What’s happening in Beirut reflects a global trend. Since neoliberal urbanization and austerity politics form a foundational paradigm for governments and financial sectors all over the world, countries with a similar landscape to Lebanon should expect to see similar protests, and by extension, grassroots pressure to form a new sense of the commons.

Al Bawaba spoke to Mona Fawaz, Professor in Urban Studies and Planning at the American University of Beirut. Dr. Fawaz, who has been active in the ongoing protests, tells Al Bawaba that the protesters in Beirut, more than merely demanding an end to austerity and sectarianism, are seeking to generate a radically different type of public than the one cultivated by the current regime; a public whose social fabric is made by a politics of care and mutual support rather one dominated by the edicts of neoliberal oligarchs.

Al Bawaba's guest for this week's Gateway podcast argues that this way of thinking underestimates the intimacy and shared outlook police have with the military.

Al Bawaba spoke with Stuart Schrader, who is a lecturer at Johns Hopkins University, Associate Director of the university’s Program in Racism, Immigration, and Citizenship and author of the book Badges Without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing.

To get a better understanding of how Yemen’s COVID-19 crisis is unfolding, Al Bawaba with Osama al-Fakih, a researcher and director of communications at Mwatana, which is an independent human rights watchdog in the country.

Based out of the Houthi-controlled city of Sanaa, Mwatana reports on abuses from the Houthis, the Saudi-led coalition and the Yemeni government. As such, it has faced constant threats for its work. In 2018, its founders were arbitrarily detained by the Houthis as a punishment for the organization’s reporting. Though they were released, members of Mwatana face the constant danger of being arrested, and rely largely on the impartiality of their reporting as well as pressure from the international community to continue freely operating.

Al Bawaba spoke with Jerome Roos to try and take this world-historical view. Roos is a Fellow of International Political Economy at the London School of Economics and author of the book Why Not Default? The Political Economy of Sovereign Debt.

He thinks much of the growing unrest shows the extent to which a financialized global economy, which has for decades been led and organized by American hegemony, is crumbling and experiencing a terminal crisis—one accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic.

That such political chaos appears to be happening in a time where countries are more entrapped in sovereign debt and austerity regimes than ever before, for him, is no coincidence.

Before the outbreak of COVID-19, tools for surveillance technology and governance were being perfected in Xinjiang, China, where a hybrid scheme of private tech firms and public security apparatuses collaborated to construct an overarching political structure that The Gateway's guest calls “digital authoritarianism.”

Al Bawaba spoke with Steven Feldstein, a nonresident fellow in Carnegie Endowment’s Democracy, Conflict, and Governance Program and professor at Boise State University about the history and global development of these surveillance tools and the types of governance they enable. Feldstein argues that a continual grassroots effort is needed to ensure emergent surveillance technology is not used to bolster the repressive power of governments.

Jordan’s full-scale national lockdown early in the outbreak was possibly the strictest on Earth. And while its political and economic repercussions may be felt in the months ahead, for now, the protocols appear to have wrestled the rate of new cases per day down to nearly zero.

Al Bawaba spoke with Kyle Burke about the beginnings of the mercenary industry in the U.S. Burke is a professor of history at Hartwick College and author of the book Revolutionaries for the Right: Anticommunist Internationalism and Paramilitary Warfare in the Cold War.

In early March of this year, just around the time the COVID-19 virus went global, Saudi Arabia initiated an oil price war with Russia by flooding the markets with cheap oil. The price per barrel of oil, which was already declining due to the drop in demand caused by efforts to quarantine the virus, plummeted even further.

The intertwining consequences of the pandemic and the ongoing oil war is crucial to understanding why the global economy is edging towards the brink of a major recession.

To focus on the geopolitics that underlies the current oil price war, Al Bawaba spoke with Laleh Khalili, a professor of International Relations at Queen Mary University of London.

On March 5, 2020, the ICC announced it was opening a formal criminal inquiry into potential war crimes committed in Afghanistan by its warring parties, including the Taliban, Afghan government, and U.S. forces.

Although the ICC’s investigation has been criticized by U.S. officials under the Trump Administration, international justice advocates are heralding it as a unique moment for global accountability as it represents the first time the ICC has opened an investigation against a superpower nation.

Al Bawaba spoke with Matt Cannock who heads Amnesty International’s Centre for International Justice, which is just a short walk away from the ICC’s headquarters in The Hague. In our conversation, Cannock makes clear that not only is the ICC’s decision to investigate U.S. actions in Afghanistan a historic moment, it is one of a growing number of ambitious decisions the ICC has undertaken in the last 12 months, and suggests 2020 could be a transformative year for accountability.

Every hour of every day, media organizations make decisions of what they are going to focus their coverage on. At every step, bias seeps in and gaps in coverage form.

One of the biggest stories that has fallen into this coverage gap is the migration of over 100,000 Ethiopians into Yemen and Saudi Arabia every year, and the dangers they face along the way.

Al Bawaba spoke with Adam Coogle, a Middle East researcher at Human Rights Watch, who authored a report on this migration route and interviewed a dozen Ethiopian migrants on their experiences having survived through it.

In his talk with Al Bawaba, he pieces together the perilous journey Ethiopians are making into Yemen and Saudi Arabia every day, and breaks down why it isn’t receiving sustained attention from the media.