Arab Digest podcasts

Editor William Law welcomes Isobel Archer to the Arab Digest podcast. Isobel is the Senior Researcher, Labour & Migrant Worker Rights for the London-based Business & Human Rights Resource Centre. The centre has just released a report on the treatment of migrant workers in Qatar during and after the football World Cup that shows, with numerous abuses uncovered, the Qataris and FIFA still have serious questions to answer for despite their claims of significant improvements in advancing the rights of migrant labourers and service workers. Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.

As part of the Arab Digest Egypt week interrogating the 3 July 2013 Egypt coup that overthrew Mohamed Morsi, the country's only democratically elected president, Arab Digest editor William Law's guest is the Egyptian writer and analyst Maged Mandour. Their conversation begins with the revolution of 2011 and traces the circumstances that enabled the coup, follows the tightening vice of the Sisi dictatorship and his destruction of the economy and ends with Maged's thoughts on when and how a democracy could emerge in Egypt. Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.

An Emirati businessman who holds Turkish citizenship has disappeared from the Amman prison where he was being held by Jordanian authorities at the behest of the UAE. Arab Digest editor William Law is joined by Dania Akkad, a senior investigative editor with Middle East Eye to discuss how a warrant issued by the so-called Arab Interpol has trapped Khalaf al-Romaithi. Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.

Arab Digest editor William Law's guest this week is Jim Krane. An ex-journalist and an author of several books dealing with energy and the Gulf States, Jim is an energy research fellow at Rice University's Baker Institute in Houston, Texas. Their conversation today is all about Abu Dhabi and OPEC+. Will constraints imposed on the UAE by the cartel cause a rupture and the departure of the Emiratis or will they weigh up the options and bide their time? Will they go or will they stay? Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.

Arab Digest editor William Law's guest this week is the British-Sudanese student and activist Hadeal Abdelatti. While two power-hungry generals fight for control and devastate Sudan and its people, the courage and determination that saw the 2019 overthrow of the Omar Bashir dictatorship remains and is captured in the TikTok videos of Hadeal. Her voice is the voice of young Sudanese within the country and in the diaspora for whom the call for democracy will not be silenced. Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.

Francis Ghilès joins Arab Digest editor William Law in this week's podcast. Francis is a visiting fellow at King's College London and an expert on North Africa politics, energy and security. He argues that what has been called Tunisia's Jasmine Revolution has failed despite the overthrow of Ben Ali in 2011 because the structure of dictatorship has remained essentially unchanged thus enabling a new dictator, in the shape of Kais Saied, to emerge. Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.

Arab Digest editor William Law's guest this week is the New Lines Institute's Caroline Rose. Caroline has been carrying out ground-breaking investigative analysis of Captagon, the drug of choice in the Gulf and the wider Middle East. With the Arab League normalising relations with the Syrian regime and welcoming Bashar al-Assad back into the fold, the head of the family narco business has scored another coup but it is one unlikely to stop the flood of Captagon into the region. Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.

Middle East analyst Jon Hoffman joins Arab Digest editor William Law from Washington D.C. Their conversation is a look at how Saudi Arabia and the UAE have used religion to drive forward their domestic and foreign policy initiatives of silencing dissent at home while subverting democracy efforts in the wider Middle East and North Africa, all the while gaining plaudits from the West for buttressing so-called moderate Islam and encouraging interfaith dialogue. Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.

The Turkish writer and analyst Aslı Aydıntaşbaş joins Arab Digest editor William Law to talk about Türkiye's 14 May election. With a battered economy and a growing sense that President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's increasingly centralised and repressive rule is failing the country, his main rival Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu leads the polls. But as the region and the world watches, the outcome remains uncertain. Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.

It is a sweeping epic that travels through time and space to tell the interlinked and intergenerational stories of five powerful, determined and gutsy women. Their narratives are woven into and entwined with the history and the challenges of the Gulf state of Kuwait. Sign up NOW at ArabDigest.org for free to join the club and start receiving our daily newsletter & weekly podcasts.