The Gateway - A Podcast from the Middle East: Recent Episodes
Al Bawaba News
Cascades of breaking news stories flood front pages and social media feeds, cataclysmic events happen every day, entire industries have been formed around dissecting and understanding the news. With The Gateway, we'll go in-depth on developments submerged under the ocean of breaking news developments and explore issues poorly or under-reported on. From our offices in Amman, Jordan, we at Al Bawaba are breaking through the news.
The extent of civilian casualties from UK airstrikes in Iraq, Syria, and elsewhere is kept hidden by the British government. Our guest this week, Joe Dyke, the lead investigator at Airwars, is part of a team working to uncover the cost of wars waged from the skies.
This week we hear from Gilbert Achcar, Professor of Development Studies and International Relations at SOAS, who discusses his latest book, The New Cold War: The US, Russia and China from Kosovo to Ukraine, published by Saqi in February 2023.In the book, Gilbert argues that, despite the rhetoric of a new Cold War following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year, there has, in fact, been an ongoing New Cold War since the late 1990s.
This week we have a little treat for fans of radical political philosophy. Mohamed Abdou, Global Racial Justice Postdoctoral Fellow at Cornell University, joins us to talk about his new book Anarchy and Islam: Relationships and Rensonances, published by Pluto in 2022.Constructing a decolonial, non-authoritarian and non-capitalist Islamic anarchism, Mohamed philosophically and theologically challenges the classist, sexist, racist, ageist, queerphobic and ableist inequalities in both post- and neo-colonial societies like Egypt, and settler-colonial societies such as Canada and the USA.
This week we have a little treat for fans of radical political philosophy. Mohamed Abdou, Global Racial Justice Postdoctoral Fellow at Cornell University, joins us to talk about his new book Anarchy and Islam: Relationships and Rensonances, published by Pluto in 2022.Constructing a decolonial, non-authoritarian and non-capitalist Islamic anarchism, Mohamed philosophically and theologically challenges the classist, sexist, racist, ageist, queerphobic and ableist inequalities in both post- and neo-colonial societies like Egypt, and settler-colonial societies such as Canada and the USA.
This week we are joined by Tine Gade, a Senior Research Fellow at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs. Tine talks about her new book, Sunni City: Tripoli from Islamist Utopia to the Lebanese ‘Revolution', published by Cambridge University Press in November 2022. In the book, Tine looks beyond typical understandings of Lebanon’s second city, Tripoli, that have focused on the city as an Islamist or even Jihadi political centre. Instead, she argues, the city has a much deeper history of resistance and collaboration with the state and wider region.
This week we are joined by Natalie Koch, Professor in the Geography and Environment Department at Syracuse University. Natalie is the author of a new book, Arid Empire: The Entangled Fates of Arizona and Arabia, published by Verso in January. In the book, Natalie looks at the connections between deserts in the U.S. and the Arabian Penninsula, teaching us to see deserts anew, not as mythic sites of romance or empty wastelands but as an "arid empire," a crucial political space where imperial dreams coalesce.
This week, we hear from Raymond B. Craib, Marie Underhill Noll Professor of American History at Cornell University. Raymond discusses his latest book, Adventure Capitalism: A History of Libertarian Exit, from the Era of Decolonization to the Digital Age, published by PM Press in 2022.From islands to space utopias, the world’s elite have for decades directed their wealth to escape the injustices they have, in no small part, contributed to. In the book, Craib explores in careful detail the ideology and practice of libertarian exit and its place in the histories of contemporary capitalism, decolonization, empire, and oceans and islands.
This week we are joined by Rebecca Lowe, a journalist who has written a book on her experience of cycling from the UK to Tehran. The Slow Road to Tehran: A Revelatory Bike Ride through Europe and the Middle East was published by September Publishing last year.
This week we hear from Ben Abelow, author of How the West Bought War to Ukraine, published by Siland Press in 2022.In the book, Ben shows how U.S. foreign policies, often supported by powers in Europe, together with NATO expansionism, were a major factor in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year. Ben’s book has recently been covered by The Independent (UK).
This week we are joined by Manijeh Moradian, Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College. Manijeh is the author of This Flame Within: Iranian Revolutionaries in the United States, published by Duke University Press in November 2022.In the book, Manjieh recounts the experiences of Iranian foreign students in the U.S. who joined a global movement against US imperialism during the 1960s and 1970s, especially against Mohammad Reza Shah’s regime in Iran.
This week we hear from Volodymyr Ishchenko, a research associate at the Institute of East European Studies, Freie Universität Berlin. Volodymyr has recently published an article in the New Left Review called ‘Ukrainian Voices’. He argues that decolonization in Ukraine has focused on culture at the expense of a broader liberatory movement that could connect Ukraine’s struggle against Russia with wider battles for justice around the world, notably in the Global South.
In this episode, we are joined by Patrick O’Hare, UKRI Future Leaders Fellow and Senior Research Fellow at the University of St Andrews. Patrick’s new book, Rubbish Belongs to the Poor: Hygienic Enclosure and the Waste Commons, was published by Pluto Press in 2022. In the book, Patrick journeys to the heart of Uruguay's waste disposal system in order to reconceptualize rubbish as a 21st-century commons at risk of enclosure. I began by asking for a quick rundown of contemporary politics in Uruguay.
This week we hear from Kaveh Abbasian, a filmmaker and Lecturer in Film and Media Practice at the University of Kent. Kaveh talks about his new documentary, Triumph, which is about the state-sanctioned narratives of Iran's 1979 Revolution and the Iran-Iraq War. Triumph was released in 2022 and will soon be available to view online.
In this episode, we hear from Yasmin El-Rifae, writer and author of Radius: A Story of Feminist Revolution (Verso, 2022). Radius is the story of the women and men who formed Opantish—Operation Anti-Sexual Harassment—who deployed hundreds of volunteers, scouts rescue teams, and getaway drivers to intervene in the spiralling cases of sexual violence against women protesters in Tahrir Square during the uprising in Egypt.
In this episode, we hear from Chris Armstrong, Professor of Political Theory at the University of Southampton and author of A Blue New Deal: Why We Need a New Politics for the Ocean.
Chris reveals how existing governing institutions are failing to respond to the most pressing problems of our time, arguing that we must do better. He examines these crises—from the fate of people whose lands will be submerged by sea level rise to the exploitation of people working in fishing to the rights of marine animals—and makes the case for a powerful World Ocean Authority capable of tackling them. A Blue New Deal presents a radical manifesto for putting equality, democracy, and sustainability at the heart of ocean politics.
In this episode, we are joined by C. Brad Faught, Professor of History and Global Studies at Tyndale University. We hear about the importance of the 1921 conference in Cairo in determining the course of 20th and 21st-century politics.
In this episode, we hear from Chrstoph N. Vogel, the author of Conflict Minerals, Inc.: War, Profit and White Saviourism in Eastern Congo.
Known as ‘digital minerals’ for their use in high-end technology, their exploitation and trade has been singled out in numerous media and United Nations reports as a key driver of violence, provoking an unprecedented popular outcry and prompting transnational efforts to promote ‘conflict-free’, ethical mining. Focusing on the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, Conflict Minerals, Inc. is the first comprehensive analysis of this phenomenon.
In this episode, we are joined by Pete Pattisson, a freelance journalist who writes for the Guardian.
Pete has covered the exploitation of workers around the world, including in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Malaysia. Over the last several years, he has covered the exploitation of workers in Qatar.
In a recent article he reported that the Qatari government has ordered construction contractors to send migrant workers home before the beginning of the World Cup, leaving many workers in thousands of dollars of debts.
In this episode, The Gateway's host Nicholas Pritchard reads from his Jerusalem Diary whilst sitting in a corner of the Old City.
He asks how the travel industry interacts with Jerusalem's history.
This week we hear from Julian Stallabrass, Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London.
Julian has written a new book, Killing for Show: Photography, War, and the Media in Vietnam and Iraq, published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers in 2020.
We discuss the role of photography in war reporting, the weaponization of photographers and the press more broadly by the U.S. government during the war in Iraq, and how technological change has bought new ways of covering and seeing conflict.
This week we hear from Çağatay Edgücan Şahin and Mehmet Erman Erol. They are the editors of The Condition of the Working Class in Turkey: Labour under Neoliberal Authoritarianism, published by Pluto Press in 2021.
They discuss the current state of the Turkish economy, which is seeing colossal inflation, neoliberalism's effects, and pay and conditions for workers in Turkey.
This week we hear from Shyamika Jayasundara-Smits, the author of An Uneasy Hegemony: Politics of State-Building and Struggles for Justice in Sri Lanka, forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.
Shyamika discusses the recent protests in Sri Lanka, how social divisions served the country’s elite, and what Sri Lanka can teach other movements worldwide.
Shyamika is Assistant Professor at the Erasmus University in the Netherlands.
This week we hear from Louis Yako, an independent anthropologist and writer. Louis is the author of a new book, Bullets in Envelopes: Iraqi Academics in Exile, published by Pluto Press in 2021.
Louis discusses education in Iraq before the Gulf war, the effects of the U.S.-led sanctions, and the neoliberalization of the education system following the U.S. invasion in 2003.
This week we’re joined by Christine Leuenberger and Izhak Schnell, the authors of The Politics of Maps: Cartographic Constructions of Israel/Palestine, published by Oxford University Press in 2020.
They discuss the birth of mapping and the nation-state, early maps of the State of Israel, and how maps are used to form public perceptions of nationhood, particularly concerning Palestine.
Christine Leuenberger is a Senior Lecturer at Cornell University, and Izhak Schnell is an Emeritus Professor of Geophysics at Tel Aviv University.
This week, we hear from Fred Scharmen, author of Space Forces: A Critical History of Life in Outer Space, published by Verso in 2021.
He talks about imagining utopian futures in outer space, the connection between space and the sea, and recommends some reading to our listeners.
This week we are joined by Ahmed Al-Rawi who has written a book called Cyberwars in the Middle East, published by Rutgers University Press in 2021.
The book looks at how different actors in the Middle East, from states to activists, use hacking as a form of political disruption.
Ahmed is an Assistant Professor of News, Social Media, and Public Communication at Simon Fraser University.
This week Yafa Shanneik discusses her book The Art of Resistance in Islam: The Performance of Politics Among Shi'i Women in the Middle East and Beyond, published by Cambridge University Press in January.
In the book, Yafa, a Visiting Professor at Lund University, uses first-hand ethnographic insights to ask how Shi'i religious women in the Middle East and Europe resist state, gender, and communal structures.
This week we hear from Tariq Ali, a leading figure on the left, a prolific author, an activist, and a member of the editorial board of the New Left Review.
Tariq discusses his new book, Winston Churchill: His Times, His Crimes, published by Verso in May 2022.
In the book, Tariq tackles the cult of Churchill that has had a pervasive impact on imperial history and contemporary politics in Britain. Churchill, Tariq highlights, was a white supremacist whose policies contributed to the deaths of millions of people abroad and enacted violence against the working class at home.
This week we hear from Dipesh Chakrabarty, the Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor in History at the University of Chicago.
Dipesh is one of the most important historians of the past few decades. In the last few years, he has turned his attention to the Anthropocene: the idea that human actions have caused such a disruption to planetary systems that we have entered a new geological epoch.
In his latest book, The Climate of History in a Planetary Age, published by Chicago University Press in 2021, he argues that climate change has changed ideas of history, modernity, and globalization.
In this episode, we hear from Sally Hayden, the author of My Fourth Time, We Drowned: Seeking Refuge on the World’s Deadliest Migration Route, published by Penguin in March 2022.
The book portrays the horrors of Libyan detention centers and the complicity of European powers who knowingly send people to places where they will face horrendous abuse. Furthermore, it’s a rare piece of investigative journalism that captures the lives of human beings suffering under extreme circumstances, together with a moral outlook matched by the power of its reporting.
Sally is a journalist covering migration, conflict, and humanitarian crises. Sally has written for several publications, including Vice, the Guardian, the Irish Times, Al Jazeera, and Foreign Policy.
This episode includes an audio recording sent to Sally by a man in a detention center in Tripoli.
This week we hear from Caroline Elkins, a Pulitzer-prize-winning historian, and Professor of History and African and African American Studies at Harvard University.
Caroline is the author of a new book, Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire, published by Penguin in March 2022.
The book demonstrates how and why violence was the most salient factor underwriting Britain’s empire and the nation’s imperial identity at home. The book upends long-held myths and sheds new light on the empire’s role in shaping the world today.
This week we hear from Asef Bayat, Professor of Sociology, and the Catherine and Bruce Bastian Professor of Global and Transnational Studies at the Department of Sociology, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
He’s a renowned scholar whose work on the contemporary Middle East has had an enormous impact on how revolutions and social movements are understood. In this episode, he talks about his new book, Revolutionary Life: The Everyday of the Arab Spring, published by Harvard University Press in 2021.
In the book, Asef looks at how the working class, women, and other marginalized groups were vital to the Arab Uprisings. Focusing on Tunisia and Egypt, he shows how the uprisings changed society for millions of people in the region.
In this episode, we hear from Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan, a writer, poet, and educator. She’s well known for her spoken word poetry which often focuses on the experience of being a Muslim in contemporary Britain.
Suhaiymah is the author of a poetry collection, Postcolonial Banter, and a new book, Tangled in Terror: Uprooting Islamophobia, which was published by Pluto in March.
Tangled in Terror looks at how Islamaphobia affects British Muslims. It argues that a system of surveillance and criminalization benefits the rich whilst dividing communities across the country.
In this episode, we focus on a very slippery material: palm oil. It can be found in a huge amount of food, health products, medicine, clothing, and technology.
Despite its ubiquity, the history and centrality of palm oil in globalized capitalism have tended to be overlooked.
In this episode, we speak to Max Haiven, Canada Research Chair in Culture, Media and Social Justice at Lakehead University. Max is the author of a new book, Palm Oil: The Grease of Empire, which will be published in April by Pluto Press.
In this episode, we discuss the history of Russian and Ukrainian relations, and how that history has been abused by Vladimir Putin to justify the invasion of Ukraine.
We also discuss how the modern Ukrainian state has been constructed through its literature, notably literature that celebrates a diversity of languages and cultures.
Shortly after the invasion began, Nicholas Pritchard spoke to Rory Finnin, Associate Professor of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Cambridge, and Uilleam Blacker, Associate Professor in the Comparative Culture of Russia and Eastern Europe at University College London.
In this episode, we hear from Leïla Vignal, professor of geography at the École normale supérieure (ENS) in Paris, and author of War-Torn: The Unmaking of Syria, 2011 - 2021, published by Hurst in 2021.
In the book, Leïla focuses on the destruction of cities, social ties, and the economy in Syria during the decade when Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad was at war with his own country.
Nicholas Pritchard met Leïla in her office at the ENS to discuss the book, the role of Russia in the destruction of Syria, and the weaponization of displacement.
In this episode, we hear from Diana Darke, author and broadcaster on culture in the Middle East. She has written a number of books on Syria and you can find her articles in the Guardian, the Financial Times, and many other places.
We discuss her most recent book, Stealing from the Saracens: How Islamic Architecture Shaped Europe, published by Hurst in 2020. In the book, Darke argues that the influence of Islamic architecture on European architecture has been greatly overlooked.
Writing against Islamophobia and Western supremacy, Darke argues that it’s time Europe acknowledged how Islamic culture led to some of Europe’s most iconic buildings, including the Houses of Parliament in London and Notre Dame in Paris.
This week, we hear from Liam Campling and Alejandro Colás, authors of Capitalism and the Sea: The Maritime Factor in the Making of the Modern World, published by Verso in 2021.
The book explores the geopolitics, ecology, and political economy of the world’s seas and oceans. They argue that the various ways in which the oceans have been used by capitalist societies led to the exploitation of humans, animals, and resources.
In this episode, we speak to Peter Mitchell who has just written a fascinating new book, Imperial Nostalgia: How the British Conquered Themselves, published by Manchester University Press.
Peter argues that the British are haunted by their imperial past, unable to imagine themselves or their place in the world without it. This nostalgia shapes mainstream political debate on issues such as war, migration, culture, and history.
In this episode, we hear from Karen J. Greenberg, Director of the Centre on National Security at Fordham University.
Greenberg is the author of a new book, Subtle Tools: The Dismantling of American Democracy from the War on Terror to Donald Trump, published by Princeton University Press. The book argues that policies and practices implemented after the 11 September attacks were later turned back on U.S. democracy.
The degradation of language, vague roles for government agencies, and new secrecy were later used against democratic movements in the U.S., including the Black Lives Matter protests.
We’ve looked back at our year in podcasting and picked out some favourite moments for a highlight episode.
This episode swerves between climate catastrophe and labour rights in the Gulf, the war in Yemen and the Palestine-Israel conflict, and history and literature.
Featuring Shireen al-Adeimi, Timothy Brennan, Andrew Cockburn, Hamid Dabashi, A. Scott Denning, Thomas Anthony Durkin, Dr Khamis Elessi, Bernard E. Harcourt, Yara Hawari, Nick McGeehan, Fadi Quran, Priya Satia.
In this episode, we speak to Timothy Brennan, Professor of Comparative Literature, Cultural Studies, and English at the University of Minnesota.
Timothy is the author of a new very highly acclaimed biography of the late writer and public figure Edward Said. Said was born in Jerusalem in 1935 but spent the majority of his formative years in Cairo, before moving to the US for his education and subsequently a long career at Columbia University in the City of New York.
In our conversation, Timothy talks about Said’s place in the New York cultural and political world, his writing, and memories Timothy has of him and Said working together during more than 20 years of friendship.
Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said, was released earlier this year and is published by Bloomsbury.
In this episode, we speak to Priya Satia, Raymond A. Spruance Professor of International History and Professor of History at Stanford University, and author of ‘Time’s Monster: History, Conscience, and Britain’s Empire’.
Professor Satia argues that history not only shapes the way the past is interpreted, but also shapes the future. Focusing on Britain’s imperial past, the book shows how Enlightenment thinkers inherited an idea that final moral judgment is delayed to a point in the distant future. To this end, Britons exerted violence and control over enormous swathes of the world whilst maintaining a sense of moral righteousness in the present.
Time’s Monster: History, Conscience and Britain’s Empire was published by Allen Lane in 2020.
In this episode, we hear from Ibrahim Ba, French former professional footballer who played as a right midfielder. Starting off his career with Le Havre in France in the early 1990s, he went on to represent clubs in Italy, England, Turkey, and Sweden before retiring at A.C. Milan in 2008.
Ba talks to Sports Writer Husam Binni about his life as a football player, his best friends from AC Milan and his predictions and views about the current football scene in Europe and the world.
In this episode of The Gateway, we speak to Andrew Cockburn, Washington editor of Harper’s and long-time follower of American foreign policy and American wars.
Andrew is the author of a new book, The Spoils of War: Power, Profit, and the American War Machine. In the book, he argues that the American war machine can only be understood in terms of the private passions and interests, financial or otherwise, of those who control it.
It takes us from extraordinary expensive toilet seat covers to wasteful spending when it came to infrastructure in Afghanistan.
The Spoils of War was published by Verso in September.
In this episode, we hear from Hamid Dabashi, Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia, and the author of a new book Reversing the Colonial Gaze: Persian Travelers Abroad, published by Cambridge University Press in 2020.
Hamid follows the journeys of travelers from Iran and India as they go to Asia, Africa, North and South America, Europe, and beyond. Until now, many of these travelogues have been read for what they can tell us about encounters with Europe.
But, as Hamid points out, the concerns and interests of these individuals were much broader than a reductive Eurocentrism would have us believe.
In this episode of The Gateway, we speak to Matthew Fuller, Professor of Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London, and Eyal Weizman, Professor of Spatial and Visual Cultures, also at Goldsmiths.
Eyal founded the research agency Forensic Architecture in 2010. Their investigations focus on a range of vital topics, including political violence in Myanmar, airstrikes by the Suadi-led coalition in Yemen, and the extrajudicial execution of 26-year-old Ahmad Erekat, by Israeli forces in 2020.
Matthew and Eyal have just published a book looking at the theory and practice of this new type of investigation, which incorporates a wide range of people, species, flora, and forms of knowledge, and knowledge making.
Investigative Aesthetics was published by Verso in August.
In this episode of The Gateway, I speak to Samuel Moyn, Henry R. Luce Professor of Jurisprudence at Yale Law School and Professor of History at Yale University, and the author of a new book, Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War.
Samuel argues that a new focus on waging wars with greater technological and tactical complexity - notably through Unmanned Arel Veichels, or drones, and through small teams of special forces - has taken precedence over whether wars should be fought in the first place.
The consequence, he argues, is that peace movements have faded into the background whilst calls for more “humane” warfare have taken over.
I began by asking Samuel how he came to the subject of his latest book, which was published in early September.
It’s been a year since Donald Trump sat on the South Lawn of the White House with Benjamin Netanyahu and the foreign ministers of the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain. They all gathered in the September sun to sign what’s been dubbed the ‘Abraham Accords’, an agreement between Israel, the UAE, and Bahrain to normalize relations, establish embassies and, essentially, begin trading relationships with one another. Since then, Morocco and Sudan have joined too. The agreements have been widely criticized by Palestinian activists and politicians, who see them as the Gulf states relieving pressure on Israel over their occupation of the West Bank and besiegement of Gaza, together with the abuses that have come to characterize Israel’s relationship with the Palestinians over the decades. In this episode of The Gateway, Nicholas Prichard spoke to Dr. Guy Burton, Visiting Fellow at the LSE Middle East Centre and an Adjunct Professor of International Relations at Vesalius College in Brussels. Guy has worked in universities in the Middle East and writes on China’s interests in the region, too. Nicholas began by asking how Dr. Burton would characterize the Abraham Accords one year on.
This week’s episode of The Gateway focuses on Palestinian stonework. An intrinsic part of Palestine’s economy and history, stone workers have helped to build every state in the Middle East, except their own. Our first guest is Andrew Ross, Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University and author of Stone Men: The Palestinians Who Built Israel, released this year in paperback. We discuss labor rights for Palestinian stone workers, aesthetics, and potential claims for land rights through stonework. Our second guests are Elias and Yousef Anastas, the brothers behind the celebrated architecture studio AAU ANASTAS. We discuss their work, decolonizing the history of architecture, and the place of stone in the future of Palestine’s landscape.
In this episode of The Gateway, we discuss the science behind the forest fires that have been plaguing the Middle East, North Africa, and other regions around the world this summer.
Imma Olivera, Lecturer in Ecosystems Science and Deputy Programme Leader on Ecosystems at the University of Oxford, talks us through the conditions necessary for forest fires to arise, ways of reducing risks, and the implications of fires on wider ecosystems.
A. Scott Denning, Professor of Atmospheric Science at Colorado State University, discusses the wider drivers behind the rise of forest fires and what societies can do to reduce and ultimately stop greenhouse gas emissions.
On 19 July, the U.S. Department of Defense announced that Abdul Latif Nasir had been released from Guantanamo Bay back to his family in Morocco. Mr. Nasir was a detainee at Guantanamo for 19 years, during which time he was known as prisoner 244.
He was never charged. In 2016, during Barack Obama’s push to close Guantanamo, Abdul Latif Nasir was cleared for release by the Periodic Review Board (PRB). Six U.S. agencies assured that he was no longer a risk to U.S. security.
However, his release was delayed and when Donald Trump was inaugurated into office in January 2017 it was too late. Trump’s campaign promise that no more detainees would be released from Guantanamo Bay was fulfilled.
But on 19 July he was released, making him the first Guantanamo detainee to be sent home in more than three years.
In this episode, Al Bawaba's Nicholas Prichard speaks to two lawyers who helped to free Abdul Latif Nasir. Thomas Anthony Durkin is a defense attorney at the law firm Durkin and Roberts and teaches law at the Loyola University Chicago School of Law. He’s worked to defend many notable cases to do with terrorism and Guantanamo detainees.
His other guest, Bernard E. Harcourt is Professor of Law and Professor of Political Science at Columbia University in the City of New York. He is also a distinguished theorist, legal advocate, writer, and editor. His most recent book is Critique and Praxis.
Nicholas began by asking Tom Durkin how he found out about Abdul Latif Nasir’s release. The conversation then moves to the legal specifics of Abdul Latif Nasir and the other detainees in Guantanamo Bay. The conversation ends with a discussion on what this means for justice in the U.S. and the relationship between the courts and politicians.
This is a special episode of The Gateway podcast, I’m your host Ty Joplin. We’re going to skip the typical introduction format here to just get to our guest, Dr. Khamis El-Essi.
Dr. El-Essi is one of Gaza’s top doctors at Al-Shifa Hospital, who lives with his family under the constant threat of bombardment by Israeli drones, jets, and artillery. At the time of recording, Israeli strikes have killed over 200 Gazans in the past week, many of them women and children. In our talk, Dr. El-Essi is surrounded by his family, who he says haven’t slept in over a week due to the constant shelling. We reached out to him to give us a glimpse into life and death in Gaza right now, and hope you find this interview helpful.
We conducted this interview quickly, and without much professional equipment, because at any moment, power may be cut entirely off entirely on the Doctor’s end. So please forgive the quality of the recording as it’s the best we can do during this time.
Packed into rubber dinghies and old fishing boats, refugees from all over North Africa and the Middle East try to reach the safety of Europe every day. Because many of them have been tortured by smugglers or police, they carry open wounds which can get infected by the noxious combination of fluids in the boat. Leaking gas from engines mixes with salt water and feces along the choppy journey through the sea. Many will not make it.
Organizations like Sea-Watch have been conducting search and rescue operations on the Mediterranean Sea, to try and save refugees' lives. Al Bawaba is happy to share this interview with Sea-Watch’s spokesperson, Mattea Weihe, which was conducted by my colleague Nick Pritchard on April 4th. Just a few days before the interview, one Sea-Watch ship responded to six distress signals, and it was able to save around 450 people.
If there’s one well-known thing about the war in Yemen, it’s that it’s a humanitarian catastrophe. Its people are blockaded from the world and are suffering from famine, cholera, COVID-19, malnutrition, and a war that seems like it has no end. But so far little is said about the reasons the war has gone on so long, or about what motivated it to begin with, and what are the political forces driving it forward.
Instead, most mainstream media coverage of the politics of Yemen is mediated through a dense network of security-minded analysts who mystify the dynamics underlying the war, and leave out the Yemeni people entirely. You can find endless analyses about the war in Yemen as either a proxy war between Saudi Arabia, the US and Iran, how it’s a part of the never-ended War on Terror, and how it’s really a sectarian conflict between Sunni and Shia.
Little is said about what the people of Yemen want, and how these demands can be achieved. Their suffering is decontextualized and depoliticized, and they are depicted as helpless objects of despair amidst a raging conflict that is beyond their reach.
My guest today is here to set the record straight. I’ll be speaking with Shireen al-Adeimi, a Yemeni activist and Assistant Professor at Michigan State University.
Together we’ll debunk the myths surrounding the war in Yemen and highlight a foundational but rarely discussed dynamic that informs much of it. We’ll hone in on how the conflict can be viewed as part of an ongoing adversarial relationship between the elites, who have organized themselves into governments and warring parties as a method to ensure their power remains in place, and the people, whose dream of a responsive political and economic system remains unfulfilled.
The cities of the Gulf region in the Middle East are often depicted as cutting-edge metropolises. Dubai in the UAE is home to the tallest building in the world, and it also has an indoor ski resort despite being in the desert. Abu Dhabi has its very own Louvre art museum. Doha in Qatar’s impressive skyline looks a mirage of steel sculptures reaching upwards in the middle of nowhere.
These images sell to the world the promise of the Gulf states as modern visionaries, bringing humanity into a new epoch of civilization.
But the picturesque skyscrapers or the region’s many artificially-made islands are virtually walled off from most of the countries’ inhabitants. Migrant workers make up a majority of these countries’ labor forces, and often form the bulk of their entire populations. But they are stuck living in packed labor camps or shantytowns, without access to clean water, hygiene, education, or healthcare. They are the ones who build these gleaming cities in the desert that inspire the world, and they are the ones who sustain life for the wealthy sub-strata of the countries’ people.
A recent report by The Guardian revealed that at least 6,500 migrant workers in Qatar had died from 2010-2020 while the country prepares to host the FIFA World Cup, most of them in circumstances the government did not explain.
So I’m seeking an explanation today from an expert on the situation of migrant workers in the Gulf. Nicholas McGeehan is a researcher and writer who has spent much of his professional life investigating the working conditions in the Gulf region of the Middle East, and he joins me in a discussion about the lived reality these people have, the economic forces throwing them towards the Middle East, and the political power that ensures their exploitation continues indefinitely.
Israelis are beginning to enter post-COVID life thanks to their widespread vaccination, while Palestinians in the West Bank are facing renewed lockdown measures with no meaningful mass vaccination effort underway.
To get an overview of the current situation in Palestine and how its deprivation is representative of the global power divide, I’ll be speaking today with Yara Hawari. Dr. Hawari is a Senior Analyst at al-Shabaka, a center for Palestinian think tank, and is prolific writer on the politics of Israel and Palestine who has appeared in The Guardian, Al Jazeera, and Foreign Policy.
The formal diplomatic ties between Israel and Arab governments around the region are deepening. And even though Israeli-Arab diplomacy has existed through back channels for decades, the recent formalization of these connections has enabled a slew of political shifts to occur.
Rabbi Marc Schneier has on the forefront of these moves, advising some of these governments on their policy towards Israel and the American Jewish community. He’s been a special advisor to King Hamad of Bahrain, he led the first-ever Evangelical Christian mission to Azerbaijan, and continues to be in contact with officials front the UAE to help guide further interfaith efforts. As a political figure, he occupies a unique, if little known position in global politics. His presence in meetings and discussions allows governments to claim that they seek to be friendly to the Jewish people.
The first half of this discussion explores Rabbi Schneier’s beliefs regarding judaism, equality and civil rights. In the second half I challenge him on the tension I see between his beliefs that all people should be equal and deserve civil rights, and the governments he’s advising who evidently do not believe that. I also challenge him on whether he puts any pressure on these governments to improve their human rights record.
The year 2021 looks to be a big one for the status of Palestine and of Palestinians.
We have the end of Trump and his Middle East envoys that cut Palestinians out of talks, and a new Biden foreign policy doctrine that so far seems more malleable to Palestinian concerns, if only on paper.
To help get a grip of how all these changes will affect Palestinians, I’ll be speaking today with Fadi Quran, a prominent Palestinian activist.
To be called a terrorist by one group is to be signaled as a kind of ultimate Other, a dark and essentially unknowable force that can only be crushed into oblivion. Deployments of the term has justified extralegal killings, torture, collective punishment, besiegements, and decimation of entire populations around the world while curtailing civil liberties of domestic populations at home.
But there’s a quiet force animating discussions on who is and is not a terrorist, which indirectly inform how it is used and popularly understood. Some entities appear simply immune to the term: there is no mainstream chorus of terrorism analysts genuinely insisting that the CIA is a terrorist organization even if its actions neatly fit within the same definition terrorist analysts rely on to label nascent jihadi organizations terrorists. Who is immune to the Terrorist label and its implications is thus just as important as who is subject to it.
To get a better understanding of the politics behind terrorism discourse, I’ll be speaking with Alexander Thurston, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Cincinnati, where he focuses on the study of Islam and Northwest Africa. Thurston is the author of the 2018 book, Boko Haram: The History of an African Jihadist Movement and has written about the prevalence of experts who always seem to pop up whenever a new terror threat is identified. He calls these people 'terrorologists.’
In May 2018, Al Bawaba launched The Gateway podcast to tell those ignored stories, demystify trends, and reveal the way power works in media. We’ve highlighted the virtually unknown immigration of Ethiopians to Yemen, talked at-length about how mercenaries and private arms manufacturers are changing warfare, and spoken about the growing power of surveillance capitalism.
Going into 2021, we’re going to continue telling these stories in each episode and hope you join us for them. If you enjoy The Gateway, subscribe to it, tell your friends about it, leave us a review on the platform you’re listening to us on. If you think there’s a story worth covering, let us know!
Barring the success of a fantastically ill-conceived attempt by Trump to stay in the White House, Joe Biden will be the 46th President of the United States. And with that position comes nearly unfettered power to shape American foreign policy.
And with a lot happening in the Middle East, it’s important to get a general grasp of where Biden’s governance may differ from Trump’s. The so-called ‘Deal of the Century,’ the blockade of Qatar, the starvation of Yemen, the withdrawal from diplomatic negotiations with Iran, the escalations of wars and threats to start new ones; it’s safe to say Biden will inherit an imperial enterprise marred by chaos.
So today I’ll be speaking with Kristian Coates Ulrichsen about what a Biden foreign policy doctrine could look like in the Middle East. Dr. Ulrichsen is a Fellow for the Middle East at the Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice University and is also the author of several books
One of the biggest unfolding events in our time is climate change. With such an overwhelming global scale and with such existential stakes, climate change and the broader health of our world is perhaps the most important issue of the 21st century while also being one of the hardest to personally respond to. If you want, you can spend your entire waking life consuming endless reports of how exactly climate change will steadily make the world we live in uninhabitable for organized human civilization.
After witnessing a massive earthquake and subsequent tsunami wreak havoc on his home country of Japan in 2011, Motorahu Nochi decided he couldn’t merely consume the news and return to his comfortable life. The tragedy helped Nochi realize he shared a connection with others on this planet, and that there was a responsibility built into that connection.
He gave up his life and moved to a region with little arable land, The Middle East, where he has dedicated himself to greening the landscape by making soil and planting trees. He has found pioneering ways to combine agricultural techniques developed in Japan with local plants and customs to build sustainable forests in Jordan.
Over the past four years, Nochi has become one of the country’s most innovative environmental caretakers, creating green spaces he hopes will last a century or more.
When trying to isolate state policy and priorities, it’s impossible to disentangle the relationship between official institutions like the U.S.’ Department of State or Defense from think tanks such as the RAND Institute, Brookings, or Carnegie Endowment. If a politician wants to justify starting a war or identify a danger to the national interest, he or she will often rely on think tank reports and their employed staff to bolster this assessment.
I’m speaking today with Daniel Bessner, who is the Joff Hanauer Honors Associate Professor in Western Civilization at the University of Washington. An historian on the defense intellectual complex and its relationship to power and democracy, Bessner is also the author of the book Democracy in Exile: Hans Speier and the Rise of the Defense Intellectual.
In our conversation, we’ll go over the relatively recent history of think tanks and the function they serve. Much of the talk will revolve around a little-known figure in this world named Hans Speier, who helped usher in the age of defense intellectuals and whose legacy, though obscure, contains valuable insights into the mind of the modern policy expert.
Since the inauguration of U.S. President Donald Trump, an economic bypass is being designed to side-step the official diplomatic negotiations between Israel and Palestine.
Much of it revolves around integrating Palestinians into a globalized market, whose rules and regulations are made by American, Israeli, Emirati, and Saudi business interests. Rather than focusing on the political status of Palestine, the plan calls for cultivating Palestinians primarily as a labor pool out of which profit can be extracted.
Today, I’ll be speaking with a key champion of this market-driven approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Deputy Mayor of Jerusalem for Foreign Relations, Fleur Hassan-Nahoum. A politician dubbed Jerusalem’s “foreign relations minister,’ Hassan-Nahoum is also the Co-Founder of the UAE-Israel Business Council, which seeks to strengthen the business ties between both countries.
The first part of the talk will lay out the neoliberal vision of Palestine advocated by Hassan-Nahoum, while the rest is a debate about three major flaws of this approach. First, its endorsement of Israeli settlements deemed illegal under international law. Second, its promise to send mass infusions of Israeli cash and tech to the UAE who could then use it to ramp-up its brutal war in Yemen that is desecrating that country. And third, the real danger that rather than having equality, Palestinians will be relegated as a hyper-exploitable group who has no real economic or political protections.
Since late 2016, the Jordanian government has been slowly stifling civil society organizations and media outlets. Through a combination of subtle acts of intimidation, cooptations, overt crackdowns, and passage of new laws restricting dissent, Jordan’s political landscape has been radically changed.
The most dramatic example of this years-long strategy has been the ongoing crackdown against the country’s powerful teachers union, called the Jordan Teachers’ Syndicate or the Jordan Teachers’ Association.
The union successfully executed one of the country’s longest strikes in 2019 to secure a wage increase for public school teachers before the government backtracked on the agreement Spring of this year.
Then in July, the government raided its offices and arrested its leaders, accusing them vaguely of breaking the law. The action prompted mass gatherings of teachers and union supporters across the country in the biggest act of national defiance since the Arab Spring of 2011. It was soon violently suppressed.
But the actions against the teachers can be taken as a sign that the government is more willing to engage more overtly to restrict expressions of dissent. In other words, it could foreshadow even more aggressive moves by the state.
Al Bawaba spoke with Sara Kayyali, a researcher for Human Rights Watch, on the causes and impacts this years-long crackdown has had on Jordan’s civil society, and what recourse organizations have to continue operating in this new political landscape.
word that gets tossed around international press coverage of conflicts, poverty, or general deprivation is “resilience,” which refers to the ability for a society to endure hardship. Stories of unmitigated disasters and unspeakable horror can be turned into hopeful human-interest stories simply by packaging the tragedy within a narrative of ‘resilience,’ and overcoming.
Today I’m speaking with Sara Mourad, an Assistant Professor of Media Studies at the American University of Beirut, on how this ‘resilience’ narrative took hold in post-war Lebanon, and how it naturalizes otherwise preventable injustices.
The ongoing cultural genocide of Uyghurs in the Xinjiang region of China slips in and out of media news cycles. But every time it pops up, the focus is based on two questions: what is happening there, and how is it happening.
But what is often missing from this conversation are the ‘why’ questions. Why is China targeting the Uyghur population for a cultural genocide, and why has it continued despite some international pressure?
My guest today, Darren Byler, examines the oppression of Uyghurs and other ethno-religious groups in Xinjiang through these ‘why’ and ‘who’ questions.
The cultural genocide of the Uyghurs should be seen as part of a state-driven project to create and police a new market.
Eli Valley is a political satirist with a growing reputation as one of today’s most biting critics of a broken American political system. He’s also the author and illustrator of the anthology Diaspora Boy: Comics on Crisis in America and Israel.
His work offers a unique way to convey righteous indignation.
A Jewish illustrator, Valley’s work is also deeply informed by Jewish traditions of social justice and care for the vulnerable. I’ll be talking to him about his upbringing, the connection from his work to his faith, as well as the usefulness of anger.
What’s happening in Beirut reflects a global trend. Since neoliberal urbanization and austerity politics form a foundational paradigm for governments and financial sectors all over the world, countries with a similar landscape to Lebanon should expect to see similar protests, and by extension, grassroots pressure to form a new sense of the commons.
Al Bawaba spoke to Mona Fawaz, Professor in Urban Studies and Planning at the American University of Beirut. Dr. Fawaz, who has been active in the ongoing protests, tells Al Bawaba that the protesters in Beirut, more than merely demanding an end to austerity and sectarianism, are seeking to generate a radically different type of public than the one cultivated by the current regime; a public whose social fabric is made by a politics of care and mutual support rather one dominated by the edicts of neoliberal oligarchs.
Al Bawaba's guest for this week's Gateway podcast argues that this way of thinking underestimates the intimacy and shared outlook police have with the military.
Al Bawaba spoke with Stuart Schrader, who is a lecturer at Johns Hopkins University, Associate Director of the university’s Program in Racism, Immigration, and Citizenship and author of the book Badges Without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing.
To get a better understanding of how Yemen’s COVID-19 crisis is unfolding, Al Bawaba with Osama al-Fakih, a researcher and director of communications at Mwatana, which is an independent human rights watchdog in the country.
Based out of the Houthi-controlled city of Sanaa, Mwatana reports on abuses from the Houthis, the Saudi-led coalition and the Yemeni government. As such, it has faced constant threats for its work. In 2018, its founders were arbitrarily detained by the Houthis as a punishment for the organization’s reporting. Though they were released, members of Mwatana face the constant danger of being arrested, and rely largely on the impartiality of their reporting as well as pressure from the international community to continue freely operating.
Al Bawaba spoke with Jerome Roos to try and take this world-historical view. Roos is a Fellow of International Political Economy at the London School of Economics and author of the book Why Not Default? The Political Economy of Sovereign Debt.
He thinks much of the growing unrest shows the extent to which a financialized global economy, which has for decades been led and organized by American hegemony, is crumbling and experiencing a terminal crisis—one accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic.
That such political chaos appears to be happening in a time where countries are more entrapped in sovereign debt and austerity regimes than ever before, for him, is no coincidence.
Before the outbreak of COVID-19, tools for surveillance technology and governance were being perfected in Xinjiang, China, where a hybrid scheme of private tech firms and public security apparatuses collaborated to construct an overarching political structure that The Gateway's guest calls “digital authoritarianism.”
Al Bawaba spoke with Steven Feldstein, a nonresident fellow in Carnegie Endowment’s Democracy, Conflict, and Governance Program and professor at Boise State University about the history and global development of these surveillance tools and the types of governance they enable. Feldstein argues that a continual grassroots effort is needed to ensure emergent surveillance technology is not used to bolster the repressive power of governments.
Jordan’s full-scale national lockdown early in the outbreak was possibly the strictest on Earth. And while its political and economic repercussions may be felt in the months ahead, for now, the protocols appear to have wrestled the rate of new cases per day down to nearly zero.
Al Bawaba spoke with Kyle Burke about the beginnings of the mercenary industry in the U.S. Burke is a professor of history at Hartwick College and author of the book Revolutionaries for the Right: Anticommunist Internationalism and Paramilitary Warfare in the Cold War.
In early March of this year, just around the time the COVID-19 virus went global, Saudi Arabia initiated an oil price war with Russia by flooding the markets with cheap oil. The price per barrel of oil, which was already declining due to the drop in demand caused by efforts to quarantine the virus, plummeted even further.
The intertwining consequences of the pandemic and the ongoing oil war is crucial to understanding why the global economy is edging towards the brink of a major recession.
To focus on the geopolitics that underlies the current oil price war, Al Bawaba spoke with Laleh Khalili, a professor of International Relations at Queen Mary University of London.
On March 5, 2020, the ICC announced it was opening a formal criminal inquiry into potential war crimes committed in Afghanistan by its warring parties, including the Taliban, Afghan government, and U.S. forces.
Although the ICC’s investigation has been criticized by U.S. officials under the Trump Administration, international justice advocates are heralding it as a unique moment for global accountability as it represents the first time the ICC has opened an investigation against a superpower nation.
Al Bawaba spoke with Matt Cannock who heads Amnesty International’s Centre for International Justice, which is just a short walk away from the ICC’s headquarters in The Hague. In our conversation, Cannock makes clear that not only is the ICC’s decision to investigate U.S. actions in Afghanistan a historic moment, it is one of a growing number of ambitious decisions the ICC has undertaken in the last 12 months, and suggests 2020 could be a transformative year for accountability.
Every hour of every day, media organizations make decisions of what they are going to focus their coverage on. At every step, bias seeps in and gaps in coverage form.
One of the biggest stories that has fallen into this coverage gap is the migration of over 100,000 Ethiopians into Yemen and Saudi Arabia every year, and the dangers they face along the way.
Al Bawaba spoke with Adam Coogle, a Middle East researcher at Human Rights Watch, who authored a report on this migration route and interviewed a dozen Ethiopian migrants on their experiences having survived through it.
In his talk with Al Bawaba, he pieces together the perilous journey Ethiopians are making into Yemen and Saudi Arabia every day, and breaks down why it isn’t receiving sustained attention from the media.
In mid-Jan of this year, videos emerged of Syrian fighters inside Libya. They were quickly identified as members of the Free Syrian Army, a loose umbrella of local Syrian rebel militias, who now operate under the wing of Turkey’s military, and have become a kind of de facto mercenary force on its behalf.
But while the Syrians fight on Turkey’s orders to defend Tripoli, many of those they are fighting against aren’t actually Libyan either. They are Sudanese and Russian mercenaries who have been ordered to spearhead the offensive on Tripoli by Haftar.
Al Bawaba spoke with Jalel Harchaoui, an analyst with the Netherlands-based Clingendael Institute, on how exactly the Libyan conflict mutated into the form it has taken, and how successive failures in the international community is enabling it to continue and expand.
Saudi Arabia is one of the Middle East’s most powerful countries, but its state, and the royal family that runs it, are a virtual black box. Answers to the complex questions of how Saudi works can be found in obsequiously long academic texts, but this knowledge has not yet been used by many analysts and journalists covering the region who still by and large view Saudi with an orientalist lens. This problem is confounded by the fact that most regional news outlets covering Saudi are funded either by Saudi itself or by rivals in the region.
To understand this further, Al Bawaba spoke with Theodore Karasik, who breaks down how the Saudi royal family works internally and how it secures power throughout the country.
The weaponization of social media has been a feature of international politics since the so-called Green Revolution in Iran in 2009. That grassroots movement for reform depended heavily on coordination via Twitter, and foreshadowed the cross-regional reliance on Twitter, Facebook and WhatsApp during and after the Arab Spring.
But just as social media has become an invaluable tool in organizing resistance, it is now being wielded by tech-savvy states to sow misinformation, surveill dissidents and manufacture consent. Nowhere are the promises and dangers of social media more apparent than in the case of Mohammed bin Salman’s Saudi Arabia.
Both the Saudi state and independent activists recognize the uniquely direct and relatively unregulated power social media has in shaping global opinions. Al Bawaba spoke with Hala al-Dosari, a Saudi human rights activist who stands on the vanguard of digitally organizing a resistance movement to the Saudi regime while in exile.
At the juncture between political marginalization, a growing concentration of power in elites, fear of an uncertain future and of other groups, distrust in establishments, real and imagined victimhood, mass media, prejudiced thinking and the need for a narrative connecting it all together, lies the conspiracy theory.
In each case, an image is conjured of a clandestine group of powerful individuals meeting in shady or opulent spaces and hashing out the direction of world politics without anybody to stop them. They are conspiring to siphon off Earth’s resources, divide land and people while wreaking havoc and gathering plunder.
Conspiratorial knowledge has been a defining feature of the global political landscape, and while its impacts have been felt at the level of presidential elections, regime changes and mass shootings, major media outlets still fail to understand their appeal.
To better understand the forces driving conspiratorial knowledge and its influence, Al Bawaba spoke with Quassim Cassam, a professor of philosophy at the University of Warwick who is an expert on conspiracy theories. His new book, Conspiracy Theories, details their persistent popularity as well as staking out their potentially fatal consequences.
The Yellow Vest movement has entered its second year of demonstrations, and though they seem as widely misunderstood now as they were when they first entered onto the world stage, their impact is being slowly realized.
The movement defies the traditional left/right political spectrum in its makeup and set of demands, which were primarily against a government-proposed fuel tax, but has since cascaded into a wider condemnation against French President Emmanuel Macron.
Macron has come to represent an emergent ideology Al Bawaba's guest today, Joshua Clover, calls Green Nationalism, where domestic austerity measures are implemented alongside militarizing borders. States around the world are adopting a Green Nationalist mindset, though this slow sea-change has been undercovered by most major media outlets.
How appealing is it to mount a camera to the outside of your house, where it constantly watches the world without ever blinking or turning off? Every second of footage is stored on a cloud that is accessible by both the parent company and your local police forces.
This idea may seem unappealing to many, but for hundreds of thousands of American consumers, such a camera represents a new, sophisticated way to keep their home safe.
On an individual home basis, the camera serves a rationale for boosting safety, but on a wider scale, the saturation of ever-watching cameras in communities is building grid-like surveillance networks throughout the U.S., whereby neighbors engage in co-policing in conjunction with Amazon and local security apparatuses.
I’ll be talking with Christopher Gilliard, a Detroit-based surveillance expert who teaches at Macomb Community College. He warns that surveillance capitalism poses grave threats not only to already-criminalized minority populations, but nationwide democratic institutions, which are staffed by public servants struggling to keep up with the sheer pace at which companies like Amazon are gaining power and data.
In the Summer of 2019, hundreds of thousands of Sudanese protesters were braving live fire from an embattled military regime that had recently imposed itself upon the country.
The two-state solution, once an acclaimed proposal to the intractable Israel-Palestine conflict, is becoming obsolete. And the Trump administration’s deal of the century, even if it is never unveiled, is part of a larger effort to ensure that solution cannot be renewed.
Al Bawaba spoke with Bessma Momani, a professor of political science at the University of Waterloo, who has focused her career on Middle East politics and political economy. In her conversation with Al Bawba, Momani contextualizes the deal of the century, including Jared Kushner’s much-maligned ‘Peace to Prosperity’ economic plan, with the decades-long shift towards a one-state solution.
To intervene in Yemen, Saudi needed British arms, and to protect itself from the resulting international scrutiny, Saudi calls on the UK to be its defense. But that prized relationship may soon change.
In June 2019, the U.K. Court of Appeals ruled that the government broke the law with its arms exports to Saudi Arabia. Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT), a U.K.-based organization opposed to international arms sales, was at the forefront of this legal fight, pushing it through the U.K.’s court system for years before attaining this ruling.
Al Bawaba spoke with Andrew Smith, CAAT’s main spokesperson, who believes the court victory is just the beginning in an international effort to halt arms sales to Saudi and other autocratic regimes.
Behind political disputes over weapons stockpiling, nuclear deals and arms races; behind war-mongering rhetoric and a growing distrust of the science behind climate change, behind breaking news cycles, lies the doomsday clock, which announces how close all these developments bring humanity to self-destruction.
It’s a universal barometer gauging the impact humans have on this world and on each other. Al Bawaba spoke with the Bulletin’s editor-in-chief, John Mecklin, who thinks the doomsday clock serves the crucial role of reminding people once a year to think on a global and long-term scale about these threats.
What's happening right now in Sudan is a case-study in ousting a regime backed by a secretive apparatus of plutocrats and militias. The protests in Sudan have toppled a dictatorship, but they're not stopping. After six months of protests, thousands are still staging sit-ins around Khartoum and the rest of the country to demonstrate against the ruling, transitional military council. Many Sudanese consider this council the remnants of the old dictator, Omar al-Bashir, and his regime.
Al Bawaba spoke with Eric Reeves, a veteran of Sudan's politics, to understand how the protests have managed to win such crucial political victories, and what more needs to be done.
A military coup in Gabon was partially inspired by a video of the country's leader that may have been a deepfake. The coup failed, but the future of deepfake videos and politics remains deeply unsettling yet certainly tumultuous. Al Bawaba spoke with Ali Breland, a disinformation reporter, to understand what deepfake videos are and what their emergence means.
A new report suggests that Bashar al-Assad relied on chemical weapons to depopulate and terrorize Syria's civilians into submission. We speak to that report's principal author, Tobias Schneider, as to how that strategy worked to win the war in Syria while creating one of the biggest migrant crises on Earth.
About a third of the US population are Christian evangelicals, about half of whom think a prophesied apocalypse will happen before 2050. They're Trump's largest and most loyal voter base, and they may be responsible for influencing Trump's foreign policy. We spoke with Matthew Sutton, a religious history professor about what this all means.
Yemeni politics has, for decades, relied on decentralized local governance structures and tribes. Nadwa al-Dawsari, an expert on Yemen's tribes, speaks with Al Bawaba about how this dimension has been ignored by the international community's attempt to push for peace in the country by only including the Houthis, Yemeni government, and Saudi-led coalition in the peace process.
When drones first emerged as a potent weapon at the end of the George W. Bush presidency and into Barack Obama’s, their use seemed opaque and calls for transparency were everywhere.
But now, two years into Donald Trump’s tenure as president, drones of all shapes and sizes are used all over the globe for a range of purposes. To try and understand the uses and abuses of drones, and if there’s anything that can be done to respond to them, Al Bawaba spoke with Arthur Holland Michel, co-director of the Center for the Study of the Drone at Bard College in New York.
Afghanistan's cricketers went from playing shoe-less on dusty pitches in Pakistan to leading the world in the sport. Its star player, Rashid Khan, is considered one of the greatest cricketing talents to grace the game, and he hasn't even turned 21. We asked an expert in Afghanistan how the team's dominance is uniting a scarred nation
From 2006-10, a protest movement comprised of day-wage laborers shook Jordan's economic and social order to its core with radical tactics, and achieved momentous success in the process. Our guest this episode, Dr. Sara Ababneh of the University of Jordan, thinks it was one of the most profound moments for women's rights in Jordan. But it was ignored and forgotten. We ask her why.
Why does the war in Yemen appear designed to kill, maim and starve but not to be won? That’s the central question Al Bawaba asked Peter Salisbury, who has worked in and with Yemen for ten years, as a journalist and analyst. He’s now a senior analyst at the International Crisis Group and a Senior Consulting Fellow at Chatham House.
Lea Baroudi brought two opposing sides in a generations-long conflict to act in a play together. Miraculously, the play was a knockout hit. Al Bawaba spoke to her about how she did it, and and how others interested in reconciliation can follow her lead.
Palestinians seem more isolated and disempowered than ever before. So what can they do guarantee their rights and representation? Al Bawaba debates with Mouin Rabbani, a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Palestine Studies, on the options facing Palestinians.
Why are the values enmeshed in the vision of a "Free Palestine" so absent in the actual governance of the Palestinian Territories? Democracy, transparency, freedom, equality are all totally absent from the ways Hamas and the Palestinian Authority (PA) respectively rule over Gaza and the West Bank. Al Bawaba spoke with Nadia Hijab, co-founder of Al-Shabaka to understand why this schism exists. Hijab emphasizes the role Palestine's civil society organizations can have in resistance, but for precisely how they mobilize and towards what end, there is no easy answer. They appear to be choked from outside and from within, with a military occupation treating them as potential terrorists on one end, and a rapacious, restrictive provisional authority who sees them as a saboteurs to a fragile sense of order on the other.
Why did the average U.S. taxpayer give $240 to Lockheed Martin in 2017? What does the $716 billion budget for the Pentagon reveal about U.S. priorities? That and other questions answered by Lindsay Koshgarian, who helps lead the National Priorities Project at the Institute for Policy Studies.
Dolkun Isa fled China and has became a prominent Uyghur activist even as China was pursuing him around the world. He fears his entire family is trapped in China's new concentration camps. He spoke with Al Bawaba about his life in China, his escape, his activism, and the deafening silence from the international community on the mass surveillance and jailing of Uyghur and Kazakh Muslims in China
The MEK is one of the strangest groups in the world today, yet little is known about them. Some call them a terrorist cult, others freedom fighters. We spoke with its former top spy to understand its inner-workings.
The Iranian regime is responsible for ongoing human rights abuses, and is not interested in democracy, transparency, or egalitarianism. Neither is its notorious opposition group, the Mujahideen al-Khalq (MEK), who is backed by the U.S. and Saudi, and is commonly called a cult. We spoke with prominent Iran expert, Trita Parsi, on the MEK and the future of Iran.
Eliot Higgins founded Bellingcat in the hopes that open source investigations could cut through the fog of war. Now, he's revolutionized fact-finding and journalism, and is changing international law precedents. He spoke with Al Bawaba about how disinformation campaigns work and how to stop them.
Its chaos and tribalism overstated, former State Department expert on the Libya, William Lawrence thinks people simply do not understand the country. Is the conflict as difficult to solve as the Syria and Iraq conflict and where will Libya go next?
Elisabeth Kendall is a scholar at Pembroke College, Oxford. We spoke to her about why she finds jihadi poetry so crucial to understanding why groups commit violence. What can traditional poetry and verse mean for the justification of war and peace, radicalization and pacifism?
Most observers would say the humanitarian situation in Yemen is the worst in the world. This is not an accident, but part of a war strategy. Yemen expert Dr. Martha Mundy explains how.
Al Bawaba Spoke with Sean McFate, an expert on mercenary warfare, on how war itself is becoming commodified, and why people are ignoring this development.
China has been interning its ethnic and religious minorities by the thousands and subjecting them to 're-education.' But now, what has been a local story of AI-powered surveillance and an emerging police state is slowly going global thanks to a illustrative new enterprise. Al Bawaba spoke with one of the world's leading experts on the issue, Adrian Zenz, to understand what is happening.
On May 17, 2018, Gina Haspel was confirmed by the U.S. Senate as the director of the CIA. To understand what a Haspel-led CIA looks like, Al Bawaba spoke with John Kiriakou, a former CIA officer who blew the whistle on the CIA’s use of waterboarding.