War & Peace

By International Crisis GroupNews News Commentary

War & Peace episodes

March 09, 2020 Deconstructing Islamic State’s Appeal in Central Asia
The conflicts in Syria and Iraq drew between 12,000 and 15,000 fighters from Central Asia. Noah Tucker, expert on Central Asian issues and our guest on War & Peace this week, helps us understand why.
No overwhelming single factor accounts for such a huge number of people going to fight with the Islamic State. “For every 10 people who join, there are 10 different life stories, and often 10 different reasons”, Noah explains.
But the deep inequalities found in Central Asian countries can help explain. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Central Asia underwent rapid modernisation and radical economic changes. While not unique to the region, the additional challenge of constructing a political system from scratch produced clear winners and losers while whole sections of society were left behind with no mechanism for changing the balance. The Islamic State offered a different path to addressing these injustices, an alternative theory on how to construct a government and distribute resources more fairly.
Noah, Olga and Hugh go on to examine the gendered element, the role of ethno-nationalism as state ideology and much more on this week’s episode. Tune in now!
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26 min
February 26, 2020 Episode 4: The long and winding road to accessibility
With the new EU disability agenda in the pipeline, in episode 4, "The long and winding road to accessibility", we discuss the employment situation of people with disabilities. We talk about what the EU should do to make its workplaces more inclusive – not only in the physical world but also in the collective mindset of a society that almost inevitably fails to see the person other than through their disability. Frank Sioen and Alba Gonzalez, both persons with disabilities, tell us about the hurdles and obstacles they had to overcome to get and keep a job. Mark Priestley, professor of Disability Policy at the University of Leeds, explains how the right of people with disabilities to work has evolved in European laws and policies over recent decades. And EESC member Yannis Vardakastanis discusses what practical measures the EU's disability strategy for the coming decade should contain to make accessibility a reality in Europe.
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13 min
February 24, 2020 Bringing home Europe’s ISIS-affiliated women and children
Over 13,500 foreign nationals who went to fight for ISIS are currently detained in Syria, among them women and children living in abhorrent humanitarian conditions. Western governments have largely failed to repatriate their citizens, afraid of the potential domestic political pushback.
For Crisis Group’s Gender Director Azadeh Moaveni, these governments should start by bringing home the children and women formerly associated with the group. She urges European leaders to do more to shift public rhetoric from being hostile and dehumanizing, explaining to Olga and Hugh how this group is far from monolithic. For her, working on gender in conflict means ensuring that women are not just seen as passive victims or inherent peacebuilders, that their full agency is explored, and that the structural conditions that first encouraged them to join militant groups are understood.
For more on this: Women and Children First: Repatriating the Westerners Affiliated with ISIS
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26 min
February 10, 2020 Of Nightclub Bouncers and Arms Control
“Policies today are geared toward power, strength and pushing back. They are not geared toward talking to each other, and that is the prerequisite for arms control”.
For Ulrich Kuehn, our guest on War & Peace this week, we have entered an age of regression of predictability in the international military balance. States are gradually dismantling many of the treaties won in hard negotiations during and after the end of the Cold War, arguing that they have become obsolete.
What does this mean for those countries who depend on cooperative mechanisms, but who have little say in what happens to them? And what are the implications for Europe? Does it have the political and military strength to be an autonomous arms control actor?
Tune in now to find out more, including why it’s sometimes useful to think of deterrence in terms of how nightclubs view their bouncers.
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27 min
January 27, 2020 Episode 3: Getting tough on gender violence
In Episode 3 "Getting tough on gender violence", we provide a vivid example of the power of civil society to bring about changes and push lawmakers to act. Our guest is Croatian actress and screenwriter Jelena Veljača who, enraged by a gruesome act of domestic violence that shook the country, started a social network campaign last year that snowballed into a national cry for justice for women and girls. Croatian EESC member Marina Škrabalo tells us about the importance of the Istanbul Convention and the EESC's take on the matter, while VoxEurop editor-in-chief Catherine André talks about the absence of unanimous support for the Convention despite the figures on gender violence remaining grim all over the EU.
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13 min
January 27, 2020 A 2020 Peace Agenda for the EU
As decades-old wars continue to escalate and new crises threaten peace and security around the world, European leadership is urgently needed to prevent and mitigate deadly conflict.
Crisis Group’s EU experts Giuseppe Famà and Lisa Musiol join Olga and Hugh in the studio this week to discuss the crises where Josep Borrell, the EU’s recently appointed Vice President and High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, can help the EU and its member states rise to the challenge.
For more see Crisis Group’s recent briefing and upcoming EU Watch List 2020.
With special thanks to our producer, BulleMedia. Also available on the Europod production network.
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33 min
January 13, 2020 Ground Reality in Nagorno-Karabakh
The dispute over Nagorno-Karabakh is the longest-running conflict that accompanied the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991. War over the territory broke out in 1992 between Armenians and Azerbaijanis. While a ceasefire in 1994 ended the fighting, decades of negotiations have failed to resolve the conflict.
Our guest this week is Olesya Vartanyan, Crisis Group’s Analyst for Europe’s Eastern Neighbourhood. She explains that grievances and tensions had existed long before the conflict erupted, and that recent calm only papers over years of stalemate that have entrenched positions and isolated Armenians and Azerbaijanis from one another.
But could there be a way out of the current deadlock? Have a listen to find out.
For more information on this conflict, see our recent report: Digging out of Deadlock in Nagorno-Karabakh and our Visual Explainer, which maps developments since 2015.
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22 min
December 30, 2019 Russia in 2020
2019 was a good year for Russia. The country rejoined the Council of Europe, the first case of sanctions being lightened since its 2014 annexation of Crimea. It confirmed the country’s commitment to the Paris climate agreement. It welcomed close to fifty African leaders to the inaugural Russia-Africa summit in Sochi. Moscow even made progress with Kyiv, although less as a result of Russian diplomacy than the efforts of Ukraine’s President Zelenskyy.
Andrey Kortunov, Director General of the Russian International Affairs Council, joined Olga and Hugh to reflect on 2019 and discuss what 2020 might bring. They weigh in on everything from Syrian reconstruction to arms control to who President Putin might want to win the U.S. presidential election.
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28 min
December 16, 2019 Bridging the EU-Russia Divide
Russia’s relationship with the European Union has been mired in tension and mistrust since Moscow's annexation of Crimea in 2014. But while relations at a political level are strained, in Russian society there is an appetite for more engagement.
Sabine Fischer is Team Leader for the Public Diplomacy EU and Russia Project, which seeks to build engagement between the EU and Russian civil society on bilateral and global issues and to strengthen mutual understanding where possible. She talks to Olga and Hugh about the project, Western perceptions of Russian foreign policy, how the new European Commission should engage Russia, and how the West can balance its rejection of the Crimea annexation with its broader policies toward Russia.
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26 min
December 04, 2019 Episode 2: Is the European Citizens' Initiative an instrument of democracy?
As we celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Lisbon Treaty, we debate the question: Has the ECI been an instrument of democracy? With us Pablo Sanchez, one of the champions of the first successful ECI Right2Water; EESC member Antonio Longo, who explains what the EESC has done over the years to help make the ECI simpler and more transparent, and prof. Alberto Alemanno, outlining the ECI's sticking points and proposing a radical overhaul of citizen participation in the EU. A Bulle Media production for the EESC.
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10 min