Foreign Exchanges: the Podcast

I’m very grateful to be joined in this episode by Darren Byler, lecturer in anthropology at the University of Washington. Darren’s research focuses on art and culture in Xinjiang and he’s done considerable field work in the region. He’s here to walk us quickly through Uyghur history, to talk about his own work in the region, and to give us a sense of the Chinese government’s campaign to stamp out Uyghur culture under the guise of “counter-terrorism.”

LINKS:

Darren has a website, “The Art of Life in Chinese Central Asia,” that covers art and politics in Northwest China and Central Asia and provides a digital home for Xinjiang artists to tell their stories and display their work. Check it out at LivingOtherwise.com.

Darren also writes a regular column on Xinjiang for supchina.com, which you can find here.

Finally, his recent Guardian piece on high-tech state surveillance in Xinjiang is here.

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I’m joined by Australia’s own Matt Brady to discuss Saturday’s election and the sordid cast of characters involved in its decidedly unexpected outcome. We look at what happened to the Labor Party and what to expect now that Scott Morrison has a whole term ahead of him—at the risk of spoiling the ending, it’s not good. Enjoy!

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I'm joined for either the first or third time by Alex Thurston from Miami University of Ohio to talk about inter-communal violence in Mali, Nigeria, and Burkina Faso, as well as an update on the Boko Haram(s) conflict in Nigeria. Alex is an expert on the Sahel region who writes at several places, but you should definitely check out his Sahel Blog and his books:

* Salafism in Nigeria from Columbia University Press

* Boko Haram: The History of an African Jihadist Movement from Princeton University Press

You can also follow him on Twitter.

I’ve uploaded two previous interviews I did with Alex when I was at Patreon, which you can find most easily on our Archive page. And to answer your other question, we do now have an RSS feed for unlocked episodes, so please plug it in to your favorite podcast app: https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast?publication_id=6479. RSS feeds for subscribers are still in the works but should be available soon.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.foreignexchanges.news/subscribe

Hey folks. This is just a short introductory message to welcome you here to Substack and explain a bit about how the podcast end of things is going to work. Mostly it’s an excuse for me to test out Substack’s podcasting feature before doing a real episode, which I will be doing later this week. I know there have been some questions about an RSS feed and I answer those as best I can in the audio. I’ll have more updates on that as I hear more from Substack. If you have additional questions/issues regarding podcasting please use the comments or email me: [email protected] (I’ll be changing that but for now I’m still using it. Thanks for listening!

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.foreignexchanges.news/subscribe

We're a day earlier than usual with this week's first episode, but I like to get interviews out quickly because of the possibility they'll be overtaken by events.

As promised, I'm joined by John Carl Baker, a senior program officer at the Ploughshares Fund who works on North Korea, to discuss last week's failed US-DPRK summit in Hanoi. John walks us through the history of US-North Korea diplomacy back to the Clinton administration, offers his thoughts on the positives and negatives of the Trump approach toward North Korea, and suggests a better way forward that centers inter-Korean engagement and lets Koreans take the lead for a change. Enjoy!

John's recent Defense One piece with Ploughshares President Joe Cirincione, on Democrats' response to Trump's North Korea diplomacy, is here.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.foreignexchanges.news/subscribe

In something of an emergency episode brought on by the sudden onset of a political crisis in Venezuela, I'm joined by political scientist and DSA member Jared Abbott. Jared specializes in Latin America and just returned from doing fieldwork in Venezuela, and he's here to hopefully put recent events into some context. This episode is open to the public so feel free to share.

The Jacobin interview Jared mentions toward the end of the show can be found here: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/01/venezuela-maduro-chavez-military-intervention

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.foreignexchanges.news/subscribe

For our final regular podcast of 2018, I'm joined by political scientist Ann Marie Wainscott of Miami University of Ohio. Ann is currently researching the religious sector in Iraq, but I wanted to talk about her past work in Morocco (ruled by King Mohammed VI, pictured). We talk about the Moroccan government's efforts to bureaucratize religious expression after the Casablanca bombings of 2003, Morocco's efforts to position itself as a "third pole" in the Islamic World, between and apart from the Saudi-Iran rivalry. Finally she helps shed some light on conditions in the Rif surrounding the 2016-2017 Hirak Rif protests and on recent developments in the frozen Western Sahara conflict. This one will be open to the public. Enjoy!

Ann's book is Bureaucratizing Islam from Cambridge University Press. The 2017 Journal of Politics and Religion article she mentions can be found here if you have some institutional access, and she's also got a 2015 article in the Journal of North African Studies on Islamic education in Morocco post-Casablanca. Check out her website, annmariewainscott.com, and give her a follow on Twitter, @AnnMWainscott.

Finally, since this is it for our regular podcasts in 2018, let me say Happy Holidays to you and yours, and see you in 2019!

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We're joined for the second time by Jacobin writer Branko Marcetic (@BMarchetich) to talk about French President Emmanuel Macron's tribulations, France's "yellow vest" protests, why austerity leads both to fascism and to a cooked planet, and of course why Vladimir Putin is behind all of it. Enjoy!

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.foreignexchanges.news/subscribe

Freelance writer and Harvard Divinity School grad student Hannah Gais is back, so that makes two repeat guests on the podcast! She's going to try to explain to me how the Orthodox Church works, an effort that goes so well you can hear my dog literally howling by the end of it (I'm pretty sure she saw some kids outside). We talk about the schism between the Russian Orthodox Church and Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I over Bartholomew's decision to allow Ukrainian church leaders to form their own autocephalous Orthodox Church separate from Moscow and try to Make Sense Of It All. Enjoy!

Hannah has also written a piece about the schism, which we discuss during the interview that you can find here. You can find her on Twitter at @hannahgais.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.foreignexchanges.news/subscribe

Today I'm joined in person by Emerson T. Brooking, co-author of a new book called LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media. We talk about  the ways social media is being used to make life worse, where we're heading in terms of how governments and other bad actors weaponize social media, and what we can do about it. Enjoy!

Buy the book: https://www.powells.com/book/-9781328695741

You can follow Emerson on Twitter at @etbrooking. And if you can, Emerson asked me to ask you to support Stacey Abrams, the Democrat running for governor of Georgia. Her actblue page is here.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.foreignexchanges.news/subscribe