In this episode, we hear from Karen J. Greenberg, Director of the Centre on National Security at Fordham University.

Greenberg is the author of a new book, Subtle Tools: The Dismantling of American Democracy from the War on Terror to Donald Trump, published by Princeton University Press. The book argues that policies and practices implemented after the 11 September attacks were later turned back on U.S. democracy.

The degradation of language, vague roles for government agencies, and new secrecy were later used against democratic movements in the U.S., including the Black Lives Matter protests.

We’ve looked back at our year in podcasting and picked out some favourite moments for a highlight episode.

This episode swerves between climate catastrophe and labour rights in the Gulf, the war in Yemen and the Palestine-Israel conflict, and history and literature.

Featuring Shireen al-Adeimi, Timothy Brennan, Andrew Cockburn, Hamid Dabashi, A. Scott Denning, Thomas Anthony Durkin, Dr Khamis Elessi, Bernard E. Harcourt, Yara Hawari, Nick McGeehan, Fadi Quran, Priya Satia.

In this episode, we speak to Timothy Brennan, Professor of Comparative Literature, Cultural Studies, and English at the University of Minnesota.

Timothy is the author of a new very highly acclaimed biography of the late writer and public figure Edward Said. Said was born in Jerusalem in 1935 but spent the majority of his formative years in Cairo, before moving to the US for his education and subsequently a long career at Columbia University in the City of New York.

In our conversation, Timothy talks about Said’s place in the New York cultural and political world, his writing, and memories Timothy has of him and Said working together during more than 20 years of friendship.

Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said, was released earlier this year and is published by Bloomsbury.

In this episode, we speak to Priya Satia, Raymond A. Spruance Professor of International History and Professor of History at Stanford University, and author of ‘Time’s Monster: History, Conscience, and Britain’s Empire’.

Professor Satia argues that history not only shapes the way the past is interpreted, but also shapes the future. Focusing on Britain’s imperial past, the book shows how Enlightenment thinkers inherited an idea that final moral judgment is delayed to a point in the distant future. To this end, Britons exerted violence and control over enormous swathes of the world whilst maintaining a sense of moral righteousness in the present.

Time’s Monster: History, Conscience and Britain’s Empire was published by Allen Lane in 2020.

In this episode, we hear from Ibrahim Ba, French former professional footballer who played as a right midfielder. Starting off his career with Le Havre in France in the early 1990s, he went on to represent clubs in Italy, England, Turkey, and Sweden before retiring at A.C. Milan in 2008.

Ba talks to Sports Writer Husam Binni about his life as a football player, his best friends from AC Milan and his predictions and views about the current football scene in Europe and the world.

In this episode of The Gateway, we speak to Andrew Cockburn, Washington editor of Harper’s and long-time follower of American foreign policy and American wars.

Andrew is the author of a new book, The Spoils of War: Power, Profit, and the American War Machine. In the book, he argues that the American war machine can only be understood in terms of the private passions and interests, financial or otherwise, of those who control it.

It takes us from extraordinary expensive toilet seat covers to wasteful spending when it came to infrastructure in Afghanistan.

The Spoils of War was published by Verso in September.

In this episode, we hear from Hamid Dabashi, Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia, and the author of a new book Reversing the Colonial Gaze: Persian Travelers Abroad, published by Cambridge University Press in 2020.

Hamid follows the journeys of travelers from Iran and India as they go to Asia, Africa, North and South America, Europe, and beyond. Until now, many of these travelogues have been read for what they can tell us about encounters with Europe.

But, as Hamid points out, the concerns and interests of these individuals were much broader than a reductive Eurocentrism would have us believe.

In this episode of The Gateway, we speak to Matthew Fuller, Professor of Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London, and Eyal Weizman, Professor of Spatial and Visual Cultures, also at Goldsmiths.

Eyal founded the research agency Forensic Architecture in 2010. Their investigations focus on a range of vital topics, including political violence in Myanmar, airstrikes by the Suadi-led coalition in Yemen, and the extrajudicial execution of 26-year-old Ahmad Erekat, by Israeli forces in 2020.

Matthew and Eyal have just published a book looking at the theory and practice of this new type of investigation, which incorporates a wide range of people, species, flora, and forms of knowledge, and knowledge making.

Investigative Aesthetics was published by Verso in August.

In this episode of The Gateway, I speak to Samuel Moyn, Henry R. Luce Professor of Jurisprudence at Yale Law School and Professor of History at Yale University, and the author of a new book, Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War.

Samuel argues that a new focus on waging wars with greater technological and tactical complexity - notably through Unmanned Arel Veichels, or drones, and through small teams of special forces - has taken precedence over whether wars should be fought in the first place.

The consequence, he argues, is that peace movements have faded into the background whilst calls for more “humane” warfare have taken over.

I began by asking Samuel how he came to the subject of his latest book, which was published in early September.

It’s been a year since Donald Trump sat on the South Lawn of the White House with Benjamin Netanyahu and the foreign ministers of the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain.

They all gathered in the September sun to sign what’s been dubbed the ‘Abraham Accords’, an agreement between Israel, the UAE, and Bahrain to normalize relations, establish embassies and, essentially, begin trading relationships with one another. Since then, Morocco and Sudan have joined too.

The agreements have been widely criticized by Palestinian activists and politicians, who see them as the Gulf states relieving pressure on Israel over their occupation of the West Bank and besiegement of Gaza, together with the abuses that have come to characterize Israel’s relationship with the Palestinians over the decades.

In this episode of The Gateway, Nicholas Prichard spoke to Dr. Guy Burton, Visiting Fellow at the LSE Middle East Centre and an Adjunct Professor of International Relations at Vesalius College in Brussels. Guy has worked in universities in the Middle East and writes on China’s interests in the region, too. Nicholas began by asking how Dr. Burton would characterize the Abraham Accords one year on.