CONFLICTED

In this episode, Aimen and Thomas talk about one of the many governing institutions which arose out of the wreckage of the old imperial and colonial world, and which still underpins the way the world functions today: OPEC. The only great governing institution founded and run by statesmen outside the Western corridors of power, since its founding in 1960, OPEC has played a big role in every major geopolitical event since its founding in 1960. War, terrorism, kidnappings, assassinations, and an ever-present threat to the global economy—the story of OPEC has it all!

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Circling back to the Arab world after a brief excursus further afield, this episode of Conflicted takes up the themes of sectarian strife and political radicalism and applies them to the country that has perhaps been most affected by the Clash of Civilizations: Lebanon. What is Lebanon? Who are the Lebanese? Why did the country crack up in 1975? Answering these questions and more, the episode climaxes with what must be the fastest, most breathless description of the Lebanese Civil War ever attempted!

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Having flitted around the edges of the Ottoman Empire for most of this season, now we’re going straight to the jugular: the heart of that empire, the city of Istanbul (or Constantinople, if you prefer). In this episode of Conflicted, we tell the thrilling story of the epic historic conflict between two peoples, Turks and Greeks, practising two faiths, Islam and Orthodox Christianity, a conflict still manifest today, most painfully on the divided island of Cyprus. The invasion of Cyprus by Turkish troops in 1974 was yet another egg in the face of the declining British empire, one of the defining events of the Cold War period, and a living witness to the ongoing clash of civilizations in the Middle East.

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From the Arab world, we now journey eastward to the Indian Subcontinent. Ancient, vast, and spiritually rich, the lands that comprise the nation-states of Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh underwent one of the great traumas of the 20th century: the end of British rule and the Partition of the Raj. In this episode, we’ll tell this story, which includes a panoply of immense political personalities—Gandhi, Nehru, Jinnah—and which reverberates down to the present day in the ongoing crisis over the Himalayan province of Kashmir.

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Now that we’ve told the story of the rise and fall of Nasserism, we turn to Libya and its handsome and charismatic dictator, Col. Muammar Gaddafi. Believing himself to have inherited Nasser’s mantle of Arab leadership, Gaddafi’s brazen narcissistic insanity is the stuff of legend, and Aimen’s got a caravan-load of funny anecdotes to illustrate just how nuts he was. But more seriously, Gaddafi symbolizes the tragic turn toward unhinged dictatorship which much of the Arab world underwent in the second half of the Cold War. Gaddafi, Assad, Saleh, Mubarak, Ben Ali, and of course Saddam Hussein—they all stalked the Middle East like undead zombies of Nasser, a nightmare from which the Arab world is still recovering.

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We’ve finally reached the climax of the Cold War in the Middle East: the 6-Day War of 1967 and its dramatic sequel, the Yom Kippur War of 1973. The outcomes of both wars are well known; less so the political machinations leading up to them. We’ll do our best to take you behind the scenes of the corridors of power and into the minds of Arab and Israeli leaders. No one wanted war, yet war arrived. Why? These two wars were transformative: Nasserism was out and radicalism was in, and in the ongoing clash of civilisations in the Middle East, a new and improved player emerged from the wreckage of war: radical Islamism.

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As we race toward the 1967 and 1973 Arab-Israeli wars, we’re putting our final duck in its row. After the fall of the Ottoman Empire, Jordan and Iraq both received Hashemite monarchs—and the rivalries and ideological conflicts that followed still reverberate today, perhaps nowhere more powerfully than on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Focusing mainly on the tragic history of modern Iraq, this episode engages with the clash between modern Arab republicanism and something like traditional monarchism (Aimen’s favourite!), as competing versions of Pan-Arabism violently spread throughout the region, prompting the Hashemites into ever more desperate acts of self-preservation.

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In this episode, we talk about Syria. Or ask the question, really: What is Syria? Syria has been described as a “ fulcrum of geopolitical hegemony...” — a bit like Ukraine, interestingly — “...in the Middle East.” For that reason, for thousands of years Syria has been fought over and smashed up several times by invading armies from all directions, making the country somewhat amorphous, a patchwork of peoples practicing a huge variety of religions. More than perhaps anywhere else, Syria’s road to modern nationhood has been strewn with conflict—which we’ll explore through the prism of our continuing journey across the Cold War Middle East.

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Before the next episode, we have something a little different for your ears - an introduction to a whole new podcast - Behind the Sun.

In Behind the Sun, Nadia, a young Syrian woman in the diaspora, struggles to come to terms with what the world knows about what’s happening in her country. She speaks with Riyad - her father's friend - whom she had first met in the strangest of circumstances.

In episode 1, Nadia and Riyad explore the true meaning of "safety and justice" in Syria. He tells her the story of his disappearance in Syria for 21 years and how he formed a close friendship with Diab between the walls of the infamous prison Sednaya. 

Behind the Sun is co-produced by Message Heard and The Syria Campaign, in collaboration with the Association of Detainees and the Missing (ADMSP) and the Syrian Center for Justice and Accountability (SJAC) under its project On the Margins No More.

Subscribe to Behind the Sun wherever you get your podcasts. Episodes out weekly.

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Having avoided it for as long as possible, Aimen & Thomas finally turn their attention to the state of Israel: its backstory, its modern re-emergence, and its impact on the civilizational fault lines crisscrossing the Middle East. In the present day, Arab statesmen have never been closer to their Israeli counterparts, both sides united around a shared enemy: Iran. This marks a dramatic sea change from the past, and to help explain it, as so often this season, this episode reaches back into the Bronze Age, establishing the mishmash of peoples who have long called the Holy Land home, before returning to the pivotal late-Ottoman period, as Jewish migration to that corner of the Ottoman Empire, under the banner of Zionism, inspired the local Arabs to respond with nationalist ambitions of their own—culminating in the first Arab-Israeli war of 1948

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