Ayatollah vs. Shah
We’ve reached the Iranian Revolution of 1979! The great showdown! The watershed moment when the tensions which we’ve been tracing—between reform and reaction, modernism and tradition—erupted into swee...
17 Aug 20221h 20min
Petrostates of the World, Unite!
In this episode, Aimen and Thomas talk about one of the many governing institutions which arose out of the wreckage of the old imperial and colonial world, and which still underpins the way the world ...
3 Aug 20221h 15min
Lebanon: Failed Narco-Terrorist State?
Circling back to the Arab world after a brief excursus further afield, this episode of Conflicted takes up the themes of sectarian strife and political radicalism and applies them to the country that ...
20 Jul 20221h 11min
Turkquake!
Having flitted around the edges of the Ottoman Empire for most of this season, now we’re going straight to the jugular: the heart of that empire, the city of Istanbul (or Constantinople, if you prefer...
6 Jul 202259min
Subcontinental Rift
From the Arab world, we now journey eastward to the Indian Subcontinent. Ancient, vast, and spiritually rich, the lands that comprise the nation-states of Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh underwent one...
22 Jun 20221h 18min
Gaddafi: The Arab Madman Cometh
Now that we’ve told the story of the rise and fall of Nasserism, we turn to Libya and its handsome and charismatic dictator, Col. Muammar Gaddafi. Believing himself to have inherited Nasser’s mantle o...
8 Jun 20221h 30min
Arab-Israeli Blitzkrieg
We’ve finally reached the climax of the Cold War in the Middle East: the 6-Day War of 1967 and its dramatic sequel, the Yom Kippur War of 1973. The outcomes of both wars are well known; less so the po...
25 Mai 20221h 6min
Hashemites!
As we race toward the 1967 and 1973 Arab-Israeli wars, we’re putting our final duck in its row. After the fall of the Ottoman Empire, Jordan and Iraq both received Hashemite monarchs—and the rivalries...
11 Mai 20221h 19min
