How Did We Get Here?

Tristan Redman is joined by the BBC’s International Editor, Jeremy Bowen, Professor Margaret MacMillan, an historian based at the University of Oxford, and essayist and novelist Pankaj Mishra, to examine the last decade of global upheaval. Together they explore what the chaotic US withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 did to America’s standing on the world’s stage and examine the consequences of Rus...

Tristan Redman is joined by Edward Luce, associate editor and columnist at the Financial Times in Washington DC, and Nicole Hemmer, political historian and associate professor at Vanderbilt University, to examine the years in which the United States, the architect of the post-Cold War order, began to turn away from it. They begin with Barack Obama's Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech in Oslo in D...

Tristan Redman is joined by Cindy Yu, a columnist at the Times and author of the Substack newsletter Chinese Whispers, and Pierre Haski, a longstanding foreign correspondent and commentator on France Inter radio, to examine a five-year period in which China's confidence grew as the West's certainties came under strain. They begin with the Beijing Olympics of August 2008, which opened as Russia inv...

Tristan Redman is joined by Gabriel Gatehouse, an investigative journalist and former international editor of BBC Newsnight, and Luke Harding, the Guardian's senior international correspondent, to trace the decade in which Russia moved from a brief partnership with the West to open confrontation with it. They begin in the immediate aftermath of the 11 September 2001 attacks, when Vladimir Putin wa...

Tristan Redman is joined by Carrie Gracie, former BBC China editor and a reporter in China throughout the 1990s, and George Magnus, an economist and research associate at the China Centre, Oxford University, and former chief economist at UBS. Together they examine the decade in which China reshaped its relationship with the international system. They begin with Deng Xiaoping's Southern Tour of 199...

Tristan Redman is joined by Lindsey Hilsum, international editor of Channel 4 News, and Allan Little, former BBC correspondent in Moscow and Africa, to look back at the decade after the Cold War in which the question of international intervention was repeatedly tested. They discuss Nelson Mandela's release in February 1990, the United States' retreat from Somalia after American soldiers were kille...

At the end of the Cold War, the international system underwritten by American power, liberal democracy and free markets looked to many like the high-water mark of a new world order. Fast forward to 2026, and that certainty looks far less solid. Tristan Redman is joined by journalists and experts who had ringside seats to the biggest moments since the end of the Cold War. Together, they ask whether...

In the last of ten programmes exploring the origins and tracing the history of the Middle East conflict, presenter Jonny Dymond is joined by journalist Jane Corbin, who has covered the region for three decades, and the BBC’s International Editor Jeremy Bowen. They start by discussing Israel’s economic success in the 2010s, and the situation in that period for Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank...

In the ninth of ten programmes exploring the origins and tracing the history of the Middle East conflict, presenter Jonny Dymond is joined by journalist and film-maker Jane Corbin, who has been reporting from the region for more than 30 years, and by the BBC’s International Editor Jeremy Bowen. They begin by examining the second Palestinian intifada, or uprising – bloodier than the first – which b...

The eighth of ten programmes exploring the origins and tracing the history of the Middle East conflict begins five years after Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, with the outbreak in 1987 of a Palestinian uprising or intifada, in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. Presenter Jonny Dymond, the BBC’s International Editor Jeremy Bowen, and Mark Tessler, Professor of Political Science at the University...

The seventh of ten programmes exploring the origins and tracing the history of the Middle East conflict takes the story from the aftermath of the Six Day War in 1967 to its invasion of Lebanon in 1982. Presenter Jonny Dymond, the BBC’s International Editor Jeremy Bowen, and Mark Tessler, Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan, USA, begin by discussing the impact of Israel’s v...

The sixth of ten programmes exploring the origins and tracing the history of the Middle East conflict examines the years from the end of the first Arab-Israeli war to the Six Day War of 1967. Presenter Jonny Dymond is joined by Mark Tessler, Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan, USA, and author of ‘A History of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict’ and by the BBC’s Internationa...

In the fifth of ten programmes exploring the origins and tracing the history of the Middle East conflict, we reach the key years of 1945-49, when the United Nations voted for two states in Palestine, the State of Israel was established, and Israel and its Arab neighbours fought their first war – by the end of which 700,000 Palestinians had lost their homes. Presenter Jonny Dymond is joined by Gudr...

In the fourth of ten programmes exploring the origins and tracing the history of the Middle East conflict, presenter Jonny Dymond is joined by Gudrun Kraemer, Professor of Islamic Studies at the Free University of Berlin, author and historian James Barr and Eugene Rogan, Professor of Modern Middle Eastern History at Oxford University. They begin by discussing the origins, significance and conseque...

In the third of ten programmes exploring the origins and tracing the history of the Middle East conflict, presenter Jonny Dymond is joined by Hugh Kennedy, Professor of Arabic at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Eugene Rogan, Professor of Modern Middle Eastern History at Oxford University, and historian Simon Sebag Montefiore. What kind of people lived in Ottoman-r...

The second of ten programmes examining the origins and tracing the history of the Middle East conflict takes the story from the Muslim conquest of the region in the Seventh Century AD through to the early Nineteenth Century. Presenter Jonny Dymond is joined by historian Simon Sebag Montefiore, author of ‘Jerusalem: The Biography’, and Eugene Rogan, Professor of Modern Middle Eastern History at Oxf...

In the first of ten programmes examining the origins and tracing the history of the Middle East conflict, presenter Jonny Dymond is joined by Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones, Professor in Ancient History at Cardiff University, and historian and author Simon Sebag Montefiore, author of ‘Jerusalem: The Biography’. They discuss the value of the Bible as a guide to history, the concept of a “promised land”, the...

Jonny Dymond and guests explore the complicated back-story of the Middle East conflict.