In mid-Jan of this year, videos emerged of Syrian fighters inside Libya. They were quickly identified as members of the Free Syrian Army, a loose umbrella of local Syrian rebel militias, who now operate under the wing of Turkey’s military, and have become a kind of de facto mercenary force on its behalf.

But while the Syrians fight on Turkey’s orders to defend Tripoli, many of those they are fighting against aren’t actually Libyan either. They are Sudanese and Russian mercenaries who have been ordered to spearhead the offensive on Tripoli by Haftar.

Al Bawaba spoke with Jalel Harchaoui, an analyst with the Netherlands-based Clingendael Institute, on how exactly the Libyan conflict mutated into the form it has taken, and how successive failures in the international community is enabling it to continue and expand.

Saudi Arabia is one of the Middle East’s most powerful countries, but its state, and the royal family that runs it, are a virtual black box. Answers to the complex questions of how Saudi works can be found in obsequiously long academic texts, but this knowledge has not yet been used by many analysts and journalists covering the region who still by and large view Saudi with an orientalist lens. This problem is confounded by the fact that most regional news outlets covering Saudi are funded either by Saudi itself or by rivals in the region.

To understand this further, Al Bawaba spoke with Theodore Karasik, who breaks down how the Saudi royal family works internally and how it secures power throughout the country.

The weaponization of social media has been a feature of international politics since the so-called Green Revolution in Iran in 2009. That grassroots movement for reform depended heavily on coordination via Twitter, and foreshadowed the cross-regional reliance on Twitter, Facebook and WhatsApp during and after the Arab Spring.

But just as social media has become an invaluable tool in organizing resistance, it is now being wielded by tech-savvy states to sow misinformation, surveill dissidents and manufacture consent. Nowhere are the promises and dangers of social media more apparent than in the case of Mohammed bin Salman’s Saudi Arabia.

Both the Saudi state and independent activists recognize the uniquely direct and relatively unregulated power social media has in shaping global opinions. Al Bawaba spoke with Hala al-Dosari, a Saudi human rights activist who stands on the vanguard of digitally organizing a resistance movement to the Saudi regime while in exile.

At the juncture between political marginalization, a growing concentration of power in elites, fear of an uncertain future and of other groups, distrust in establishments, real and imagined victimhood, mass media, prejudiced thinking and the need for a narrative connecting it all together, lies the conspiracy theory.

In each case, an image is conjured of a clandestine group of powerful individuals meeting in shady or opulent spaces and hashing out the direction of world politics without anybody to stop them. They are conspiring to siphon off Earth’s resources, divide land and people while wreaking havoc and gathering plunder.

Conspiratorial knowledge has been a defining feature of the global political landscape, and while its impacts have been felt at the level of presidential elections, regime changes and mass shootings, major media outlets still fail to understand their appeal.

To better understand the forces driving conspiratorial knowledge and its influence, Al Bawaba spoke with Quassim Cassam, a professor of philosophy at the University of Warwick who is an expert on conspiracy theories. His new book, Conspiracy Theories, details their persistent popularity as well as staking out their potentially fatal consequences.

The Yellow Vest movement has entered its second year of demonstrations, and though they seem as widely misunderstood now as they were when they first entered onto the world stage, their impact is being slowly realized.

The movement defies the traditional left/right political spectrum in its makeup and set of demands, which were primarily against a government-proposed fuel tax, but has since cascaded into a wider condemnation against French President Emmanuel Macron.

Macron has come to represent an emergent ideology Al Bawaba's guest today, Joshua Clover, calls Green Nationalism, where domestic austerity measures are implemented alongside militarizing borders. States around the world are adopting a Green Nationalist mindset, though this slow sea-change has been undercovered by most major media outlets.

How appealing is it to mount a camera to the outside of your house, where it constantly watches the world without ever blinking or turning off? Every second of footage is stored on a cloud that is accessible by both the parent company and your local police forces.

This idea may seem unappealing to many, but for hundreds of thousands of American consumers, such a camera represents a new, sophisticated way to keep their home safe.

On an individual home basis, the camera serves a rationale for boosting safety, but on a wider scale, the saturation of ever-watching cameras in communities is building grid-like surveillance networks throughout the U.S., whereby neighbors engage in co-policing in conjunction with Amazon and local security apparatuses.

I’ll be talking with Christopher Gilliard, a Detroit-based surveillance expert who teaches at Macomb Community College. He warns that surveillance capitalism poses grave threats not only to already-criminalized minority populations, but nationwide democratic institutions, which are staffed by public servants struggling to keep up with the sheer pace at which companies like Amazon are gaining power and data.

In the Summer of 2019, hundreds of thousands of Sudanese protesters were braving live fire from an embattled military regime that had recently imposed itself upon the country.

The two-state solution, once an acclaimed proposal to the intractable Israel-Palestine conflict, is becoming obsolete. And the Trump administration’s deal of the century, even if it is never unveiled, is part of a larger effort to ensure that solution cannot be renewed.

Al Bawaba spoke with Bessma Momani, a professor of political science at the University of Waterloo, who has focused her career on Middle East politics and political economy. In her conversation with Al Bawba, Momani contextualizes the deal of the century, including Jared Kushner’s much-maligned ‘Peace to Prosperity’ economic plan, with the decades-long shift towards a one-state solution.

To intervene in Yemen, Saudi needed British arms, and to protect itself from the resulting international scrutiny, Saudi calls on the UK to be its defense. But that prized relationship may soon change.

In June 2019, the U.K. Court of Appeals ruled that the government broke the law with its arms exports to Saudi Arabia. Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT), a U.K.-based organization opposed to international arms sales, was at the forefront of this legal fight, pushing it through the U.K.’s court system for years before attaining this ruling.

Al Bawaba spoke with Andrew Smith, CAAT’s main spokesperson, who believes the court victory is just the beginning in an international effort to halt arms sales to Saudi and other autocratic regimes.

Behind political disputes over weapons stockpiling, nuclear deals and arms races; behind war-mongering rhetoric and a growing distrust of the science behind climate change, behind breaking news cycles, lies the doomsday clock, which announces how close all these developments bring humanity to self-destruction.

It’s a universal barometer gauging the impact humans have on this world and on each other. Al Bawaba spoke with the Bulletin’s editor-in-chief, John Mecklin, who thinks the doomsday clock serves the crucial role of reminding people once a year to think on a global and long-term scale about these threats.