Arab Digest podcasts

Arab Digest editor William Law is joined by the Middle East policy analyst Jon Hoffman from the Washington-based Cato Institute. Hoffman argues that Biden and his advisors are poised to make the gravest foreign policy blunder in the region since the Iraq war as the president pushes forward on securing a deal that would see Saudi Arabia join the Abraham Accords and recognise Israel. Sign up NOW at...

Reinventing the Sheikdom: how MbZ has shaped the UAE Top of our New Top Ten Podcast Countdown is our 1 July, 2022 podcast with Matthew Hedges. Matthew is an academic focusing on authoritarian regimes with an emphasis on the monarchies of the Gulf states. He's the author of Reinventing the Sheikhdom: Clan, Power and Patronage in Mohammed bin Zayed’s UAE published last year by Hurst. Sign up NOW at...

The MbZ and Erdoğan embrace Number 2 in our NEW Top Ten Podcast Countdown is our 18 February 2022 podcast with Sami Hamdi, Editor in Chief of the International Interest and a regular Arab Digest newsletter and podcast contributor. Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.

Today’s New Top Ten entry is our 8 July 2022 podcast with Maged Mandour. Maged is a political analyst and a regular contributor to Arab Digest and to Middle East Eye and Open Democracy. He is also a writer for Sada, the Carnegie Endowment online journal. Maged is the author of an upcoming book, Egypt Under Sisi (I.B.Tauris) which will examine the social and political developments in Egypt since th...

Number 4 in our new Top Ten is our 9 September 2022 podcast with Dr Elisabeth Kendall. Dr Kendall is an expert on Yemen and militant jihadist movements. Prior to her appointment as Mistress  of Girton College, Cambridge University she was a senior research fellow in Arabic and Islamic Studies at Oxford University's Pembroke College. Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start...

America and the Kais Saied coup Number 5 in our new Top Ten is our 11 March 2022 podcast with Amy Hawthorne. At the time Amy was the Deputy Director of Research at POMED, the Project on Middle East Democracy in Washington, DC. She is a Middle East expert with many years of experience working on Arab politics and US Middle East policy in the NGO sector and think tanks and in the State Department du...

Iraq in a suddenly changed world Our 25 February podcast was with Renad Mansour, a Senior Research Fellow at the Middle East and North Africa program and project director of the Iraq Initiative at  London’s Chatham House.  It was recorded a little less than a month after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newslette...

Macron’s missteps in the Middle East Francis Ghilès is a specialist on security, energy and political trends in North Africa, and the western Mediterranean. He's a Senior Associate Research Fellow at the Barcelona Centre for International Affairs and a visiting fellow at King's College London. The podcast was first broadcast 28 January 2022 ahead of the French presidential election in April. Sign...

The UK’s declining status in the Middle East Amidst domestic political uncertainty and a lack of coherent policy formulation in the autumn of 2022 the UK found its presence in the Gulf and the wider Middle East in danger of slipping further into decline. Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.

The UAE, Saudi Arabia and the JCPOA Kristian Coates Ulrichsen is a Middle East Fellow at Rice University's Baker Institute for Public Policy in Houston, Texas. His most recent book published by Hurst is Qatar and the Gulf Crisis. This podcast was first broadcast on 14 January 2022, six weeks ahead of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It focussed on the JCPOA, the Iran nuclear deal, at a point where Ir...

A Palestinian village you’ve probably never heard of The untold story of a small Palestinian village split in half and fighting quietly and with great determination for its survival. Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.

Arab Digest editor William Law's guest this week is the Gulf security expert David Roberts. He has just published a book that examines the six Gulf monarchies through five security lenses: political, societal, economic, military and environmental. He argues that the monarchies have shown a remarkable resilience and defied repeated predictions of their demise. Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free...

Arab Digest editor William Law's guest this week is Elisheva Goldberg, media and policy director for the New Israel Fund. Their conversation is about a crucial West Bank Bedouin village, Khan al-Ahmar, and why the extremists in Netanyahu's government are pushing hard for its destruction as a key to achieving their ultimate goal of driving Palestinians out of what they call Greater Israel. Sign up...

Editor William Law welcomes Isobel Archer to the Arab Digest podcast. Isobel is the Senior Researcher, Labour & Migrant Worker Rights for the London-based Business & Human Rights Resource Centre. The centre has just released a report on the treatment of migrant workers in Qatar during and after the football World Cup that shows, with numerous abuses uncovered, the Qataris and FIFA still have serio...

As part of the Arab Digest Egypt week interrogating the 3 July 2013 Egypt coup that overthrew Mohamed Morsi, the country's only democratically elected president, Arab Digest editor William Law's guest is the Egyptian writer and analyst Maged Mandour. Their conversation begins with the revolution of 2011 and traces the circumstances that enabled the coup, follows the tightening vice of the Sisi dic...

An Emirati businessman who holds Turkish citizenship has disappeared from the Amman prison where he was being held by Jordanian authorities at the behest of the UAE. Arab Digest editor William Law is joined by Dania Akkad, a senior investigative editor with Middle East Eye to discuss how a warrant issued by the so-called Arab Interpol has trapped Khalaf al-Romaithi. Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org f...

Arab Digest editor William Law's guest this week is Jim Krane. An ex-journalist and an author of several books dealing with energy and the Gulf States, Jim is an energy research fellow at Rice University's Baker Institute in Houston, Texas. Their conversation today is all about Abu Dhabi and OPEC+. Will constraints imposed on the UAE by the cartel cause a rupture and the departure of the Emiratis...

Arab Digest editor William Law's guest this week is the British-Sudanese student and activist Hadeal Abdelatti. While two power-hungry generals fight for control and devastate Sudan and its people, the courage and determination that saw the 2019 overthrow of the Omar Bashir dictatorship remains and is captured in the TikTok videos of Hadeal. Her voice is the voice of young Sudanese within the coun...

Francis Ghilès joins Arab Digest editor William Law in this week's podcast. Francis is a visiting fellow at King's College London and an expert on North Africa politics, energy and security. He argues that what has been called Tunisia's Jasmine Revolution has failed despite the overthrow of Ben Ali in 2011 because the structure of dictatorship has remained essentially unchanged thus enabling a new...

Arab Digest editor William Law's guest this week is the New Lines Institute's Caroline Rose. Caroline has been carrying out ground-breaking investigative analysis of Captagon, the drug of choice in the Gulf and the wider Middle East. With the Arab League normalising relations with the Syrian regime and welcoming Bashar al-Assad back into the fold, the head of the family narco business has scored a...

Middle East analyst Jon Hoffman joins Arab Digest editor William Law from Washington D.C. Their conversation is a look at how Saudi Arabia and the UAE have used religion to drive forward their domestic and foreign policy initiatives of silencing dissent at home while subverting democracy efforts in the wider Middle East and North Africa, all the while gaining plaudits from the West for buttressing...

The Turkish writer and analyst Aslı Aydıntaşbaş joins Arab Digest editor William Law to talk about Türkiye's 14 May election. With a battered economy and a growing sense that President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's increasingly centralised and repressive rule is failing the country, his main rival Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu leads the polls. But as the region and the world watches, the outcome remains uncertain....

It is a sweeping epic that travels through time and space to tell the interlinked and intergenerational stories of five powerful, determined and gutsy women. Their narratives are woven into and entwined with the history and the challenges of the Gulf state of Kuwait. Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.

Arab Digest editor William Law's guest this week is the ECFR MENA specialist Tarek Megerisi. With Sudan sliding towards civil war as two generals vie for power, the Libyan warlord Khalifa Haftar winning Western backing and Kais Saied the president of Tunisia tightening his grip on power as he restores one-man rule in Tunisia Tarek argues that the West's support for dictators will only serve to fur...

While the world looks elsewhere, three countries are hosting at a conservative estimate 5.4 million Syrian refugees. Arab Digest editor William Law 's guest this week is Kelly Petillo, a Middle East and North Africa specialist with the European Council on Foreign Relations. The European hard right is scapegoating Syrian refugees while at the same time Syrians in Türkiye, Lebanon and Jordan are fac...