Arab Digest 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, p...

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,...

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...

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 opportuniti...

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 Midd...

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 Is...

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 allowe...

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...

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 tarn...

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 em...

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...

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 asp...

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...

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...

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 si...

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...

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 emb...

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 dai...

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 Kh...

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. S...

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 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 re...

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...

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 t...