Sami Hamdi, the CEO of The International Interest, joins Arab Digest editor William Law for a wide-ranging, fast-paced and thought-provoking review of a tumultuous year for the MENA region as alliances shifted and fissures emerged with new tensions flaring up even as old ones eased. The podcast wraps up with Sami's take on what to look for in 2023.

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The 2022 Middle East and North Africa Review

Kurdish-American journalist Sirwan Kajjo joins Arab Digest editor William Law in this week's podcast. Sirwan is just back from the Kurdish Region of Iraq (KRI) and he brings to the table his analysis of the current situation, including tensions between Erbil and Baghdad over oil revenues and the ongoing struggle for supremacy between the two families who control the KRI, the Barzanis and the Talibanis.

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Iraqi Kurdistan: a troubled region with an uncertain future

Arab Digest editor William Law's  guest this week is the journalist and author Elias Jahshan. Elias, who edited This Arab is Queer, an anthology of LGBTQ+ Arab writers, talks about the power of language and of music and food to hold truth to power, to challenge intolerance and repression and to push forward the struggle for liberation in the Arab world.

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Elias Jahshan: "my ancestors are within my hands"

The 21 year old Tunisian writer Tharwa Boulifi joins Arab Digest editor William Law for a conversation about the young Tunisians who came of age a decade after the revolution only to find the country slipping back into dictatorship under President Kais Saied, a man many of the Gen Zs initially thought they could trust to keep the dream of revolution alive.

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Tunisia's Gen Z

Chatham House Iraq expert Renad Mansour joins Arab Digest editor William Law to discuss the impact of America and the UK's 2003 decision to invade Iraq and overthrow Saddam Hussein. Faulty assumptions, false claims and the decision to dismantle the armed forces and the civil service coupled with the imposition of a sectarian governance structure led to chaos, corruption and violence that scars Iraq to this day.

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The Iraq war twenty years on

Andreas Krieg joins Arab Digest editor William Law for a conversation about his just released book Subversion. Andreas looks at how weaponised narratives have been used in the Middle East to sabotage and subvert the Arab Spring and efforts to empower civil society. Key players in the game are the United Arab Emirates and Israel who share a common goal: to subvert democratic engagement and governance in the Middle East and North Africa.

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Subversion: the strategic weaponisation of narratives

Arab Digest regular contributor Francis Ghilès joins editor William Law in a wide ranging conversation about the economic and political outlook emerging from the constitutional coup being carried out by Tunisian President Kais Saied. Francis notes the support that Saied is receiving from powerful MENA allies, chief among them gas-rich Algeria.

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Algeria and the Kais Saied coup

Arab Digest editor William Law's guest this week is the Saudi human rights activist Areej al-Sadhan. Her brother Abdulrahman is one of many held in Saudi Arabia's labyrinthine prison system whose only crime was to criticise the regime of Mohammed bin Salman. The crown prince spends billions to promote an image of reform in the kingdom but behind the expensive PR and his lavish giga-projects lies a brutally repressive dictatorship.

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#FreeSadhan

William Law's guest on the podcast is the Palestinian academic Dalal Iriqat. This week marks the first 100 days of the latest Netanyahu government, the most extreme in Israel's history. Acting with impunity, a Fascist coterie of his ministers has stepped up a vicious campaign aimed at removing whatever rights Palestinians might still have while using violence to provoke violence in order to justify apartheid.

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Dalal Iriqat speaks truth to power

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 during the Obama administration.

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AD's NEW Top 10 Podcast Countdown #5 - America and the Kais Saied coup

Arab Digest editor William Law's guest this week is the North Africa analyst Tarek Megerisi. While the world has been focussed on the Gaza war competing kleptocrats in Libya have gotten on with plundering the country while Europe and the rest of the international community look away and the UN fumbles opportunities to move the country and its people toward security and peace. We begin, however, with Tarek’s thoughts on Gaza.

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Libya in the grip of kleptocrats

Arab Digest is where business leaders and experts on the Middle East and North Africa come together to share analysis and insight about the issues in the region that matter most.
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