Order From Ashes

Shownotes President Donald Trump’s invasion of Venezuela is just the latest American war initiated with no Congressional authorization.  According to the Constitution, only Congress can decide to go to war. In practice, however, since 9/11 presidents have enjoyed complete freedom to go to war, or even wage secret and undeclared wars, without authorization from Congress, and with no accountability...

Shownotes: Syria’s new president, former rebel leader Ahmed al-Sharaa, has just made another quantum leap in establishing his power over Syria, by persuading the United States to let Sharaa take over the Kurdish statelet in northeast Syria. Sharaa has presented himself as an inclusive agent of change. On this episode of Order from Ashes, Century International fellow Frederick Deknatel discusses Sy...

America Turned Authoritarian in 2025. Century’s New Democracy Meter Puts a Number on It. Shownotes Just how badly has American democracy eroded during the first year of the second Trump administration? The Century Foundation’s new United States Democracy Meter objectively analyzes that question—and the answer is discomfiting.  The index, which is the brainchild of veteran human rights researcher N...

Shownotes Order from Ashes returns after a long hiatus. On this episode of the podcast, Zaid Al-Ali and Thanassis Cambanis remember the real lessons of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq—and that history's stark warning for American interventionist fantasies in Venezuela. Participants * Zaid Al-Ali, Princeton University School of Public and International Affairs * Thanassis Cambanis, director,...

During decades of turmoil, war, and regime change in Iraq, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani has played a critical, often overlooked role—steering Iraq away from sectarian conflict, promoting civic democracy over direct theocracy, and quietly seeking to calm regional tensions.   On this episode of Order from Ashes, Century International fellow Sajad Jiyad explains how Sistani has appealed to a majori...

The Middle East has faced growing instability, violence, and the risk of a wider war ever since October 7.    Most attention is understandably focused on Israel, where 1,200 people were killed in a single day, and Gaza, where the death toll is steadily climbing past 11,000, the majority children and women.    But the wider region is experiencing a level of violence that is cause for alarm: near-da...

Foreign donors are propping up Lebanon’s public institutions and services with the kind of aid they ordinarily provide to failed states. Will this aid create more problems than it solves for Lebanon’s long-suffering people?   On this episode of Century International’s Order from Ashes podcast, fellow Sam Heller discusses the alarming findings of his report, “ Adopt a Ministry: How Foreign Aid Thre...

On this episode of the Order From Ashes podcast, Ali Al-Mawlawi traces the long history of anti-Shia prejudice in Iraq. That prejudice, he argues, distorts contemporary debates over whether Shia factions are undermining the state when they compete for power.   This episode of Order From Ashes is the fourth and final episode in “Shia Power,” a series about the transformation of Shia politics in Ira...

On this episode of the Order From Ashes podcast “Shia Power” series, Taif Alkhudary explains how the October 2019 protests formed a popular response to years of thwarted democratization.    The Tishreen protests movement, Alkhudary argues, represents an indigenous democratization movement that is resisting the putative democracy put in place after the U.S. invasion. Since 2003, Iraqis have endured...

On this episode of the Order From Ashes podcast, Marsin Alshamary explains why, despite some setbacks, Shia clerics in Iraq still wield a great deal of authority.    Protest movements have rejected religion in politics, while corrupt politicians have sullied the reputations of religious factions. But clerics and their institutions remain powerful players in Iraqi society even as their roles change...

On this episode of the Order From Ashes podcast, Sajad Jiyad plumbs the complex evolution of Shia Islamism during two decades at the center of Iraqi power.   This episode of Order From Ashes is the first in “Shia Power,” a four-part series about the transformation of Shia politics in Iraq, and what Iraq’s experience teaches us about the role of religion in politics everywhere.    A new edited volu...

In a miserable twist for the people who live there, Iraq has become a front-line test lab for the extreme effects of climate change. A combination of forces, accelerated by bad human decisions, has dramatically degraded Iraq’s environment. And Iraq’s experience is a harbinger of what’s coming to the rest of the world.  On this episode of the Order From Ashes podcast, Century International fellow Z...

Lebanon’s ruling elites have sabotaged talks with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which offered the last hope for reforms that could save the country’s economy and improve life for millions of suffering people.  On this episode of the Order From Ashes podcast, researchers Sami Zoughaib, from The Policy Institute in Lebanon, and Sam Heller, from Century International, reveal how Lebanon’s el...

The scramble for electricity has produced new interest groups that will shape the evolution of Lebanon’s decaying power sector, and the country’s future. Lebanese people endure erratic and expensive electricity supplies—not because of some staggering technical challenge but because of corrupt, often criminal, monopolies that control the energy sector. On this episode of the Order From Ashes podcas...

The effort to secure Iraq’s borders after the defeat of ISIS has created other, new sources of instability, as conflict supply chains adapt to new circumstances. A close look at two border towns in Iraq’s western desert illustrates the law of unintended consequences. The Iraqi government, bordering countries, and the international community moved to more tightly control official border crossings i...

Members have fled the Muslim Brotherhood in droves since its ouster from power in Egypt in 2013, frustrated that the organization can’t take care of them, or provide meaning for their lives. Will the Brotherhood learn the lessons of its failures before its next, inevitable, comeback? In this final episode of Broken Bonds, Amr ElAfifi explores the Brotherhood’s crisis of membership and the implicat...

The Muslim Brotherhood is a hierarchical organization suffering a debilitating leadership vacuum. Now, the organization has to reinvent itself while most of its top cadres are in exile, dead, or in jail. Years after being forced to become a transnational organization because of its leadership’s expulsion from Egypt, the Brotherhood is now at an even more complex crossroads. Its old strategies for...

Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood is suffering from an identity crisis, made worse by ongoing, violent state repression. Nearly a century since its founding, the Brotherhood hasn’t reconciled its social and political aims. Noha Khaled plumbs the first of three crises besetting the Brotherhood: its internal identity conflict over what kind of organization it aspires to be.  Throughout its history, the Bro...

The Muslim Brotherhood tries to project an image of grassroots power and disciplined leadership. A trio of researchers takes a different view, describing a once-formidable organization that is under strain and out of touch. The Brotherhood, they argue, is experiencing multiple crises—of identity, legitimacy, and membership—which accelerated after Egypt’s military coup in July 2013.  Based on unpre...

What’s it like to come of age in a Muslim Brotherhood family in Egypt’s Nile Delta? Abdelrahman Ayyash recounts his childhood, political awakening, and disenchantment. Ayyash recounts his early history cocooned in a Brotherhood community that took care of its members’ schooling, moral training, social life, and career counseling. And he recalls with stark frankness his shock, as a young blogger an...

The catastrophic earthquake that struck Turkey and Syria on February 6 had particularly dire consequences for the millions of displaced Syrians living near the epicenter. Many of them have moved multiple times to flee violence. Since September, an outbreak of cholera has rapidly spread across Syria and entered Lebanon. And to make matters worse, international humanitarian aid is only allowed to en...

This fall, news broke that a web of thieves—including high-level officials—had stolen $2.5 billion in Iraqi government cash. The scam is only the most recent example of systemic corruption perpetrated by Iraq’s elites since 2003. The country’s new government has its work cut out for itself.  On this episode of the Order From Ashes podcast, Sajad Jiyad talks about the sordid theft and the way forwa...

America maintains an enormous military infrastructure on the Arabian peninsula and in the Persian Gulf. How should the United States shrink this enormous footprint while continuing to protect its interests and those of its sometimes difficult partners in the region? On this episode of the Order From Ashes podcast, Becca Wasser considers some of the practical ways in which a progressive-minded Unit...

Progressives have done a good job articulating the problems with bad policies, especially the Global War on Terror, which worsened the problems it was supposed to solve. But what is the better, progressive alternative? On this episode of the Order From Ashes podcast, New America fellow Alex Stark outlines some of the specific ingredients of a policy that tries to promote genuine stability.  Sound,...

The United States and Lebanon are, in some ways, very different political contexts, and yet organizers face strikingly similar dilemmas and pitfalls in both countries. Both Nicole Carty and Jean Kassir have been actively involved in politics since 2011—Carty in the United States and Kassir in Lebanon. In this episode of “Transnational Trends in Citizenship”—the new season of Order from Ashes—the t...