CONFLICTED

In this week’s Conflicted Conversation, UCL associate professor Philip Cunliffe makes a provocative case: far from being polar opposites, global Islamism and American unipolarity were born of the same globalised order. But what happens when that order starts to fall apart? And is today’s rising New Left inadvertently fighting to save the liberal-imperial system it says it wants to destroy?

For deeper dives and world-class Q&As with Aimen Dean, join the CONFLICTED COMMUNITY here: https://conflicted.supportingcast.fm

Philip and Thomas discuss:

How U.S. unipolarity and globalisation reshaped the world after the Cold War

Why Cunliffe thinks ‘global Islam’ is a distinctly modern political phenomenon

How early state-seeking Islamism gave way to transnational Islamism and jihadism

Why neoliberal globalisation weakened state sovereignty and boosted Islamist networks

The strange overlap between liberal humanitarianism and jihadist causes

How the CIA, Afghanistan and Syria blurred the line between ally and enemy

Why the new American Left could revive the logic of liberal interventionism over Israel

What comes after the decline of American empire: sovereign nation-states or rival new blocs?

Find Philip on X: https://x.com/thephilippics

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Conflicted is a Message Heard production.

Executive Producers: Jake Warren & Max Warren.

Produced and edited by Thomas Small .
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Every region-watcher was stunned over past week as the anti-Houthi forces in Yemen suffered an extremely brutal reversal—with global consequences. Aimen lifts up the curtain of inter-Gulf politics to help Thomas understand better what went wrong, and why Saudi Arabia's confused foreign policy may deserve the lion's share of the blame.

For mind-expanding Q&A's with Aimen, join the CONFLICTED COMMUNITY here: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://conflicted.supportingcast.fm/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Aimen and Thomas discuss:

Did Iran dupe Saudi Arabia?

How the Houthis humiliated their rivals

Mocha falls: Bab al-Mandab exposed

Saudi Arabia’s oil lifeline gets hit

Why Yemen’s anti-Houthi coalition imploded

The bitter Saudi-UAE divorce

Has Qatar reshaped Saudi foreign policy?

Why Trump refused MBS’s rescue call

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Conflicted is a Message Heard production.

Executive Producers: Jake Warren & Max Warren.

Produced and edited by Thomas Small.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

To commemorate the 25th Anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, Aimen and Thomas take a deeper, wider look at the historical, ideological, and geopolitical context on either side of that momentous world-changing event.

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Aimen and Thomas discuss:

Was 9/11 an ending as well as a beginning?

The myth of the peaceful 1990s

America inherited a geopolitical mess after the USSR's collapse

America as a revolutionary power

Could preserving Middle Eastern monarchies have prevented later disasters?

Al-Qaeda and liberal globalisation

Jihadism amid the wreckage of earlier promises

Was the War on Terror a rupture or an acceleration?

Bin Laden’s selective use of history

History without a puppet master

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Conflicted is a Message Heard production.

Executive Producers: Jake Warren & Max Warren.

Produced and edited by Thomas Small.
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Where did the nation-state come from—and what happens if the conditions that made it powerful are now disappearing?

Thomas discusses these questions and much more in this wide-ranging Conflicted Conversation with award-winning novelist and essayist Rana Dasgupta, whose new book After Nations: The Making and Unmaking of a World Order sets out to explain where our world order came from and where it could be going.

Rana explains:

The origins of the modern nation-state and the decline of universal sacred empires

Louis IX, the Crown of Thorns and the sacralisation of the French state

How Enlightenment political theology transformed God, sovereignty and individual rights

Industrialisation, mass democracy, welfare states and the political power of workers

Liberalism, populism and the changing relationship between elites and mass democracy

The origins of international law in empire, property rights and global capitalism

Why the postwar rules-based international order is now weakening

The East India Company, Silicon Valley and the rise of quasi-sovereign corporate power

China as an alternative model of state power and control over private capital

Climate change, mass migration and whether the nation-state can survive a new ‘nomad century’

Find Rana on X: x.com/byranadasgupta

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Conflicted is a Message Heard production.

Executive Producers: Jake Warren & Max Warren.

Produced and edited by Thomas Small .
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In this Conflicted Conversation, journalist Chris Horton talks about his new book Ghost Nation: The Story of Taiwan and Its Struggle for Survival.

Chris explains:

Why China wants Taiwan and why the island is vital to control of the western Pacific.

Taiwan’s strategic position in the First Island Chain between China, Japan and the Philippines.

How a Chinese invasion, blockade or maritime quarantine of Taiwan could unfold.

Why a war over Taiwan could devastate global trade and the world economy.

What Taiwan’s fall would mean for US power, Japan and the Philippines.

Why Taiwan is an independent democracy but still officially called the Republic of China.

Who the Taiwanese are: Indigenous peoples, Hoklo, Hakka and post-1949 mainlanders.

How martial law, dictatorship and democratisation created modern Taiwanese identity.

Why the Kuomintang, once Communist China’s enemy, is now Taiwan’s most Beijing-friendly major party.

Whether Taiwan could eventually choose closer integration with China through democracy rather than war.

Find Chris on X: www.x.com/heguisen

Visit Chris’s website: www.chrishortonwriter.com

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Conflicted is a Message Heard production.

Executive Producers: Jake Warren & Max Warren.

Produced and edited by Thomas Small .
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices