge not only the region but the world's security. Aydıntaşbaş concludes our year-ender with her predictions for 2024.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.
Arab Digest editor William Law's guest this week is the Washington-based CEO of Gulf State Analytics, Giorgio Cafiero. When Joe Biden arrived in Tel Aviv on 12 July this year he said "you don't need to be a Jew to be a Zionist." The podcast examines the president's unwavering support for Israel in the face of the IDF's continuing onslaught on the people of Gaza and considers other critical US policy failures in the Middle East and North Africa in 2023.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.
While the war in Gaza rages on, little thought is being given to the impact it is having on refugees across the Middle East and North Africa. Arab Digest editor William Law's guest this week is the European Council on Foreign Relations Kelly Petillo. She discusses efforts by extremists in the Netanyahu government to carry out ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, examines the impact of the war on refugees in Syria, Jordan and Lebanon and considers efforts by Europe to buy its way out of the migrant crisis.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.
Arab Digest editor William Law is joined by the historian Avi Shlaim to talk about his latest book Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew. Professor Shlaim was just five when he and his family left a comfortable middle-class life in Baghdad for the newly emerging state of Israel. It was a country, he argues, that was dominated then, as it is now, by the politics and Zionist ideology of European Jewry. The opportunity to use Arab-Jews as a bridge between two peoples was never taken up with decades long and terrible consequences that today are being played out in the violent destruction of Gaza.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.
Arab Digest editor William Law's guest this week is the North Africa analyst Tarek Megerisi. While the world has been focussed on the Gaza war competing kleptocrats in Libya have gotten on with plundering the country while Europe and the rest of the international community look away and the UN fumbles opportunities to move the country and its people toward security and peace. We begin, however, with Tarek’s thoughts on Gaza.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.
Arab Digest editor William Law is joined by regular AD newsletter and podcast contributor Maged Mandour. His book Egypt under El-Sisi: a Nation on the Edge will be published by I.B. Tauris 25 January and is the subject of today's conversation. Maged tracks Sisi's trajectory since orchestrating the 2013 coup that overthrew Mohammed Morsi and he argues that the Egyptian president is a dictator unlike any that have come before him.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.
Lina Khatib the director of the Middle East Institute at London's SOAS joins Arab Digest editor William Law to discuss how the Gaza war is impacting Lebanon. With its economy in ruins and the government paralysed the last thing Lebanon needs is for the war to spill over. But with Iran-backed Hezbollah the dominant force and Israel continuing its strikes into the country the threat remains high that a regional war that begins in Lebanon could engulf the region with far reaching and disastrous consequences.
Arab Digest editor William Law's guest this week is the Turkish analyst and writer Aslı Aydıntaşbaş, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institute in Washington DC. Their conversation focusses on the efforts that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has made to position himself as a leading voice in resolving the Gaza war, efforts that have thus far backfired badly for him.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.
Arab Digest editor William Law's guest is the analyst and commentator Sami Hamdi, editor in chief of The International Interest (intlinterest.com). As Israel continues to bomb the Gaza Strip, Middle East regimes are scrambling to come up with responses that both accommodate Israel and respond to popular support for Palestinians amidst concerns in some countries that street protests in support of Palestine could quickly turn on the regimes. The podcast was recorded 27 October.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.
Arab Digest editor William Law is joined by Jon Alterman, a senior vice president at Washington's Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). Jon brings to the table insights into President Biden's handling thus far of the Gaza-Israel war and argues that Israel's military battering of Gaza offers no long-term solutions that will bring about security for Israel and end the suffering of the Palestinian people.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.
Arab Digest editor William Law's guest is the British-Arab writer Layla Maghribi. Like many citizens of Arab descent in the UK and Europe Layla speaks out in defence of Palestinians as the bombardment of Gaza continues and civilian casualties continue to mount. And as she speaks she voices the fear that many Arabs feel that they are no longer safe in their own countries as their leaders give Israel unconditional support.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.
Arab Digest editor William Law is joined by the defence and security analyst Andreas Krieg, author of Subversion: the strategic weaponization of narratives. Their conversation explores how prevailing narratives in the Gaza - Israel war are driving the region and the world into an evermore dangerously lethal situation even as civilian casualties continue to mount and Israel prepares for a land invasion that regardless of the outcome it cannot win. The podcast was recorded before news broke of the bombing of a hospital in Gaza City that has left 100s of civilians dead.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.
Arab Digest editor William Law's guest this week is the Kurdish writer and academic Choman Hardi. A distinguished poet, Choman has just had her debut novel Whispering Walls published by Afsana Press. It is an absorbing and powerful account of an Iraqi Kurdish family grappling, on the eve of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, with their own history, entangled as it is with the history of the Kurds as a people without a country.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.
Arab Digest editor William Law's guest this week is the energy analyst Alastair Newton. Alastair, a regular contributor to the AD newsletter, takes a long hard look at the way the future of oil is playing out in the Gulf. Peak oil is coming and it may be sooner than Gulf oil producers think. The UAE and Saudi Arabia are the key players and between the two Alastair examines who is better prepared and what happens if the Saudis stumble at a time when the region and the world is gripped by a climate crisis caused in no small part by the addiction to oil.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.
Arab Digest editor William Law's guest this week is the Yemen expert Helen Lackner. In a wide-ranging conversation they look at the situation on the ground, how negotiations between the Saudis and the Huthis are progressing, the role the UAE is playing in the south and the acute humanitarian situation as leaders of various factions inside the country and outside players jostle while the people continue to suffer in a largely forgotten war that has now gone on for more than 8 years.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.
William Law's guest this week on the AD podcast is the Libyan analyst Anas El Gomati. As the warlord Khalifa Haftar and his sons spin a web of deceit and attempt to shirk responsibility for the massive flood that killed thousands, El Gomati strips away their lies to reveal how the Haftars' greed and incompetence are at the heart of the disaster and how the support of foreign players has enabled the family to plunder Libya.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.
Arab Digest editor William Law's guest this week is Renad Mansour, a Senior Research Fellow, Middle East and North Africa Programme and the Project Director of the Iraq Initiative at London’s Chatham House. Their conversation ranges widely, looking at the current government in place for nearly a year, the continuing role of Iran, what needs to happen to curb the corruption throttling the country and the determination of young Iraqis to replace a system that denies them with one that empowers their hopes and enables their aspirations.
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Arab Digest editor William Law is joined by the Middle East policy analyst Jon Hoffman from the Washington-based Cato Institute. Hoffman argues that Biden and his advisors are poised to make the gravest foreign policy blunder in the region since the Iraq war as the president pushes forward on securing a deal that would see Saudi Arabia join the Abraham Accords and recognise Israel.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.
Reinventing the Sheikdom: how MbZ has shaped the UAE
Top of our New Top Ten Podcast Countdown is our 1 July, 2022 podcast with Matthew Hedges. Matthew is an academic focusing on authoritarian regimes with an emphasis on the monarchies of the Gulf states. He's the author of Reinventing the Sheikhdom: Clan, Power and Patronage in Mohammed bin Zayed’s UAE published last year by Hurst.
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The MbZ and Erdoğan embrace
Number 2 in our NEW Top Ten Podcast Countdown is our 18 February 2022 podcast with Sami Hamdi, Editor in Chief of the International Interest and a regular Arab Digest newsletter and podcast contributor.
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Today’s New Top Ten entry is our 8 July 2022 podcast with Maged Mandour. Maged is a political analyst and a regular contributor to Arab Digest and to Middle East Eye and Open Democracy. He is also a writer for Sada, the Carnegie Endowment online journal. Maged is the author of an upcoming book, Egypt Under Sisi (I.B.Tauris) which will examine the social and political developments in Egypt since the coup of 2013.
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Number 4 in our new Top Ten is our 9 September 2022 podcast with Dr Elisabeth Kendall. Dr Kendall is an expert on Yemen and militant jihadist movements. Prior to her appointment as Mistress of Girton College, Cambridge University she was a senior research fellow in Arabic and Islamic Studies at Oxford University's Pembroke College.
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America and the Kais Saied coup
Number 5 in our new Top Ten is our 11 March 2022 podcast with Amy Hawthorne. At the time Amy was the Deputy Director of Research at POMED, the Project on Middle East Democracy in Washington, DC. She is a Middle East expert with many years of experience working on Arab politics and US Middle East policy in the NGO sector and think tanks and in the State Department during the Obama administration.
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Iraq in a suddenly changed world
Our 25 February podcast was with Renad Mansour, a Senior Research Fellow at the Middle East and North Africa program and project director of the Iraq Initiative at London’s Chatham House. It was recorded a little less than a month after the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
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Macron’s missteps in the Middle East
Francis Ghilès is a specialist on security, energy and political trends in North Africa, and the western Mediterranean. He's a Senior Associate Research Fellow at the Barcelona Centre for International Affairs and a visiting fellow at King's College London. The podcast was first broadcast 28 January 2022 ahead of the French presidential election in April.
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The UK’s declining status in the Middle East
Amidst domestic political uncertainty and a lack of coherent policy formulation in the autumn of 2022 the UK found its presence in the Gulf and the wider Middle East in danger of slipping further into decline.
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The UAE, Saudi Arabia and the JCPOA
Kristian Coates Ulrichsen is a Middle East Fellow at Rice University's Baker Institute for Public Policy in Houston, Texas. His most recent book published by Hurst is Qatar and the Gulf Crisis. This podcast was first broadcast on 14 January 2022, six weeks ahead of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It focussed on the JCPOA, the Iran nuclear deal, at a point where Iran was claiming agreement was close to hand.
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A Palestinian village you’ve probably never heard of
The untold story of a small Palestinian village split in half and fighting quietly and with great determination for its survival.
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Arab Digest editor William Law's guest this week is the Gulf security expert David Roberts. He has just published a book that examines the six Gulf monarchies through five security lenses: political, societal, economic, military and environmental. He argues that the monarchies have shown a remarkable resilience and defied repeated predictions of their demise.
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Arab Digest editor William Law's guest this week is Elisheva Goldberg, media and policy director for the New Israel Fund. Their conversation is about a crucial West Bank Bedouin village, Khan al-Ahmar, and why the extremists in Netanyahu's government are pushing hard for its destruction as a key to achieving their ultimate goal of driving Palestinians out of what they call Greater Israel.
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Editor William Law welcomes Isobel Archer to the Arab Digest podcast. Isobel is the Senior Researcher, Labour & Migrant Worker Rights for the London-based Business & Human Rights Resource Centre. The centre has just released a report on the treatment of migrant workers in Qatar during and after the football World Cup that shows, with numerous abuses uncovered, the Qataris and FIFA still have serious questions to answer for despite their claims of significant improvements in advancing the rights of migrant labourers and service workers.
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As part of the Arab Digest Egypt week interrogating the 3 July 2013 Egypt coup that overthrew Mohamed Morsi, the country's only democratically elected president, Arab Digest editor William Law's guest is the Egyptian writer and analyst Maged Mandour. Their conversation begins with the revolution of 2011 and traces the circumstances that enabled the coup, follows the tightening vice of the Sisi dictatorship and his destruction of the economy and ends with Maged's thoughts on when and how a democracy could emerge in Egypt.
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Arab Digest editor William Law's guest this week is the King's College defence and security analyst Dr Andreas Krieg. In a revealing conversation Dr Krieg lays bare the extraordinary support the UAE provides Yevgeny Prigozhin's Wagner Group. Prigozhin's entire African network, one that includes Libya and Sudan, is facilitated and run by a sophisticated banking and logistics infrastructure operating in the UAE and with the direct involvement of senior members of UAE President Mohammed bin Zayed's family.
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An Emirati businessman who holds Turkish citizenship has disappeared from the Amman prison where he was being held by Jordanian authorities at the behest of the UAE. Arab Digest editor William Law is joined by Dania Akkad, a senior investigative editor with Middle East Eye to discuss how a warrant issued by the so-called Arab Interpol has trapped Khalaf al-Romaithi.
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Arab Digest editor William Law's guest this week is Jim Krane. An ex-journalist and an author of several books dealing with energy and the Gulf States, Jim is an energy research fellow at Rice University's Baker Institute in Houston, Texas. Their conversation today is all about Abu Dhabi and OPEC+. Will constraints imposed on the UAE by the cartel cause a rupture and the departure of the Emiratis or will they weigh up the options and bide their time? Will they go or will they stay?
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Arab Digest editor William Law's guest this week is the British-Sudanese student and activist Hadeal Abdelatti. While two power-hungry generals fight for control and devastate Sudan and its people, the courage and determination that saw the 2019 overthrow of the Omar Bashir dictatorship remains and is captured in the TikTok videos of Hadeal. Her voice is the voice of young Sudanese within the country and in the diaspora for whom the call for democracy will not be silenced.
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Francis Ghilès joins Arab Digest editor William Law in this week's podcast. Francis is a visiting fellow at King's College London and an expert on North Africa politics, energy and security. He argues that what has been called Tunisia's Jasmine Revolution has failed despite the overthrow of Ben Ali in 2011 because the structure of dictatorship has remained essentially unchanged thus enabling a new dictator, in the shape of Kais Saied, to emerge.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.
Arab Digest editor William Law's guest this week is the New Lines Institute's Caroline Rose. Caroline has been carrying out ground-breaking investigative analysis of Captagon, the drug of choice in the Gulf and the wider Middle East. With the Arab League normalising relations with the Syrian regime and welcoming Bashar al-Assad back into the fold, the head of the family narco business has scored another coup but it is one unlikely to stop the flood of Captagon into the region.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.
Middle East analyst Jon Hoffman joins Arab Digest editor William Law from Washington D.C. Their conversation is a look at how Saudi Arabia and the UAE have used religion to drive forward their domestic and foreign policy initiatives of silencing dissent at home while subverting democracy efforts in the wider Middle East and North Africa, all the while gaining plaudits from the West for buttressing so-called moderate Islam and encouraging interfaith dialogue.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.
The Turkish writer and analyst Aslı Aydıntaşbaş joins Arab Digest editor William Law to talk about Türkiye's 14 May election. With a battered economy and a growing sense that President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's increasingly centralised and repressive rule is failing the country, his main rival Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu leads the polls. But as the region and the world watches, the outcome remains uncertain.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.
It is a sweeping epic that travels through time and space to tell the interlinked and intergenerational stories of five powerful, determined and gutsy women. Their narratives are woven into and entwined with the history and the challenges of the Gulf state of Kuwait.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.
Arab Digest editor William Law's guest this week is the ECFR MENA specialist Tarek Megerisi. With Sudan sliding towards civil war as two generals vie for power, the Libyan warlord Khalifa Haftar winning Western backing and Kais Saied the president of Tunisia tightening his grip on power as he restores one-man rule in Tunisia Tarek argues that the West's support for dictators will only serve to further instability and heighten insecurity in the Middle East and North Africa.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.
While the world looks elsewhere, three countries are hosting at a conservative estimate 5.4 million Syrian refugees. Arab Digest editor William Law 's guest this week is Kelly Petillo, a Middle East and North Africa specialist with the European Council on Foreign Relations. The European hard right is scapegoating Syrian refugees while at the same time Syrians in Türkiye, Lebanon and Jordan are facing increasing hostility as those countries struggle with weak economies and political insecurity.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.
William Law's guest on the podcast is the Palestinian academic Dalal Iriqat. This week marks the first 100 days of the latest Netanyahu government, the most extreme in Israel's history. Acting with impunity, a Fascist coterie of his ministers has stepped up a vicious campaign aimed at removing whatever rights Palestinians might still have while using violence to provoke violence in order to justify apartheid.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.
Arab Digest editor William Law's guest this week is the Saudi human rights activist Areej al-Sadhan. Her brother Abdulrahman is one of many held in Saudi Arabia's labyrinthine prison system whose only crime was to criticise the regime of Mohammed bin Salman. The crown prince spends billions to promote an image of reform in the kingdom but behind the expensive PR and his lavish giga-projects lies a brutally repressive dictatorship.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.
Arab Digest regular contributor Francis Ghilès joins editor William Law in a wide ranging conversation about the economic and political outlook emerging from the constitutional coup being carried out by Tunisian President Kais Saied. Francis notes the support that Saied is receiving from powerful MENA allies, chief among them gas-rich Algeria.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.
Andreas Krieg joins Arab Digest editor William Law for a conversation about his just released book Subversion. Andreas looks at how weaponised narratives have been used in the Middle East to sabotage and subvert the Arab Spring and efforts to empower civil society. Key players in the game are the United Arab Emirates and Israel who share a common goal: to subvert democratic engagement and governance in the Middle East and North Africa.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.
Chatham House Iraq expert Renad Mansour joins Arab Digest editor William Law to discuss the impact of America and the UK's 2003 decision to invade Iraq and overthrow Saddam Hussein. Faulty assumptions, false claims and the decision to dismantle the armed forces and the civil service coupled with the imposition of a sectarian governance structure led to chaos, corruption and violence that scars Iraq to this day.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.
Zoe Robbin, an Amman-based analyst on climate change and water issues joins Arab Digest editor William Law on today's podcast. Their conversation is about water and how it is a little-reported on but extremely powerful weapon. While cutting Palestine out of climate change talks, Israel is using water to further settlement plans in the West Bank while using Jordan's increasingly desperate water needs to push the kingdom into a corner.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.
One year on from the launch of Putin's 'special military operation' Arab Digest editor William Law invites the New Lines Institute's Caroline Rose back to discuss how the war is impacting the Middle East diplomatically and politically and what a frontline attritional stalemate will mean for America's relations in the region.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.
The 21 year old Tunisian writer Tharwa Boulifi joins Arab Digest editor William Law for a conversation about the young Tunisians who came of age a decade after the revolution only to find the country slipping back into dictatorship under President Kais Saied, a man many of the Gen Zs initially thought they could trust to keep the dream of revolution alive.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.
Arab Digest Editor Willliam Law is joined by Dr Lina Khatib. Her research focuses on the international relations of the Middle East, Islamist groups and security, political transitions and foreign policy, with special attention to the Syrian conflict. Their conversation examines how last week's devastating earthquakes are playing into the hands of the Syrian dictator.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.
Arab Digest editor William Law's guest this week is the journalist and author Elias Jahshan. Elias, who edited This Arab is Queer, an anthology of LGBTQ+ Arab writers, talks about the power of language and of music and food to hold truth to power, to challenge intolerance and repression and to push forward the struggle for liberation in the Arab world.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & podcasts.
The Baker Institute's Kristian Coates Ulrichsen joins Arab Digest editor William Law for a conversation about the extremist regime Benjamin Netanyahu has assembled and how far-right ministers like Itamar Ben-Gvir in provoking provocations against Palestinians are creating a dangerous new environment, a tinderbox which needs only a single spark to set off a major regional conflagration.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & podcasts.
Kurdish-American journalist Sirwan Kajjo joins Arab Digest editor William Law in this week's podcast. Sirwan is just back from the Kurdish Region of Iraq (KRI) and he brings to the table his analysis of the current situation, including tensions between Erbil and Baghdad over oil revenues and the ongoing struggle for supremacy between the two families who control the KRI, the Barzanis and the Talibanis.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & podcasts.
Arab Digest editor William Law welcomes the Palestinian journalist and commentator Nour Odeh to the podcast. A recent UN General Assembly decision to seek an opinion about Israel's occupation has wide-reaching implications, ones that Israel is clearly rattled by. Against the backdrop of the most extreme government in Israeli history, Nour explains the importance of the decision for the cause of Palestinian justice.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & podcasts.
Annelle Sheline from the Washington-based Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft joins Arab Digest editor William Law for a conversation about US foreign policy in the Middle East. Two years into the Biden presidency perceptions about America and its role have shifted dramatically in the region but the president and his advisors seem locked in a belief that little has changed.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & podcasts.
Author and blogger Amal Ghandour joins editor William Law as his guest on the Arab Digest podcast. Their conversation about Lebanon, Jordan and the wider Arab world takes as its point of departure Amal's latest book This Arab Life which is both an intensely personal memoir and a ruthlessly honest assessment of the past, the present and the near future of a region riven by social, political and economic crises.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & podcasts.
On 21 January, 2022 we podcast Lina al-Hathloul’s powerful Testament of Courage. She spoke about her sister Loujain, the Saudi women’s rights activist and for all prisoners of conscience and their families. Lina is Head of Monitoring & Comms @ALQST_ORG and co-author of the children’s book Loujain Dreams of Sunflowers. In honouring the courage and resilience of human rights defenders and their families, we are proud to select her podcast for the Arab Digest Editor’s Choice 2022.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & podcasts.
Sami Hamdi, the CEO of The International Interest, joins Arab Digest editor William Law for a wide-ranging, fast-paced and thought-provoking review of a tumultuous year for the MENA region as alliances shifted and fissures emerged with new tensions flaring up even as old ones eased. The podcast wraps up with Sami's take on what to look for in 2023.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & podcasts.
Arab Digest editor William Law's guest this week is Gulf State Analytics CEO Giorgio Cafiero. With relations between the US and key GCC players fraying, China has upped its game seizing both economic and diplomatic advantage. But with Washington remaining the Gulf's security guarantor, the GCC will need to tread a balanced line.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & podcasts.
Arab Digest editor William Law asks Libya expert Tarek Megerisi to give his assessment of the current situation. His diagnosis is that yes the country remains in a downward spiral but with a new UN special representative in place there is some reason to believe that this seemingly intractable conflict may, possibly, be heading into a more positive space.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & podcasts.
Arab Digest editor William Law welcomes back Helen Lackner, a leading expert on Yemen to talk about her latest book Yemen: Poverty and Conflict, published by Routledge. The book builds on her profound experience in the country over several decades and is an invaluable primer on its extraordinary history and on current issues that threaten Yemen including the ongoing war, climate change and foreign interference.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & podcasts.
Arab Digest editor William Law welcomes back Egyptian analyst Maged Mandour. Their conversation this weeks looks at how international finance has enabled President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi to continue his mega-projects spending binge as the military tightens its iron grip on the economy and ordinary Egyptians are plunged ever deeper into poverty.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & podcasts.
Arab Digest editor William Law welcomes back Jim Krane to the podcast. Jim is an energy research fellow at Rice University's Baker Institute in Houston. Their conversation focusses on the remarkable partnership that has grown up between Saudi Arabia and Russia and how the Saudis are very effectively using oil and the rediscovered clout of OPEC+ to leverage geopolitical advantages.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & podcasts.
Arab Digest editor welcomes Qatar University's Dr Ali Bakir as the podcast heads to Doha. In a wide-ranging conversation they talk about how Qatar is responding to the criticism it is receiving ahead of the World Cup, Sharm el-Sheikh and COP27, the implications for the Gulf of the US mid-terms and how Qatar's ally Türkiye seeks to consolidate gains in the region with a soft power agenda.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & podcasts.
RUSI associate fellow Samuel Ramani joins Arab Digest editor William Law to discuss Putin's flagging image in the Middle East, how his stratagems in Libya and Syria are playing out, relations with the Israelis as Netanyahu returns, Türkiye's role in getting grain moving again and how the Middle East is weighing up its relationship with a leader who in provoking a war has stumbled badly.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & podcasts.
Francis Ghilès, associate senior researcher at the Barcelona Centre for International Affairs, is Arab Digest editor William Law's guest this week. Algeria, like other hydrocarbon producers, has experienced a huge windfall thanks to the war in Ukraine. The question is will the country see itself return to a position of prominence in North Africa and beyond or will it once again squander the opportunity and remain locked in a dysfunctional economy and a frozen political system?Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & podcasts.
Arab Digest editor William Law's guest this week is Dr Andreas Krieg, assistant professor at the Defence Studies Department, King's College London. With global turbulence and turmoil running high the Gulf remains an island of stability but faces challenges as the war in Ukraine plays out, relations with Washington fray and the UK, a longtime GCC ally, staggers from one political crisis to the next.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & podcasts.
Arab Digest editor William Law's guest this week is Dr Renad Mansour, senior research fellow and head of the Iraq Initiative at London's Chatham House. He has just returned from Baghdad and this wide-ranging conversation explores Iraq's political impasse and the structure that is responsible for it, the culture of violence and the enigmatic and powerful populist cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. Also on the table: Iran, Gulf neighbours, the JCPOA and climate change.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & podcasts.
As turmoil roils the ruling Conservative party, Arab Digest editor William Law is in conversation with the Middle East analyst Michael Stephens. They explore how political instability and economic uncertainty in the UK are accelerating the decline of Britain's status in the region.Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & podcasts.
Arab Digest editor William Law's guest this week is Lina Khatib, director of the Middle East and North Africa Programme at the London-based think tank Chatham House. Their conversation focusses on the political and business elites that are plundering Lebanon. Ordinary people are suffering huge deprivation, with 80% of the population now below the poverty line, as the economic crisis caused by the insatiable greed of the elites grows ever deeper.
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The Arab Digest podcast conversation this week takes a hard look at US foreign policy in the Middle East under President Joe Biden. Digest editor William Law's guest is Jon Hoffman, a geopolitical analyst and commentator. Hoffman sees Biden's approach as a continuation of decades of failed policies that have served neither the US nor the people of the region well.
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After a tumultuous week which saw the death of Queen Elizabeth and the rout of the Russian army in Ukraine, the Middle East analyst and author Kristian Coates Ulrichsen returns to the podcast to discuss in detail his recent tweets with Arab Digest editor William Law.
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Arab Digest editor William Law's guest this week is the Yemen and Jihadist expert Dr Elisabeth Kendall. She assesses the enduring threat of AQAP - Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula - and the extent to which the movement can exploit both the war and the current truce in an attempt to reassert its terror bona fides.
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Kicking off a new podcast season, Arab Digest editor William Law is in conversation with the Palestinian academic Dr Dalal Iriqat. Their conversation examines both the current and the historic situation of the Palestinian people and their resilience in the struggle to secure human rights and end the Israeli occupation.
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On 10 October 2021 we podcast Maged Mandour’s incisive assessment of the military industrial dictatorship President Sisi is building in Egypt. Maged is a political analyst who writes openDemocracy’s “Chronicles of the Arab Revolt” column, covering the affairs of the Arab world with a special focus on social change in the post-Arab Spring Middle East. He is also a Sada writer for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a contributor to Middle East Eye and a regular Arab Digest contributor.
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At number 2 in the all-time top ten is Christopher Davidson’s podcast Putin’s war plays well with MENA authoritarians which aired 1 April, 2022. Chris is an academic and author of several books on the politics and foreign affairs of the Gulf states and a regular contributor to the Arab Digest newsletter. His latest book published by Hurst is titled From Sheikhs to Sultanism.
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Number 3 in the top ten is a podcast that aired 28 May 2021. It featured Aslı Aydıntaşbaş and Cinzia Bianco. Aslı is a Senior Policy Fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations and Cinzia is a Visiting Fellow at the Council. They co-authored the paper, “Useful Enemies – How the Turkey-UAE rivalry is remaking the Middle East”.
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At number 4 in our all-time top ten podcasts is Francis Ghilès’ Algeria and Morocco: neighbours with issues released 23 July 2021. Francis is a specialist on security, energy and political trends in North Africa and the western Mediterranean, and associate senior researcher at the Barcelona Centre for international affairs. From 1981 to 1995 he was a North Africa correspondent for the Financial Times, and has written for numerous publications including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Le Monde, and El Pais.
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At number five in the top ten, Beyond the two-state solution was aired 22 October 2021. Jonathan Kuttab is co-founder of Nonviolence International and of the Palestinian human rights group, Al Haq. A well known international human rights attorney, he has practiced in the US, Palestine and Israel. He serves on the board of Bethlehem Bible College and is President of the Board of Holy Land Trust. He is the Executive Director for Friends of Sabeel North America. William Law spoke with Jonathan just after he had published ‘Beyond the two-state solution’ with Nonviolence International.
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Sitting at number six in the top ten countdown is Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula: down but not out with Elisabeth Kendall. Her conversation with William Law was podcast on 17 September, 2021. Dr Kendall is a Senior Research Fellow in Arabic and Islamic Studies at Oxford University's Pembroke College and an expert on Yemen and on Jihadist movements. In October she takes up her appointment as Mistress of Girton College, Cambridge. Her article, “The Jihadi threat and the Arabian Peninsula” on which their conversation was based was published in a 9/11 CTC Sentinel special issue. (CTC Sentinel is West Point's Combating Terrorism Center Journal.)
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Our podcast Cairo and Ankara: a new axis? ranks number 7 in the Arab Digest top ten podcast list. It was released 18 June 2021 and features Ali Bakir, a research assistant professor at Ibn Khaldoon center for Humanities and Social Sciences in Doha. Ali is an analyst following geopolitical and security trends in the Middle East, and especially those between Turkey and the Arab world. His conversation with Digest editor William Law focussed on the thaw in relations between Cairo and Ankara.
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We spoke with Chris 11 June 2021. His new book From Sheikhs to Sultanism: Statecraft and Authority in Saudi Arabia and the UAE had just been published by Hurst.
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Coming in at number nine in our all-time Arab Digest top ten is Annelle Sheline’s podcast The Weaponisation of Moderate Islam, first broadcast 30 July 2021. Annelle is a Research Fellow in the Middle East program at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and an expert on religious and political authority in the Middle East and North Africa.
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This podcast conversation aired 14 May 2021 as violence flared in the wake of Israeli security forces actions at Al Aqsa mosque and the attempted eviction of Palestinians from their homes in the East Jerusalem quarter of Sheikh Jarrah. Jordan’s Prince Hassan has long advocated on behalf of interfaith and humanitarian issues with particular stress on the human dimension of conflicts.
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Arab Digest editor William Law's guest this week is the European Council on Foreign Relations' Tarek Megerisi. Tarek considers the crisis that Putin's invasion has plunged the Middle East and North Africa into and he calls for fresh thinking and urgent action on the part of Europe, acting in concert with international bodies such as the IMF, to avert a human catastrophe on a scale that is unthinkable.
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Arab Digest editor William Law's guest this week is the editor in chief of The International Interest, Sami Hamdi. Sami looks beyond the headlines in the Western media about that fist bump. He argues instead that President Joe Biden's trip to Jeddah to meet with the Saudi crown prince had almost nothing to do with human rights and was much more about his own domestic political challenges, his efforts to reinforce relations with Israel and the attempt to keep alive his hopes for a deal with Iran.
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Writer and journalist Elias Jahshan is Arab Digest editor William Law's guest this week. Their conversation focus on the LGBTQ+ Arab community in the Middle East and the diaspora in a powerful new book of 18 essays, This Arab is Queer, which Elias edited. As he says in his introduction: "These writings assert our existence and agency as a community, and also celebrate our varied experiences.This is a space where the microphone is entirely the writer’s own."
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Arab Digest editor William Law's guest this week is the Egyptian political analyst and commentator Maged Mandour. Their conversation deals with Egypt's growing economic crisis and how President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi is managing it. He may believe that with good friends in the neighbourhood, among them Israel, he has time to spend his way out of economic collapse. But the military-economic dictatorship he has assiduously built leaves him less and less room in which to manoeuvre.
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Author and analyst Matthew Hedges is this week's podcast guest as he joins Arab Digest editor William Law to discuss his recently published book, an analysis of how Mohammed bin Zayed, the crown prince of Abu Dhabi, has assiduously built a military, digital and economic power base while remaining largely in the shadows. Matthew talks, too, about his detention and abuse at the hands of the UAE's State Security Department while he was in the country doing research for the book.
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Arab Digest editor William Law's guest this week is Samuel Ramani. Their conversation focusses on how the Ukraine war is playing out for Vladimir Putin's ally, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. As Putin continues his war of attrition against a European nation, Middle Eastern countries are weighing up how a Russian drawdown of troops in Syria might serve to tilt the scales either away from or towards Iran.
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Arab Digest editor William Law welcomes top North Africa energy analyst Francis Ghilès to the podcast to talk about the potential energy alliance between Italy, Tunisia and Algeria as the war in Ukraine grinds on and sanctions on Russia begin to bite. Italy is determined to become Europe's energy hub while Tunisia has the geographic proximity to the continent and Algeria the resources for a nexus of interests to emerge, one that could prove a winner for all three.
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Arab Digest editor William Law's podcast guest is Giorgio Cafiero, the CEO of Washington-based Gulf State Analytics. Their conversation focusses on US-Saudi relations and the awkward situation US president Joe Biden finds himself in needing to reach some sort of accommodation with the Saudi Crown Prince and de facto ruler Mohammed bin Salman as petrol prices rocket and America's domestic economic woes mount.
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Bahraini human rights activist Maryam Alkhawaja is Arab Digest editor William Law's guest. Her father Abdulhadi is serving a life sentence in Bahrain. His efforts on behalf of the struggle for rights in the Gulf kingdom, and his unjust incarceration, have been acknowledged with a 2022 Martin Ennals award honouring exceptional human rights defenders. For more than a decade Maryam has campaigned tirelessly for his release and that of all political prisoners held in Bahrain, other Gulf states and the wider Middle East.
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The European Council on Foreign Relations' Cinzia Bianco joins Arab Digest editor William Law to talk about the partnership deal that the EU is proposing to the Gulf states. Large in ambition and sweeping in scope, it was released in Brussels in mid-May and titled 'Joint Communication to the European Parliament and Council: a strategic partnership with the Gulf.' So is the proposal a gamechanger or is it a dustcatcher? Will the Gulf play ball or are there red lines that will stop the initiative in its tracks? Cinzia weighs up the pros and cons and delivers her verdict.
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Arab Digest editor William Law is in conversation with the Saudi human rights activist Areej al-Sadhan. Her brother Abdulrahman, a humanitarian aid worker, was forcibly disappeared in Saudi Arabia in 2018. She has been fighting ever since to secure his release and that of the many other prisoners of conscience sentenced to long terms by a politicised judiciary who then vanish into the kingdom's labrythine prison system.
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Yemen expert and author Helen Lackner joins Arab Digest editor William Law to discuss a ceasefire that is largely holding as all sides begin to acknowledge that a protracted stalemate, rather than leading to further fighting, could prove the path to dialogue, negotiations and an end to a more than seven year war that has brought untold suffering to the people of Yemen.
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Newlines Institute senior analyst Caroline Rose joins Arab Digest editor William Law to discuss how Syria's Assad family runs a narco state built on captagon, the illicit drug of choice for the Levant, the Gulf states and the wider Middle East. Working with Hezbollah, the family oversees the manufacture, distribution and sale of a drug that is cheap and easy to produce and is generating billions for the family and their associates.
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Arab Digest editor William Law welcomes back Qatar University Gulf analyst Dr Ali Bakir to discuss what's at stake for the region and beyond as the JCPOA talks, which appeared close to reaching the finish line, now seem bogged down in Vienna. What the Iranians see as a weakened US administration may allow them to drag the negotiations out and ultimately doom the deal, a scenario that could trigger a MENA nuclear arms race.
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Arab Digest editor William Law welcomes back Andreas Krieg of the Defence Studies Department, King's College London and their conversation focusses on the battle that liberal democracy now finds itself engaged in as its MENA partners play the neutral card while quietly backing their ideological ally Putin in his war in Ukraine. It is an existential struggle, one encumbered with a stark hypocrisy.
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Arab Digest editor William Law welcomes back Francis Ghilès, a leading expert on energy and politics in North Africa. Their conversation revolves around the huge opportunities and the challenges the war in the Ukraine has given Algeria and its state-owned energy corporation Sonatrach. As Europe scrambles to find alternatives to Russian gas, Algeria is well placed to play the advantage. The question is will it and will Europe realise that finally it needs to treat Algeria and North Africa as equals?
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In this the 100th Arab Digest podcast editor William Law is in conversation with Aslı Aydıntaşbaş a journalist and a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations. Their focus is on the remarkable volte-face of Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in the Middle East. An economic crisis and collapsing popular support have forced him into a major rethink and in the case of Saudi Arabia a significant climbdown.
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Arab Digest editor William Law's guest this week is the author and MENA analyst Christopher Davidson. Their conversation focusses on how Russia's invasion of Ukraine is proving beneficial for the region's autocratic leaders and not simply because the price of hydrocarbons has soared. Amongst other windfalls Russia's oligarchs are finding new homes in the Gulf and bringing their wealth with them.
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Arab Digest’s editor William Law welcomes back the journalist and researcher Sirwan Kajjo. Sirwan is an expert on Kurdish issues and their conversation explores the challenges, aspirations and issues facing a people without a country.
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Arab Digest editor William Law is in conversation with Aviv Tatarsky. He works with Ir Amim, a Jerusalem-based NGO fighting to prevent the destruction of Palestinian homes in the farming village of Al Walaja where terraced agriculture has been practiced for hundreds of years and a way of life is being besieged by the full force of the Israeli state.
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Arab Digest editor William Law is joined by the Project on Middle East Democracy's Amy Hawthorne. And their focus is Tunisia. While the world's attention is riveted on Ukraine and Putin's war, Kais Saied, the Tunisian president is quietly putting the finishing touches to a new dictatorship in North Africa. So what is the Biden administration, which claims to put democracy at the heart of its foreign policy, doing about it?
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Arab Digest editor William Law's guest is Dania Akkad, an investigative journalist with Middle East Eye. Their conversation is about the practice of mahram, male guardianship, in the tiny and enormously wealthy Gulf state of Qatar. Despite the image it projects of an ultra-modern society embracing tolerance and openness, Qatar holds on to a practice that treats women as second-class citizens and that can enable domestic abuse and even murder.
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Arab Digest editor William Law is joined by Chatham House's Renad Mansour. Their conversation begins with the impact of the Russian invasion of the Ukraine on Iraq and other MENA countries who may find themselves forced to take sides. They then explore the current challenges the Iraqi people face in a country where politically sanctioned corruption flourishes at a rampant pace.
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Arab Digest editor welcomes back Sami Hamdi, editor-in-chief of The International Interest and their conversation explores a surprising rapprochement between the UAE and Turkey as President Erdoğan grapples with an economic crisis at home and setbacks to his efforts to assert leadership ascendancy in the MENA region.
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Arab Digest editor William Law welcomes back author and analyst Jim Krane. Jim is energy research fellow at Rice University's Baker Institute and an expert on Gulf energy matters. Their conversation focusses on the quest for net zero. Are Gulf hydrocarbons producers serious about hitting their ambitious targets or is this little more than a PR mirage?
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Arab Digest editor William Law's guest this week is Annelle Sheline, a Research Fellow in the Middle East Program at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. Their conversation explores the role that the Yemen war has played in making the already demanding challenge of bringing Iran and the US back into a nuclear deal just that much more difficult and how various actors are like pieces of a puzzle that just won't fit.
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Arab Digest editor William Law welcomes back Francis Ghilès, a leading European expert on the Maghreb and a senior associate research fellow at the Barcelona Centre for International Affairs. Their conversation explores the missteps of France in North Africa and the persistent failure to arrive at coherent policy approaches towards countries that are crucial to Europe's security.
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Arab Digest editor William Law is in conversation with Lina al-Hathloul about the fight for freedom for her sister Loujain whose crime was to lead the struggle for women's rights in Saudi Arabia, including the right to drive. Loujain was seized in the UAE and turned over to Saudi authorities. She was imprisoned and tortured before being released last year but with severe restrictions, including a travel ban.
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Arab Digest editor William Law welcomes back the Baker Institute's Kristian Coates Ulrichsen for a conversation about how the UAE and Saudi Arabia are on the sidelines but acutely watching how talks to revive the nuclear deal with Iran are faring in Vienna. Also on the table: Yemen, Syria, the Biden White House and the growing competition between the two GCC neighbours on the economic front.
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Arab Digest editor William Law kicks off the Digest's first podcast of 2022 with the Egyptian analyst and writer Maged Mandour who argues that President Sisi has tethered Egypt's foreign policy to the domestic imperative of strengthening his harsh authoritarian grip. Through massive borrowing and weapons purchases Sisi has lured Europe and America into turning a blind eye to human rights abuses and to an economic model that is destined to fail with profound consequences for Egypt, MENA and the wider world.
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Arab Digest editor William Law is in conversation with the Conservative MP Crispin Blunt about his efforts to find justice for Palestinians through the Israeli and international justice systems. He is he says "done with false hope" and the way forward now is to use the courts to right historic wrongs commmited against the Palestinian people.
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Arab Digest editor William Law is joined by the European Council on Foreign Relations' Cinzia Bianco. Cinzia takes an insightful look at the year just past in the Middle East and North Africa, from coups, to Covid, to MbS and MbZ, to alliances abandoned and new ones forged. And she offers her predictions for 2022.
Arab Digest editor William Law welcomes back the geopolitical analyst and commentator Samuel Ramani to discuss how, in the past decade, Russia has consistently played a strong hand in the Middle East, buttressing relations with MENA states and presenting itself as an honest disputes mediator while exploiting anxieties and uncertainties to advantage as America continues to pull away from its longstanding role as the region's guarantor of security.
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Arab Digest editor William Law in conversation with the Newlines Institute's Caroline Rose on the consequences of the accelerating US withdrawal from MENA as the Biden administration continues its pivot away from a region where America had served as security guarantor for decades. In a power vacuum created by a US retreat, new players are emerging to stake a claim and new alliances are forming.
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Just a little over a year after they were signed, Arab Digest editor William Law talks with Gulf State Anaytics CEO Giorgio Cafiero about the impact and implications of the Abraham Accords, the Trump-engineered deal that saw Israel triple the number of Arab states with whom it has diplomatic relations at no cost to itself but at a very great cost to the cause of Palestinian statehood.
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Arab Digest editor William Law is in conversation with Dr Ali Bakir, a MENA region geopolitical and security analyst at Qatar University's Ibn Khaldoon Center for Humanities and Social Sciences. On the table is a discussion about the UAE's diplomatic initiative in Syria as 'Little Sparta' curbs its military adventures in favour of soft power approaches aimed at relationship building with, amongst others, Iran.
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Newlines Institute senior analyst Rasha Al Aqeedi joins Arab Digest editor William Law to discuss the assassination attempt on the Iraqi prime minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi. After an election that was a serious setback for parties that back armed militias will the attempt to kill the prime minister usher in a new wave of violence or will his efforts at de-escalation prevail?
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Arab Digest editor William Law is in conversation with the European Council on Foreign Relations’ Libya expert Tarek Megerisi. With a presidential vote slated for 24 December they discuss whether or not it will happen, who is likely to win if it does and what's at stake for Libya if an election that lacks basic principles of fairness and transparency goes ahead.
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Arab Digest editor William Law talks with Michael Stephens, Senior Research Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute about the UK's role in the Middle East after Brexit.
They discuss the need for fresh thinking among policy makers and explore challenges and opportunities in a region where Britain has historical, political and economic ties.
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Palestinian author, activist and human rights attorney Jonathan Kuttab joins Arab Digest editor William Law for a conversation that focuses on a radical rethink of the Israel-Palestine conflict. Kuttab has abandoned any hope for two states and is now calling for a single entity that recognises the rights and obligations of both sides.
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In the wake of elections in Qatar and Iraq, Kais Saied's increasingly autocratic moves in Tunisia and Joe Biden's apparent indifference to human rights abuses, Arab Digest editor William Law is in conversation with Amy Hawthorne deputy director of research at the Washington-based Project on Middle East Democracy.
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Arab Digest editor William Law's guest is Airwars' Emily Tripp. Her organisation tracks civilian casualties in conflict zones. Airwars has just released a report on civilian harm caused by Russian airstrikes in the Syrian conflict, a war that is receiving little coverage even as the death toll of civilians steadily mounts, with the Russians escaping scrutiny and dodging accountability for actions that constitute war crimes.
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Arab Digest editor William Law is joined by the Egyptian writer and analyst Maged Mandour. Their conversation focusses on the repressive dictatorship that President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi and his generals are building in Egypt. His is a regime rooted in a fascistic, militarist nationalism that continues to hold strong appeal, even as more and more Egyptians fall ever deeper into poverty.
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The Baker Institute for Public Policy's Kristian Coates Ulrichsen joins Arab Digest editor William Law in a conversation about how Qatar is renewing independent foreign policy initiatives that are gaining pace as the small Gulf state plays a pivotal role, assisting Washington in smoothing out the rough edges from Joe Biden's abrupt and chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan.
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Arab Digest editor William Law in conversation with Dr Elisabeth Kendall, Senior Research Fellow in Arabic and Islamic Studies at Oxford University's Pembroke College. Though drone strikes have seen AQAP severely degraded, the ongoing war and the Taliban victory in Afghanistan reinforce the lethal threat jihadist terrorism continues to pose to the region and to the West from its base in Yemen.
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Arab Digest editor William Law is joined by Dr Andreas Krieg, lecturer at the School of Security Studies, King's College London. On the eve of the twentieth anniversary of the 9/11 attack they examine what the West's 'war on terror' has really achieved in MENA: a reinforcement of authoritarian regimes, the fueling of brutal insurgencies, the silencing of protest and the crushing of civil society.
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Arab Digest editor William Law launches the third season of the podcast with Sami Hamdi, editor in chief of The International Interest. In the wake of the Taliban rout of the US and its coalition allies we consider gains and losses, whether or not the Taliban victory will spark intensified jihadist insurgencies and who will ultimately determine the timing of when MENA states recognise the new regime in Kabul.
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Arab Digest editor William Law in conversation with Annelle Sheline, a Research Fellow in the Middle East program at the Quincy Institute in Washington DC. The podcast focusses on the marketing of 'moderate Islam' as a propaganda weapon designed to convince the West and most importantly America that the authoritarian regimes that espouse it are bastions of tolerance and promulgators of shared values.
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Arab Digest editor William Law is in conversation with the North Africa expert Francis Ghilès, an associate senior researcher at the Barcelona Centre for International Affairs (CIDOB). Their economies, their governments, the repression of critics and journalists, relations with France and the Western Sahara affair all feature in a wide-ranging overview of the two senior Maghreb countries. And the Pegasus scandal gets a look-in too!
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Arab Digest editor William Law is in conversation with Jon Alterman, a senior vice president at Washington's Center for Strategic and International Studies. The focus is on President Biden and his administration's Middle East efforts. He inherited several challenges from the chaotic Trump years, not least to repair America's diplomatic standing in the region while seeking a return to the JCPOA.
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Arab Digest editor William Law in conversation with Jim Krane, an energy research analyst at Rice University's Baker Institute in Houston.The podcast focusses on the Gulf's national oil companies and the challenges they and the MENA region share with the rest of the world as climate change ramps temperatures up. In the Middle East, unless temperature rise is slowed whole regions will become uninhabitable. The NOCs are potentially game changers but the ruling families that control them are moving too slowly and time is fast running out.
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Arab Digest editor William Law speaks with Chatham House's Renad Mansour, a MENA Senior Research Fellow and Project Director of the Iraq Initiative. In the week that saw the death of Donald Rumsfeld, a key architect of the 2003 war, their conversation focusses on a governance structure built by the US but enabled and empowered by Iran. It is Rumsfeld's legacy, one that sustains a corrupt political elite and betrays the people of Iraq.
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Arab Digest editor William Law in conversation with Helen Lackner. Her book "Yemen in Crisis: the Road to War", published by Verso in 2019, is a seminal study of the current war and what lies behind it. Today's podcast looks at the ongoing battle for Ma'rib, the failed efforts of the UN special envoy and the fragile hope that Oman's recent intervention in efforts to get effective peace talks underway may bear fruit as the conflict grinds on in its sixth year.
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Arab Digest editor William Law's guest is Ali Bakir, a research assistant professor at Ibn Khaldun Center for Humanities and Social Sciences in Doha. His analysis focuses on Turkish relations with the MENA region. Today's podcast explores the warming relationship between Turkey and Egypt and how it is impacting on the regional power balance as Cairo seeks to chart a distinctive foreign policy while lessening its reliance on Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
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Arab Digest editor William Law is joined by the author and academic Christopher Davidson. He's written several books on the Gulf, the latest, just published by Hurst, is titled From Sheikhs to Sultanism. Their conversation is about two crown princes and their transformation into regional power players. Mohammed bin Salman enjoys playing on the world stage while Mohammed bin Zayed takes a more quiet road but both have consolidated power in an unprecedented manner as they shift from sheikhs to sultans.
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Arab Digest editor William Law in conversation with Samuel Ramani, a geopolitical analyst and non-resident fellow at Gulf International Forum. Their conversation explores the extraordinary gains Russia has made in positioning itself as a player of consequence in the Middle East. Showing a deft hand and adroit manouevring Vladimir Putin, in a few short years, has realised the dream of Catherine the Great to establish Russia in the Middle East and North Africa as a Mediterranean power to be reckoned with.
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Arab Digest editor William Law in conversation with the European Council on Foreign Relations' Aslı Aydıntaşbaş and Cinzia Bianco. As Turkey's president and the crown prince of Abu Dhabi vie to grasp the mantle of regional leadership, the Biden administration has caused them to place a temporary pause on their competition for ascendancy. Meanwhile, their dispute is proving useful to each of them but for different reasons.
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Arab Digest editor William Law in conversation with Dr Andreas Krieg, lecturer at King's College London's School of Security Studies. As the Abu Dhabi crown prince Mohammed bin Zayed continues to forge new directions for the country, the podcast explores his relations with Israel in light of the Gaza war, how enmity with Qatar drives his strategy of promoting counter-revolution, and how he is pivoting to China while moving the UAE away from its traditional relationship with the US.
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As violence escalates Arab Digest editor William Law is in conversation with HRH Prince El Hassan bin Talal of Jordan. Prince Hassan calls for an end to confiscations and expropriations in East Jerusalem: "Jerusalem is a shared gift, not the exclusive property of one government or one people." And he warns that creeping annexation in the West Bank will end the possibility of the two state solution with disastrous consequences for all.
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William Law, Arab Digest editor is in conversation with Tarek Megerisi, a policy fellow with the European Council on Foreign Relations. Libya has a new government and a new prime minister but has the situation there improved as dramatically as some would like to think? Tarek takes a long hard look at the new regime and sees old patterns, old faces and the same old set of outside players.
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Arab Digest editor William Law in conversation with the Syrian Kurdish journalist Sirwan Kajjo. In northeast Syria,in the midst of civil war, the SDF has carved out an autonomous region and the Kurdish Region of Iraq has long asserted its autonomy from Baghdad but Kurds in both countries face significant challenges and the dream of a Kurdish homeland seems as elusive as ever.
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Arab Digest editor William Law in conversation with Mosul native Rasha al-Aqeedi. Rasha is a Senior Analyst at the Newlines Institute in Washington. Her work focuses on non-state armed groups and political Islam. She grew up in Mosul under the Saddam dictatorship, experienced the occupation and then, like many others, left Mosul and Iraq. But her passion for her hometown remains defiantly strong.
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Arab Digest Editor William Law in conversation with Kristian Coates Ulrichsen, a Middle East fellow at Rice University's Baker Institute for Public Policy and author of ‘Qatar and the Gulf Feud’. Since the Al Ula accord in January that ended the feud the mood music between the Qataris and the Saudis is all about reconciliation. The Emiratis, however, are not about to get their dancing shoes on, at least not yet.
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Arab Digest editor William Law in conversation with Lina Khatib, director of the Middle East and North Africa Programme at London's Chatham House.Their subject is the brutal and complex war in Syria, as they explore how the conflict could come to an end. Questions abound, among them the extent to which America will re-engage and how much compromise Russia, Iran and Turkey are willing to show.
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Arab Digest editor William Law's podcast guest is Caroline Rose, Senior Analyst and programme head in the Human Security Unit at the Newlines Institute. Caroline recently authored a report for the institute titled In the wake of drawdown: addressing blindspots in Iraq. Their conversation looks at the blindspots and the blunders, the road travelled thus far and what America needs to do on the road ahead to extricate itself from Iraq.
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Arab Digest Editor William Law in conversation with Sanam Vakil deputy director of the MENA Programme at London's Chatham House. Sanam’s research focuses on Gulf geopolitics, security issues and future trends in Iran’s domestic and foreign policy. AD got an early look at a paper she and her Chatham House colleague Neil Quilliam are publishing in mid-April that examines pathways to de-escalating conflict, building trust and moving to regional security in the Middle East.
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William Law, the Arab Digest editor is in conversation with Sami Hamdi, editor in chief of The International Interest. And their conversation is all about Sami's tweets. He is an incisive MENA twitterati with thoughts and opinions that are sometimes controversial but never dull. So rather than limiting @SALHACHIMI to 280 characters AD decided to let him rip.
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Arab Digest editor William Law talks with Giorgio Cafiero. Giorgio is the founder and CEO of Gulf State Analytics, based in Washington. Their conversation focusses on how internal and external pressures are shaping the Gulf states and driving forward fresh regional initiatives that signal the era of America as the Gulf's big brother is well and truly over.
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Arab Digest editor William Law in conversation with investigative sports journalist Karim Zidan. Their conversation focusses on Abu Dhabi's Fight Island where the Ultimate Fighting Championship, the UFC, has landed. Karim looks at how a sport that mixes martial arts with boxing and features men and women fighters is a fit for a conservative Gulf emirate.
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Arab Digest editor William Law in conversation with Samuel Ramani, a non-resident fellow at Gulf International Forum and a doctoral candidate in International Relations at the University of Oxford. Their conversation focusses on the United Arab Emirates and the challenges the country's rulers face as Joe Biden settles into the White House with new agendas on Iran, human rights in the Middle East and relations with America's Gulf allies.
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Arab Digest editor William Law in conversation with Jon B Alterman director of the Middle East Program and senior vice president of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. With Joe Biden in the White House American diplomacy is back in fashion but is diplomacy enough to solve the MENA region's myriad challenges?
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Arab Digest editor William Law, in conversation with Francis Ghilès, an associate senior researcher at the Barcelona Centre for International Affairs (CIDOB). A former North Africa correspondent for the Financial Times, he is a specialist on security, energy, and political trends in North Africa and the Western Mediterranean.
Francis Ghilès argues that after exploiting the Maghreb in colonial times and largely ignoring it since, Europe now is in urgent need of strategies that treat the region as an equal partner with shared concerns.
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Arab Digest editor William Law in conversation with Helen Lackner, one of the world's foremost experts on Yemen and a conflict now entering its seventh year. Their talk ranges from the abandoned oil tanker that threatens an environmental disaster to outside forces and leaders of the Yemeni factions who profit from a war that leaves the people destitute and desperate.
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Arab Digest editor William Law in conversation with Tarek Megerisi, a policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, on the role Europe could play in the Libya conflict. There are elites within the country and outside forces that want to keep the war going. It is in Europe's interest to work towards ending it.
Arab Digest editor William Law in conversation with Lina al-Hathloul, the sister of the jailed Saudi womens' rights activist Loujain al-Hathloul (https://www.loujainalhathloul.org/.) Loujain was detained and tortured in a secret prison and in December of last year given a six year prison sentence. Her sister tells Loujain's story and the family's fight for justice.
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William Law, editor of the Arab Digest, in conversation with Michael Stephens, a Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and co-author of ‘What next for Britain in the Middle East?’ just published by I.B. Tauris. The Gulf feud that pitted the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Egypt against Qatar has ended but the wounds remain and policy differences are unlikely ever to be finally resolved.
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Arab Digest editor William Law in conversation with the Kuwaiti author and academic Dr. Alanoud Alsharekh. She is a longtime advocate for the rights of women in Kuwait and the wider Middle East and the co-founder of Mudhawi List which was established to support Kuwaiti women seeking elected office.
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Arab Digest editor William Law in conversation with human rights lawyer Toby Cadman co-founder and head of chambers at the London law firm Guernica 37. He represents the family of the late president of Egypt Mohammed Morsi whose death in custody the UN Special Rapporteur Agnes Callamard has determined could "amount to a State-sanctioned arbitrary killing."
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Arab Digest editor William Law is in conversation with Chris Woods, the co-founder of Airwars, a London-based NGO that tracks civilian casualties caused by aerial warfare. In the ongoing wars raging in the Middle East, Airwars has documented 55000 civilians killed in air attacks launched by foreign combattants on all sides. Airwars gathers and preserves a permanent record of these deaths which would otherwise be lost.
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Arab Digest editor William Law in conversation with the Baker Institute’s Jim Krane. Their conversation is about the world’s largest energy company Saudi Aramco: the year it has had since launching the IPO and the future it faces as the world takes on the daunting task of fighting the impact of climate change.
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Arab Digest editor William Law is in conversation with Cinzia Bianco, a visiting fellow at the European Council for Foreign Relations in Berlin.
Their focus is on the many challenges Saudi Arabia faces as it prepares for a Biden presidency and searches for diplomatic solutions to the Qatar feud, the war in Yemen, the Iran threat and resisting normalisation with Israel.
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Arab Digest editor William Law welcomes back Sami Hamdi, editor in chief of The International Interest. Their conversation is about the disconnect between governments and the people in the MENA region. How wide is the gap and what role does the West play in maintaining a status quo that denies Arabs fair and open governance?
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Arab Digest editor William Law in conversation with Dr Elisabeth Kendall, Senior Research Fellow in Arabic and Islamic Studies at Oxford University’s Pembroke College, on the Yemen war now into its sixth year. Dr Kendall, an expert on Yemen and jihadist organisations, looks at the background to the war, the impact it is having on the people, especially young Yemenis and considers the possibilities of finding a road to peace amidst a myriad of competing factions and external forces.
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Arab Digest editor William Law in conversation with Dr H.A. Hellyer, author of A Revolution Undone: Egypt’s Road Beyond Revolt
The revolutionary spirit that flourished in Tahrir Square in 2011 and elsewhere in the MENA region lives on and in the face of oppressive regimes young Arabs continue the struggle for accountable government.
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"We are talking about ten years not 100. Was the French Revolution a failure?" H. A. Hellyer
Arab Digest editor William Law in conversation with Dr Ali Bakeer, a MENA region political analyst and consultant, about the politics and pursuit of energy security
Strategies that have isolated Turkey in its bid for energy security are driving tensions to dangerous levels in the Eastern Mediterranean and the wider Middle East while outside players like Russia and China are exploiting the situation as America withdraws.
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Arab Digest editor William Law in conversation with Neil Quilliam an Associate Fellow in the Middle East and North Africa Programme at London's Chatham House on the perilous road that Iraqi prime minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi faces as he attempts to guide his country through the security, political and economic crises besetting it. The Iraqi prime minister must balance regional pressures with domestic political challenges, a failing economy and rising security threats.
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Arab Digest editor William Law is joined by Kristian Coates Ulrichsen, a Middle East fellow at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy. Their conversation revolves around what a Joe Biden presidency would mean for the Middle East. How would President Biden handle the Iran deal, "Peace to Prosperity", relations with the Saudis, the ongoing wars, Russian influence and human rights abuses?
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Arab Digest editor William Law in conversation with Gulf analyst Michael Stephens, a Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, and Associate Fellow at RUSI. It has been more than three years since a quartet of states - Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Egypt - turned on Qatar. With major geo-political shifts occuring in the region and three ongoing wars what are the implications and impact of the feud and what are the chances that it will be resolved anytime soon?
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Arab Digest editor William Law in conversation with Tarek Megerisi a policy fellow with the North Africa and Middle East programme at the European Council on Foreign Relations. From Libya to Qatar to Syria and beyond a new great game is playing out in MENA with Turkey and the United Arab Emirates vying to gain the upper hand and seize advantage from the US withdrawal from the MENA region.
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Tunis-based journalist Layli Foroudi in conversation with Arab Digest editor William Law on how the smuggling network benefits from Tunisia’s struggling fishing industry crisis. The smugglers are not hardened criminals, they are young men who see no future for themselves and no alternatives but to smuggle.
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Arab Digest editor William Law talks with Jon Alterman, director of the Middle East Program and senior vice president of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. Their conversation focuses on a decade of US policies in the Middle East, from 2010 to 2020, from the last six years of the Obama presidency to four years of the Trump presidency.
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Arab Digest Editor William Law in conversation with Sami Hamdi, editor in chief of The International Interest (https://www.intlinterest.com/) on the normalisation deal between Israel and the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain. Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu have made bold and sweeping claims but the Arab world does not share their enthusiasm.
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Founder and CEO of Washington-based Gulf State Analytics Giorgio Cafiero joins Arab Digest editor William Law for a conversation about French President Emmanuel Macron's foreign policy initiatives in the Levant, North Africa and the Sahel and the growing rivalry between France and Turkey as they compete for a pre-eminent position in the MENA region.
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Author and energy expert Jim Krane @jimkrane joins Arab Digest editor William Law for a conversation about #nuclear reactors, #renewable energy, #ClimateChange and the future of #oil in the Gulf.
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Arab Digest editor William Law in conversation with Dr Elisabeth Kendall, @Dr_E_Kendall, a Senior Research Fellow in Arabic and Islamic Studies at Oxford University’s Pembroke College. Dr Kendall is an expert on Yemen and on the jihadist organisations operating there. As the war grinds on into its sixth year, the conversation today focusses on ISIS and Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula - dangerous and still very determined to realize their jihadist dreams.
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Arab Digest editor William Law in conversation with Cinzia Bianco, a visiting fellow at the European Council for Foreign Relations on the impact of America's diplomatic withdrawal from the MENA regions and who in the region and beyond are moving in to fill the vacuum Donald Trump's disregard has left behind.
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As outside players continue to use Libya as a proxy battlefield, Arab Digest editor William Law is in conversation with Libya specialist Tarek Megerisi, a policy fellow with the North Africa and Middle East programme at the European Council on Foreign Relations.
Is endless war the likely outcome of foreign powers' incessant meddling in Libya’s civil conflict?
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Arab Digest editor William Law in conversation with Kristian Coates Ulrichsen on the difficult, challenging and complex relations between Iran and their Gulf neighbours Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Dr Ulrichsen is a Middle East fellow at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy. His latest book is Qatar and the Gulf Crisis, published by Hurst.
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Lina Khatib, director of the Middle East and North Africa Programme at Chatham House, in conversation with Arab Digest editor William Law on the subject of young Arabs, leadership and the possibilities for change in the MENA region.
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After a price crash some modest gains as oil climbs back to $40. Arab Digest energy analyst Alastair Newton in a conversation with Digest editor William Law assesses where oil is headed and what the direction of travel means for the Saudi economy.
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Kuwaiti author and academic Dr Alanoud Alsharekh in conversation with Arab Digest editor William Law on the impact of social media influencers in the Gulf and the wider Middle East. Dr Alsharekh is director of Ibtkar Strategic Consultancy and an associate fellow of Chatham House's MENA region programme. Her latest publication is Love or Country: A Difficult Choice for women in Kuwait published by Arabian Humanities.
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Arab Digest editor William Law in conversation with Karim Zidan an investigative journalist covering the intersection of sports, politics, and society for a number of outlets including the Guardian, Vox Media and HBO Real Sports. Karim discusses the Saudi attempt to purchase Newcastle United, Abu Dhabi's skillful manipulation of sport, Qatar and the 2020 World Cup and the curious links between Ultimate Fighting Championship and sportswashing in the MENA region.
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Neil Partrick joins Arab Digest editor William Law to talk about the Gulf States' relationship with the Islamic Republic of Iran. Dr Partrick is a freelance writer and consultant on the Gulf and the wider Middle East and the lead contributor to the book “Saudi Foreign Policy: Conflict & Cooperation” published by IB Tauris. He blogs at https://www.neilpartrick.com/blog
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Marc Owen Jones is Assistant Professor of Middle East Studies and Digital Humanities at Hamad bin Khalifa University in Doha. He scours the internet, forensically uncovering disinformation and deceit. Marc is the author of Political Repression in Bahrain published by Cambridge University Press. His latest book Disinformation in the Middle East published by Hurst and OUP will be available shortly. His conversation with Arab Digest editor William Law focusses on the dark arts of digital deception in the MENA region.
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Yahia Zoubir, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Doha Centre, discusses Algeria and President Abdelmajid Tebboune.
Is it a case of same old, same old or is a new Algeria emerging from the street protests known as the Hirak?
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Former UK ambassador to the UN Sir Jeremy Greenstock explores the impact of two massive shocks to MENA and assesses the economic and political direction the region is headed toward post-pandemic.
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Ankara based political analyst Dr Ali Bakeer discusses the growing MENA grudge match between Turkey and the UAE.
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The ECFR's Cinzia Bianco discusses the challenges Oman's Sultan Haitham bin Tarek faces in an increasingly volatile neighbourhood. Can he maintain the legacy of Sultan Qaboos and continue to steer the country's neutral path or will pressures from Saudi Arabia and the UAE as well as a distressed economy force him to abandon course?
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A discussion with Tarek Megerisi, policy fellow with the North Africa and Middle East programme at the European Council on Foreign Relations.
As UAE-backed Libyan warlord Khalifa Haftar suffers significant losses and Turkey ups support for the GNA, the risk the grows the proxy war will become more intense with disastrous consequences for Libyan people.
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Courtney Freer, research fellow at the London School of Economics Middle East Programme, discusses political Islam and the Muslim Brotherhood in the MENA region.
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Baker Institute fellow and associate Chatham House fellow Kristian Coates Ulrichsen discusses the bitter feud that divides the GCC.
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How will coronavirus change the political, social and economic landscape of the MENA region? A conversation with Sami Hamdi, editor-in-chief of The International Interest.
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Alastair Newton analysizes the oil price war for Arab Digest. Alastair worked as a professional political analyst in the City of London from 2005 to 2015. Before that he spent 20 years as a career diplomat with the British Diplomatic Service. He is a regular contributor to Arab Digest.
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As the 5th anniversary of the Yemen war approaches, Yemeni women's rights activist Misk AlJunaid calls on international organisations to ensure women are at the heart of the peace process.
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Dubai had great expectations about what Expo 2020 would deliver. As Covid-19 continues its global onslaught now is the time to rethink those expectations.
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The European Council on Foreign Relation's Tarek Megerisi in conversation with Arab Digest editor William Law on the war in Libya.
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