Behind The Lines with Arthur Snell

Check out our Bookshop.org affiliate site behindthelines and please sign up for my substack at arthursnell.substack.com and/or follow me on Bluesky @snellarthur.bsky.social. You can sometimes find me on other podcasts - most often Disorder which I am involved with in partnership with RUSI, the Royal United Services Institute, the world's oldest think tank. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy fo...

At the heart of much of the discussion of the multiple crises facing the Middle East is Iran, whose proxies are active across the region. But what is it that Iran itself wants? What is it trying to achieve and and what considerations does it bring to these questions? To try to answer these complicated questions I was fortunate to be joined by Charlie Gammell, historian, Iran expert and former UK d...

Repeated airstrikes against Houthi targets in Yemen do not appear to have dampened their willingness or their ability to continue strikes against shipping. What are the appropriate responses to this determined and dangerous group? To get a better understanding of their role in Yemen, the wider political context and the regional factors in play, I spoke to Laura Cretney, scholar, researcher and soc...

Argentina's 'anarcho capitalist' president Javier Milei haș a series of policies that are barely believable. I spoke to Leiza Brumat about the political and economic background to his election, his political platform and whether he is likely to get it adopted. Check out our Bookshop.org affiliate site behindthelines and please sign up for my substack at arthursnell.substack.com and/or follow me on...

BONUS EPISODE In conversation with Jason Pack of the Disorder Podcast about Yemen. This is a joint episode with Disorder, so if you are already listening to that show, you won't find too much different between these two. There are some links that were referenced during the show. https://time.com/6555947/houthi-airstrike-history/ https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/01/12/houthis-red-sea-british-royal-na...

EMERGENCY EPISODE On 11 January US and UK airforces struck targets in Yemen associated with the Huthi militia which has been targeting international shipping in the Red Sea, purportedly in solidarity with the plight of the Palestinians. To try to understand the bewildering background to these worrying events I was privileged to be joined by Hannah Porter, Senior Research Officer for Yemen at ARK G...

After a tough year in 2023 and a lack of major progress in regaining territory from the Russians, this year promises to be another challenging one for Ukraine. Looming over all of what Ukraine does is the question of Western support. Will the USA be able to overcome its political turmoil and continue to provide the Ukrainians with the weapons and aid they desperately need? Will Europe be able to s...

With all the pressure of the Christmas season I held off from putting out a 'geopolitical review of the year' or something like that: there's a lot going on and people need some space. Instead, I wanted to finish the year with an episode that is in some ways completely different, but also relevant to the issues we have covered in the podcast earlier. Shane O'Mara is a professor of experimental bra...

As the Israeli assault on Gaza, immediately preceded by the Hamas-led massacre in Southern Israel, continues, we return to the history of this conflict. This is the second part of my extended interview with the historian James Barr, author of several books on the history of the Middle East including A Line in the Sand and Lords of the Desert, some of the best regarded guides to the region, particu...

The crisis in Israel - Palestine continues, currently unfolding with the Israeli attack on Gaza, immediately preceded by the Hamas-led massacre in Southern Israel. Unpicking the history and origins of these events remains a particularly difficult task, with history used and abused by people with points to prove on all sides. For that reason I was particularly happy to be able to conduct an extende...

The sense that our politics isn’t working might be familiar to listeners of this podcast. If you heard last week’s episode you’ll know that I had James O’Brien discussing his book “How they Broke Britain”, which gets to the heart of these questions. But one area that James and I didn’t touch on is our parliament. Britain’s parliament, sometimes self-importantly calling itself the Mother of Parliam...

James O'Brien is often described as the voice of liberal England. With this regular radio slot on LBC and his huge online following, he is a reminder that popular doesn’t have to be populism. His patient, forensic but totally accessible unpicking of cynical political dishonsesty, particularly of the Brexist variety, has been a beacon of sanity for literally millions of people - at a time when so m...

After months of fierce fighting, mostly in the Donbas region, Ukraine's attempt to push through Russia occupation zone to reach the Sea of Azov appears to have failed. Russia's incredibly dense minefields, its increasingly sophisticated use of drones, and its willingness to weather extraordinary casualties have all contributed to a lack of Ukrainian progress. But the West's failure to supply Ukrai...

When I worked at the Provincial Reconstruction Team in Helmand Province, I was largely based at the Forward Operating Base in Lashkar Gah - the main city of Helmand. There, amid the dust and noise of an active military campaign, there was a small, beautifully tended garden inside the base. I’m going to be honest and say that I was too preoccupied with my own job ever to ask myself who was responsi...

Dr Mike Martin, former soldier, military strategist and author of How to Fight a War joined me to discuss how Israel and Hamas are fighting their war. Our discussion took us into a wider exploration of conflict in the modern age and the risk of escalation and agglomeration of individual conflicts into global ones. Mike can be found on Twitter where he writes fascinating threads on what is happenin...

Understanding the risks of a regional war between Israel and its antagonists feels like the most important issue at the present time. I was able to speak to Michael Stephens, former head of the Middle East programme at RUSI, the Royal United Services Institute, about the complex diplomatic and strategic relations that exist across the region. We covered Iran and its proxies, the Arab Gulf states a...

In this episode I wanted to go back to something that Paul Mason said in an earlier episode which struck a chord. He identified that the weakest link in International democratic politics is the world’s greatest democracy, the United States. Here’s Paul’s line “the key to the international situation is America. we could wake up in November 2024 with Trump as president that is a legitimation of insu...

Following Hamas’s horrific assault on Israel, attention turns to Israel’s reaction. Gaza is under siege and Israel has mobilised over 300,000 reservists. Israel claims that it plans to destroy Hamas. What does that mean in practice? And what does it mean for the civilians that live in Gaza? This sits in a wider context of regional relationships, Israel’s support in the West and the impact on the c...

EMERGENCY PODCAST We’re only 4 days after the stunning horror of Hamas’s attack on Israel. Much remains unclear, but we now know that a major Hamas operation completely blindsided Israel’s defences and nearly 1,000 Israelis, mostly civilians are dead, with several hundred taken as hostages to Gaza. Israel has regained control of the towns that were seized by Hamas fighters, but there remain gunmen...

In 2021, Paul Mason, a veteran journalist familiar to viewers of Newsnight and Channel 4 News, published a book called How to stop Fascism, History Ideology, Resistance. His book came in the aftermath of the January 6th insurrection in Washington DC and the spectre of rising authoritarian nationalism across the world. A year later, Paul found himself in Kyiv just 24 hours before Russian tanks roll...

We’re living in an age of the self-confident autocrat: China is rising, President Erdogan coasted to a managed re-election and in the Gulf, the Arab monarchies are riding high on oil prices boosted by Putin’s war in Ukraine. And what do the autocrats do with their money? They use it to buy influence. And one of the ways that they can do this is through football, the most popular sport on the plane...

Storm Daniel passed through the Mediterranean in early September,  one of a bewildering number of extreme weather events in recent months. When it hit Libya on 10 September, torrential rainfall led to catastrophic floods in the Town of Derna. At the time of recording as many as 20,000 people are missing, feared dead. It was an example of the terrifying new reality of the climate crisis where entir...

On the 30th August a military coup took place in Gabon in West Africa, dislodging the president Ali Bongo, whose family has controlled the country for nearly 60 years. That military takeover in Gabon followed swiftly on the heels of a coup in Niger, one month earlier. There seems to have been a spate of these in the Sahel region of Africa. Indeed, within a period of just over two years, every coun...

Since independence in 1980, Zimbabwe has been controlled by one political movement - ZANU-PF. Outside the country this was often seen as the personal fiefdom of one man, Robert Mugabe. Undoubtedly he was the key figure, but after his removal from power in 2017, the party has continued to control Zimbabwe’s politics and its institutions. So it is a fair question whether there has ever been a legiti...

Ukraine’s Radical War Thanks to all of you that have listened to the first episode of Behind the Lines and to all of those of you that are joining this new podcast for the first time. We are taking a weekly look at a different aspect of current geopolitics. This week, it’s how the information age has transformed warfare, and particularly how it has transformed warfare in Ukraine. Russia's war on U...