The Foreign Desk

As the so-called Libyan National Army, led by rebel general Khalifa Haftar, advances on Tripoli, Andrew Mueller asks what, if anything, Haftar is after and if this could lead to yet more violence in the troubled country.

Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan declared last weekend's local elections to be about the ‘survival of the nation’. That was until his ruling AK party suffered its biggest defeats in years. Votes are still being counted and the results are still contested – by Erdogan, anyway. Are his hitherto loyal followers starting to tire of his nationalist fear-mongering? Andrew Mueller is joined by Ayla Jean Yackley, Rebecca Vincent and Fadi Hakura.

Last weekend Slovakia voted in its first female president, Zuzana Caputova. The anti-corruption activist has little experience of national politics but has vowed to change the way the country is run. However, what chance does she have of making a difference in what is a largely ceremonial role? Monocle 24’s Vienna correspondent Alexei Korolyov went to meet her to find out.

When Kurdish fighters overran Islamic State’s last stronghold in Syria, victory was declared over the jihadist group. But many of Islamic State’s fighters and their families have survived the collapse of the caliphate. What should become of them? And can we be sure that the defeat of Islamic State is also a defeat of its ideology? Andrew Mueller is joined by NPR’s Jane Arraf, former MI6 global counter-terror chief Richard Barrett CMG OBE and Aimen Dean, former al-Qaeda militant turned MI6 agent.

Do Ukrainians voting in the upcoming elections crave a fresh face for president or will they stick with what they know? Paige Reynolds asks whether Petro Poroshenko has done enough to stay in power.

How do you put a price on historical injustice and who should pay for it? In the final part of this series, Andrew Mueller explores practical solutions to these difficult and often divisive questions. Deena Hayes-Greene and Dr William “Sandy” Darity make the case for reparations for centuries of racial injustice in the US, while Yossi Mekelberg assesses the effectiveness of Germany’s payments to Israel, and survivors of the Holocaust, after the Second World War.

With just over a week until the UK was supposed to be leaving the EU, Andrew Mueller asks (yet again) what on earth is going on.

In this episode of our series looking at how countries reach an understanding with difficult aspects of their history, we look at empire – how we think about it, talk about it, teach it – and try to answer the question at the heart of the subject: what does a former coloniser owe the formerly colonised?

With Turkey’s economy officially in recession, Andrew Mueller asks what the phrase actually means, which other countries are experiencing one and whether the global economy should be worried.

In the second episode of our series, we hear from Indigenous people in Australia, New Zealand and Canada about what reconciliation means in theory – and how it can work in practice.