CONFLICTED

In this Conflicted Conversation, Justin Marozzi discusses his new book Captives and Companions: A History of Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Islamic World.

Justin traces the long, varied history of slavery in the Islamic world, arguing that slavery could sometimes offer remarkable paths to freedom and power, but that these exceptions never erased the violence of capture, ownership and exploitation—or the uneasy entanglement of abolition with Western imperialism.

Justin explains:

The scale and longevity of slavery in the Islamic world

The spiritual status of enslaved people in early Islam

The Quran, manumission and the legal regulation of slavery

The Islamic conquests and the expansion of slave-taking

Anti-black racism and the Zanj Revolt in Abbasid Iraq

Concubines, eunuchs, and sexual slavery

Mamluks, Janissaries and elite forms of servitude

Christian and Muslim slave-raiding across the Mediterranean

Ottoman abolition and its entanglement with Western imperialism

Modern slavery, Daesh and hereditary servitude in Mauritania

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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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Donald Trump has once again stepped back from a threatened major attack on Iran. So has America lost the Iran War? Or is Trump’s apparent hesitation part of a longer strategy to exhaust the Iranian regime?

Aimen and Thomas discuss:

Whether Iran has outmanoeuvred Trump despite America’s overwhelming military superiority

Aimen’s three possible futures for the war: US withdrawal, prolonged attrition or extreme escalation

Why an American retreat could unleash an even more destructive regional war

Israel, the Gulf states and Pakistan in a Middle East without American restraint

The revival of the US–Iran MoU and President Pezeshkian’s lack of authority over the IRGC

America’s possible ‘death by a thousand cuts’ strategy against Iran’s military and economy

Iran’s collapsing currency, soaring inflation and ability to withstand prolonged pressure

Trump’s highly personal style of government and the absence of a stable American war strategy

The limits of air power and America’s repeated failure to convert destruction into political victory

The danger of nuclear escalation if Iran races towards a bomb or misreads Trump’s restraint as weakness

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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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In this Conflicted Conversation, Thant Myint-U talks about his new book Peacemaker: U Thant, the United Nations and the Untold Story of the 1960s. It tells the story of his grandfather U Thant, the Burmese schoolteacher turned UN Secretary-General who guided the United Nations through some of the most dangerous crises of the 1960s, yet is now woefully forgotten or badly misremembered.

Thant explains:

U Thant’s forgotten role as UN Secretary-General during the great crises of the 1960s

His sociability, humour, directness, and moral imagination

How Buddhism shaped U Thant’s approach to crisis

How newly independent post-colonial states tried to remake the world order

Burma/Myanmar after empire: colonial destruction, weak institutions, and postcolonial state-building

The Non-Aligned Movement: Afro-Asian internationalism beyond the US–Soviet Cold War

Congo, Katanga and sovereignty: U Thant’s defence of postcolonial borders against neo-imperial fragmentation

The Cuban Missile Crisis: U Thant’s overlooked role in helping Kennedy, Khrushchev and Castro de-escalate

Vietnam and the lost peace channel: U Thant’s ignored 1964 attempt to open talks with Ho Chi Minh

The Six-Day War and the UN-Israel rupture: UNEF, Nasser, Israel, and the myth that the UN abandoned Israel

U Thant’s late one-world vision, the decline of Bandung idealism, and the lost promise of postcolonial internationalism

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Visit Thant’s website: thantmyintu.com

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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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French war reporter and global jihadism expert Wassim Nasr was part of the presidential press party during Emmanuel Macron’s recent visit to Damascus. He shares his first-hand account not only of what happened between Macron and Syrian president Ahmad al-Sharaa during the visit, but also what he discovered afterwards, during a trip to Aleppo and to the northern town of Kobane.

Wassim and Thomas discuss:

What it was like inside Macron’s presidential delegation to Syria

France–Syria relations after the fall of Bashar al-Assad

Macron and Ahmed al-Sharaa at the Umayyad Mosque and Mount Qasioun

Islamic State bombings during Macron’s Damascus visit

French investment in Syrian reconstruction, energy, ports and transport

Aleppo’s security, political representation and slow post-war recovery

Kobani, SDF integration, PKK influence and Arab–Kurdish tensions

Ahmed al-Sharaa’s Islamist pragmatism and Syria’s dependence on his leadership

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Follow Wassim on X: https://x.com/SimNasr

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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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In this Conflicted Conversation, Thomas meets Laura Spinney, author of Proto: How One Language Went Global, the story of the Proto-Indo-European language and its descendants, which are spoken today by half of humanity.

Laura explains:

How, where, and among whom Proto-Indo-European emerged

How Indo-European split into English, Hindi, Persian, Russian, Greek, Latin-derived Romance languages, Celtic, Germanic, Baltic and Slavic tongues

How linguists reconstruct an unwritten prehistoric language through sound laws, comparative vocabulary and ancient texts

Why ancient DNA has transformed the debate over Indo-European origins by restoring migration to the centre of the story

Who the Yamnaya were, and how mobile pastoralists north of the Black Sea spread language through cattle, wagons, dairy and steppe mobility

How a small number of steppe migrants may have transformed Europe’s languages through disease, prestige, violence, intermarriage and social networks

Why Tocharian, Sanskrit and Persian reveal extraordinary Indo-European journeys from the Pontic-Caspian steppe to China, India and Iran

How ‘Aryan’ began as a real Indo-Iranian self-description before being distorted by racial nationalism and Nazi pseudoscience

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Find Laura on X: https://x.com/lfspinney

And on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/laurainparis.bsky.social

And on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/laura.spinney

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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