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Produced by Finbar Anderson

Please be aware that this episode contains discussions of sexual violence.

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Produced by Finbar Anderson

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Further reading: They Photographed an Execution in Bosnia. Did They Influence the Killer? by Barbara Matejčić

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Far From the Land of Good News by Nada Bakri

Who Is Left To Cover Lebanon? by Zahra Hankir

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Further reading: Saudi Arabia’s Break With Interventionism by Sultan Alamer

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A Palestinian Citizen of Israel Reflects on Life in the Shadow of Genocide in Gaza – by Rida Abu Rass Confessions of a Syrian Barrel Bomber – by Kamal Shahin When a Dutch Drug Kingpin Needed a New Base, Sierra Leone Welcomed Him With Open Arms – by Oliver Dunn and Josef Skrdlik The South Asian Vote May Be Split for Zohran Mamdani in New York City – by Yashica Dutt

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Produced by Finbar Anderson

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Produced by Finbar Anderson Assistant Producer Henry Wilkins

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Further reading: The UK’s Fragmenting Politics by Jos Betts and Lydia Wilson

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Further reading: The Courage and Death of Anas al-Sharif by Kareem Shaheen

They explore how the concept of Central Europe — revived during the Cold War by the novelist Milan Kundera — still shapes the way nations like Poland, Hungary and Croatia see themselves today. And in the shadow of the Ukraine war, that identity is much more than purely symbolic.

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Further listening: AI Is Transforming Geopolitics — with Bruno Maçães and Faisal Al Yafai America’s Era of the Entrepreneur — with Erik Baker and Faisal Al Yafai

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Further reading: “The Humiliation Is the Point” by Alex Hobson

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Further listening: The American Experiment From Outside and Within — with Hari Kunzru and Faisal Al Yafai

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Further listening: Survival and Statehood in Ukraine — with Yaroslav Trofimov

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Produced by Finbar Anderson

Further reading:

The Backstory Behind the Fall of Aleppo by Hassan Hassan and Michael Weiss Assad Was Disengaging From Iran, but His Next Steps Are Unclear by Rasha Elass Syrians Ponder a Future After Aleppo by Kamal Shahin Dawn in Damascus by Kareem Shaheen Liberation in Syria Is a Victory Worth Embracing by Layla Maghribi With Assad in Moscow, Putin Scrambles To Save Face — and his Syrian Bases by Amie Ferris-Rotman Hope and Despair at Assad’s ‘Human Slaughterhouse’ by Aubin Eymard and Cian Ward

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Further reading | A New Theory: European Cathedrals Show Traces of Ancient Egypt

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Further reading: The Threat Trump Poses Is Real, but Democrats Must Learn Through Defeat

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Produced by Finbar Anderson Additional research by Santiago Ospina Celis

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Further reading: The Day After Hassan Nasrallah

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Produced by Patrick Hagan and Finbar Anderson

Further reading: Kamala’s Progressive Skeptics

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Further reading: Lost and Found in Guantanamo Bay

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New Lines’ Faisal Al Yafai speaks to Lebanese translator and writer Lina Mounzer to understand what the atmosphere in Lebanon is like under the threat of a new war, and political analyst Faysal Itani for his take on the geopolitical currents playing out on the Lebanese-Israeli border.

Further reading: It Felt Like Love by Lina Mounzer

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Produced by Finbar Anderson

Further reading: J.D. Vance and the Myth of White Exceptionalism

Further reading:

The Mass Psychology of Trumpism — Watch the accompanying video here The United Auto Workers Rejected Trump. Members Aren’t So Sure How the War in Gaza Is Shaping the 2024 Elections — And the Future of the Democratic Party A Deliberate Political Madness?

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Produced by Finbar Anderson

Further listening: The War on India’s Free Press — With Manisha Pande, Samar Halarnkar and Surbhi Gupta India’s Political Hinduism — With Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay and Surbhi Gupta

Further reading: Why the Indian Election Results Present Modi With a Defeat Within a Win The Recent Elections Demonstrate India’s Growing Democratic Deficit

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New Lines’ Faisal Al Yafai speaks to the Guardian’s Ruth Michaelson, Chloe Cornish of the Financial Times and independent journalist Tara Kangarlou to assess how the war has changed the political and economic landscape in Turkey, Egypt, Iran, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia.

Further listening: Living in a State of Hopelessness: On the Ground in Israel — With Lisa Goldman On the Ground in Gaza — With Arwa Damon In the Firing Line — With Joumana Haddad

Further reading: The Cost of Leaving Gaza How the War in Gaza Is Shaping the 2024 Elections — And the Future of the Democratic Party

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Pearson explains how her research challenged established thinking around extremism, and how she came to the understanding that misogyny and masculinity play a much bigger role in the radicalization process than has been previously thought.

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Lal joins New Lines’ Rasha Elass on The Lede to discuss her book “Vagabond Princess: The Great Adventures of Gulbadan,” which is based on Gulbadan’s own long-forgotten writings.

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“Israelis feel for the very first time that their army couldn’t protect them, it didn’t protect them. They had been living with a very strong sense of confidence that whatever happened, they were physically secure because they had such a well-trained army and a highly efficient intelligence system. And all of that broke down on Oct. 7.”

Goldman shares the insights she gained from the ground, including how local media helps to drive support for Israel’s war in Gaza, personal tensions with her old friends brought about by the conflict and what it was like when Iran bombarded Tel Aviv with over 300 drones and missiles while she was there.

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Arwa Damon has been in plenty of war zones, but going into Gaza was unlike anything she’s yet experienced.

The veteran CNN correspondent joins New Lines’ Faisal Al Yafai on The Lede for a conversation about her recent humanitarian mission into the Palestinian territory. They discuss the moving and heartbreaking human interactions Damon had with Palestinians in Gaza, the Israeli strike on the World Central Kitchen convoy that killed seven aid workers just days before Damon’s trip, and the lasting impact of journalists not being allowed into Gaza to cover the conflict.

Damon also picks up on the topic she discussed in her last appearance on The Lede. Back in November, she spoke with Al Yafai about how trauma impacts decision-making in situations like the Israel-Hamas conflict. That episode, titled “The Emotional Fog Of War,” has since been nominated for multiple awards.

Further listening: The Emotional Fog Of War — With Arwa Damon

Further reading: Gaza in a Million Pieces

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Montgomery tells Wilson how poetry is a portal to the pre- and early Islamic worlds, and how, after struggling with one set of translations for over 20 years, inspiration came from an unlikely source: YouTube.

Further reading: The Seven Hanging Odes of Mecca

Produced by Finbar Anderson and Joshua Martin

For more information go to newlinesmag.com/podcast

“If you just take a moment to look at the Arab Spring and the countries in which the largest protests occurred, and the regimes against which millions so courageously rose up … they were precisely the regimes that were the most direct legacies of Nasser’s time in power,” Rowell, New Lines’ online editor and author of “We Are Your Soldiers: How Gamal Abdel Nasser Remade the Arab World,” tells Joshua Martin.

Rowell and Martin consider Nasser’s enduring impact up to the present day, including Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza.

Further reading: Hoping to Channel Nasser, Egypt’s Sisi Provokes a Backlash

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For more information go to newlinesmag.com/podcast

Gupta and Liwewe discuss the various key issues in the upcoming elections, such as the rise of Hindu nationalism and controversies such as improper donations to major parties, as well as the arrest of key opposition figure Arvind Kejriwal.

Further listening: India’s Political Hinduism — with Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay The War on India’s Free Press — with Manisha Pande and Samar Halarnkar

Further reading: The Ambani Gala Expands the Limits of the Big Fat Indian Wedding

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For more information go to newlinesmag.com/podcast

The author and activist explains how growing up during the Lebanese Civil War fundamentally shaped her character, encouraging her to try to change the world around her, even if that might just be in her immediate circle.

Haddad and Al Yafai discuss why she chooses to remain in Lebanon despite physical threats to her safety and a tempestuous political climate, most recently manifested in the war in Gaza that has turned southern Lebanon into a warzone. They also discuss some of the ideas that have put Haddad in the firing line in Lebanon, such as her insistence that wearing of the veil or burqa should be banned.

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For more information go to newlinesmag.com/podcast

“The entire public sphere becomes like a collective body that is orchestrating around this war effort. I remember in later wars, or operations in Gaza, when I went out to demonstrate, people were shocked that I’m demonstrating in a time of war, because when war is happening everyone needs to be on the same front and just support the troops,” she tells New Lines’ Lisa Goldman.

In her book “Sovereign Intimacy: Private Media and the Traces of Colonial Violence,” Melamed charts the history of what she calls Israeli amnesia back to the 1982 war with Lebanon. She considers how both the country’s media and its anti-war movement present a “partial image of violence,” with profound implications for Israeli society and for those on the other side of the wars it prosecutes, whether in Lebanon or Gaza.

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For more information go to newlinesmag.com/podcast

For more information go to newlinesmag.com/podcast

Further listening: The Last Days of the Ottomans — With Eugene Rogan Imperial Folly After the Ottomans — With James Barr The Rise of the House of Osman — With Marc David Baer

For more information go to newlinesmag.com/podcast

The unprecedented move served as a wake-up call to Israel’s Western allies, who might not have predicted the drive of a seemingly less powerful nation to take such an action on the world stage.

“The U.S. is not used to having international court judicial proceedings used either against it or against any of its allies,” Stephen Chan, author and professor of world politics at SOAS, University of London tells New Lines’ Kwangu Liwewe. “The whole idea of international tribunals, international courts, international commissions seems very alien to the American sense of how international relations should work. So, in other words, the only actors should be states, preferably powerful states.”

Following South Africa’s case at the ICJ, U.S. lawmakers John James and Jared Moskowitz introduced a bill on Feb. 6 that seeks to reevaluate the bilateral relationship between the U.S and South Africa. The bill alleges that South Africa has forged alliances with malign actors such as Hamas and Russia and specifically accuses South Africa of pursuing a politically motivated lawsuit against Israel.

The legislation stipulates that within 30 days of its enactment, provided it is approved by both the House and Senate, the president must submit to Congress and publicly disclose “an unclassified assessment clearly stating whether South Africa has undertaken actions that undermine the national security or foreign policy interests of the United States.”

The South African government has dismissed the bill stating that it has no future. 

South Africa’s response to the Russia-Ukraine conflict has also made some doubt its assertion of being nonaligned. Western diplomats and local experts point to a series of actions that they say contradict this claim and raise questions about South Africa’s foreign policy and its national interests.

These actions include abstaining from U.N. resolutions condemning Russia, engaging in a joint military exercise with the Russian navy, publicly criticizing the U.S. and allegedly aiding a sanctioned Russian cargo ship.

“It is a confused foreign policy,” Phumlani Majozi, a South African author and political analyst says. “We are taking a direction that is breaking our relations with the West.”

Hankir and Salem consider their personal experiences and how the product offered them each a way to connect with their cultural heritage while growing up in the diaspora. “It really was a part of my journey of coming of age and self-acceptance,” says Hankir. “When you are growing up in a predominantly white society, and you’re sort of trying to fit in, just growing up by itself is difficult. … There’s this fine line between wanting to assimilate but also wanting to express yourself and your heritage.”

Hankir recalls that while researching her book she considered an aspect of the Orientalism discourse to which she had not previously given much thought. The bust of the ancient Egyptian Queen Nefertiti, she says, exposes the double standards that Western beauty ideals impose on women from the Global South. “Simultaneously the attraction is because she’s exotic-looking, but also they’re almost repulsed by the idea that they would be attracted to something exotic.”

“What I was trying to do with this chapter on Nefertiti was to understand what her place was in Western society, to situate her within the growth trajectory of eyeliner,” Hankir adds. “To learn about the history of how she was perceived I had to look at primarily Western sources and the discourse around her was so Orientalist.”

Hankir highlights some of the modern contradictions around the wearing of eyeliner, such as the case of Iran, where women’s bodies are policed despite the historically religious practice of wearing eyeliner. “Eyeliner is known in its earliest iterations to have been worn by the Prophet Muhammad. So that would make it permissible for Muslim communities to wear eyeliner,” she points out.

One of the more surprising elements of her research, Hankir notes, was how extensively eyeliner is used across different cultures. “This item of makeup has been used historically across these cultures in different ways,” she says. “At the same time, they will have commonalities and similarities. … They’re using eyeliner for similar purposes, and I think the interesting thing is obviously that the eye is so central to our being.”

“There’s a complete and near total capture of mainstream voices, especially the loudest voices, the most prominent voices,” says Manisha Pande, managing editor at Indian media watchdog Newslaundry and host of TV Newsance, a weekly show that looks at TV news in India. “It is not an exaggeration to say that, when you turn on the television today, it’s very close to what you see in non-democracies like Russia,” she tells New Lines’ Surbhi Gupta.

“In more than 30, I think 34 years now that I’ve been a journalist, I have never felt as acutely a sense of threat as I do today,” says Samar Halarnkar, the founder of the independent Indian news website Article 14.

Pande and Halarnkar discuss the ever-present threat of legal action against journalists and news organizations, often on flimsy grounds. 

“It doesn’t really matter what the charges are,” says Halarnkar. “In India, the judicial process is the punishment.”

Pande warns of a trend toward a hyperpartisan media environment in which the dominant, pro-government channels frequently join the government in attacks on the media and echo populist lines denigrating minority groups. 

“I think in 2016 there was a marked shift where anchors started asking for the jailing of activists or voices or dissenters that weren’t in line with the current government,” she says.

“What’s happening to the media is an indication of the de-democratic realization,” adds Halarnkar. “Many people are self-radicalized, believing every bit of this fake news,” he says. “That turns them against their neighbors and friends.”

The two journalists discuss the economic incentives behind pushing a pro-government line and the financial difficulties that might be suffered by trying to remain independent. 

“If you’re a digital news organization, you want investors coming in,” says Pande. “Today, you’re in that space where even if people believe in you and support you … they may not necessarily want to be seen around you because you’re seen as anti-government.”

Pande still marvels at the fact that Prime Minister Narendra Modhi still refuses to speak directly to journalists at press conferences. 

“It’s really pathetic that the largest democracy in the world has accepted this,” she says.

In 2018, international pressure forced the Kiir-led government to declare a cease-fire and endorse a power-sharing deal among rival political factions.

The peace plan, which has largely been ignored by the government and the political elite, subsequently led to ethnic and communal violence in the country.

“The government has been using violence in the peripheries of the country to jockey for power and compete among themselves. So the war is formally over but the violence has continued,” Joshua Craze, a New York-based researcher on South Sudan, tells New Lines’ Kwangu Liwewe. “Every time Juba sends someone seemingly to stop the conflict or negotiate the conflict, they are always partisan.”

But the ongoing violence in most parts of the country does not fit the traditional narrative of rebels vs. the state, as it is largely driven by intercommunal conflicts among ethnic groups. This stems from the shifting dynamics within the South Sudanese state, which no longer revovles solely on competition between Kiir and Machar.

In his recent story, New Lines contributor James Barnett explored how South Sudan remains in a state of uncertainty even though the war ended thirteen years ago. 

“The problem has been aggravated . The violence has morphed into what may appear to be local level conflict but very much ties back to the national level politics,” Barnett explained to Liwewe.

In the past two months, a fresh wave of violence has claimed the lives of 136 people. This time it’s in the disputed Abyei region along the border of Sudan and South Sudan. Fighting broke out between the Twic Dinka and Ngok Dinka communities, intensifying tensions in the region. 

“It serves Salva Kiir … not to resolve the Abyei fight because that allows him to keep his relationship with Sudan, and it also means a number of Ngok Dinka who are powerful don’t take up a central place in politics,” Craze said.

When Russia invaded Ukraine two years ago, that war began to dominate the news cycle, displacing coverage of Myanmar, Sudan and Syria. But, as the months wore on, the Ukraine war, too, slipped from our screens. Now the war in Gaza has captured global attention, but for how long? 

Why is it that while the human suffering never gets less tragic, we seem to have only a finite amount of empathy for the victims of conflict? And what is the effect on our creeping ambivalence?

For Bel Trew, chief international correspondent at The Independent, this decline in interest has become something she learns to anticipate at the start of every war she covers. “You know, if you’ve covered conflict before, that the world’s focus is fickle,” she tells New Lines’ Faisal Al Yafai. Whether in Gaza, Ukraine, Myanmar or Syria, “There will be a point where those cameras shift, the spotlight shifts. … As a journalist who becomes obviously invested and cares and talks to people, and makes friendships with people when you’re on a front line, you almost feel like it is a betrayal.”

For Trew, the importance of continuing to cover these conflicts lies in showing the full effect of war, despite knowing her audience might be mostly interested in how the conflict might affect them. “The most important thing that we can do is show people just how devastating war is, so that it’s not just turned into what’s essentially a game of armies and the playground of the battlefield. But people want to know how this is going to impact them.”

Nabih Bulos, Middle East bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times, wants his audience to understand that they often have a degree of complicity in a faraway conflict and what that actually means. “I want people to really understand what it means when a politician or a soldier says the phrase surgical strike. I want them to understand what it means when they’re going into a country or establishing a no-fly zone,” he says.

The veteran correspondents note that some conflicts are easier to report on than others, and many change as the conflict progresses. Bulos remembers the battle against the Islamic State group as offering a great deal of freedom for reporters, who could embed with different units in the Iraqi army freely. 

But, as Trew notes, that’s not always the case. 

“Another issue with forever wars is that access becomes quite difficult,” she says. “You end up telling the same story again and again.” 

Furthermore, she notes that as conflicts progress and subsequent events can incur ever higher casualty figures, statistics can become meaningless. “We had the clearing of Rabaa,” she says, remembering the 2013 massacre of protesters by Egyptian police, in which more than 1,000 were estimated killed. “A few weeks later, there were 66 people killed in a protest, which would normally be a very high number of unarmed protesters to be killed,” Trew recalls. “Because we’d already had 1,000 [casualties], people got desensitized.”

As numbers start to lose their meaning, you have to focus on human stories, Bulos suggests. “The enormity of those figures means nothing to people, and the only way to bring it home to people is to focus on the smaller stories,” he says.

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“Very often you start by what we call ‘Track Two,’” Hazan, author of the recently published book “Negotiating with the Devil: Inside the World of Armed Conflict Mediation,” tells New Lines’ Lydia Wilson. “You try to approach different people that are ready to talk to the other side. It’s a period of testing the different red lines to better understand the dynamics of each side.”

Hazan explains that much of the work of the conflict mediation happens away from the negotiating table. 

“Very often it could be dangerous to go too fast and to want to have both sides together. They need to be ready to do that; they need to have elaborated their red lines; they need to have elaborated their strategy. So you spend a lot of time working separately with each group.”

Hazan and Wilson discuss the underlying tension between choosing to pursue peace on the one hand or justice on the other. Hazan recalls meeting a Western ambassador. “He said, ‘It’s so bizarre — I just had a whiskey with Milosevic and some people here want to indict him. How does it work? Do we want to make peace or do we want this man behind bars?’”

Negotiation usually involves a compromise with powerful people who might have committed horrendous acts. 

“Sometimes the imperative is to get the war to stop, and people stop getting killed and justice will come later. But you will try at the same time to introduce some elements of justice even during the peace process,” Hazan says. “Human rights documentations and other things could be important because also it gives hope to the victims, to the society at large. They can imagine a process of reconstruction.”

Hazan and Wilson debate the nature of the International Court of Justice’s recent findings in the case of South Africa’s case against Israel for a potential breach of the Genocide Convention. But Hazan notes the case’s effect on the multiple tracks of negotiation currently taking place in the context of the Gaza conflict.

Wilson challenges Hazan on his contention that it is always necessary to take the immediate option to save lives, as she argues that in the case of Syria such a choice might have led to a greater death toll in the conflict in that country. Hazan, however, notes the example of the 1995 massacre in Srebrenica of Bosniak Muslims, which he argues could have been averted. 

“When you are confronted with excruciating dilemmas, you are trying to identify the lesser evil,” Hazan says. “It’s not a perfect solution. It’s not even a good solution, but it’s possibly a lesser evil.”

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But as these spaces have grown, so have parallel, counter-feminist ones promoting toxic masculinity.

The “manosphere,” an online space promoting toxic masculinity, misogyny and anti-feminism, is rapidly growing in Africa, particularly in Kenya and South Africa, where gender-based violence is already rife.

In Kenya, the manosphere has been associated with disturbing and toxic content denigrating women and promoting violence against them. In January, the country witnessed two gruesome cold-blooded murders of women, crimes that have both sparked outrage and fueled a disturbing trend of victim-blaming among internet users.

“There was a backlash coming from men who generally held the views that women should do more to secure their own safety, that women should not have been in those situations,” Caroline Kimeu, the Guardian’s East Africa global development correspondent tells New Lines’ Kwangu Liwewe. 

Similarly, in South Africa, a country that boasts of one of Africa’s most progressive laws against hate speech, online movements have been linked to violent and sexualized hate speech targeting women.

“They know where to push the boundaries, they know where they are protected and they know how to protect themselves and get around the law,” Rosie Motene, a South African author and feminist tells New Lines.

“About 3,000 people died across the country in the aftermath of the demolition of the Babri Masjid,” Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay, author of upcoming book “The Demolition, the Verdict and the Temple,” tells New Lines’ Surbhi Gupta. “So you can well imagine that it led to a bad bout of communal violence, which went on for a fairly long period of time.”

The controversy didn’t end there. After decades of legal battles, the Supreme Court permitted a Hindu house of worship to be built on the site, and on Jan. 22, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi presided over the idol consecration ceremony at the opening of the Ram Temple.

“All lines between religion and politics got blurred,” says Mukhopadhyay. “This entire ceremony was facilitated by the Indian state.” 

Modi and the BJP are poised to win a third term in the coming spring’s general election, which Mukhopadhyay attributes to his embrace of sectarian, far-right politics. Though this in itself is nothing new — hostility toward minority religions has always been a big part of the Modi ‘brand’ — Mukhopadhyay says the opening of the temple marks a concerning intensification of the religious aspects of the prime minister’s politics. For a nation founded as a secular democracy, it is a major departure from India’s traditional norms. 

“It's a question of myth making,” Mukhopadhyay says. “We’re seeing the emergence of political Hinduism, with Mr. Modi being the chief priest.”

Produced by Finbar Anderson and Joshua Martin

“You realize how little people know about the world around them,” Mortimer tells New Lines magazine’s Lydia Wilson. “They tend to make judgments based on the world as it is today.”

But that tells you only half the story. “If you've got the perspective of a thousand years or more, you realize that actually we don't get a very good picture of humanity by just looking at ourselves as we are today. You get a much fuller picture by looking at the past.”

That would be a lot easier if we didn’t tend to think that we know that picture already. 

“We already have set preconceptions on the Middle Ages,” he says. “Okay, let's scrub everything we know.”

In other words, forget everything that comes to mind when you hear the word medieval. Forget the associations with ignorance, violence and superstition. You could even, Mortimer suggests, forget the word itself. 

“The labels we put on these things don't matter. These are all modern constructs,” he points out. “The more we overlay the past with these constructs, we're actually putting barriers to our understanding — and looking at the Middle Ages shows you how we could live in very different circumstances and yet thrive and survive.”

Looking at it that way recontextualizes the usual stereotype of medieval people as violent and warlike. Our imaginary version of the period is dominated by glorified warrior figures like knights, vikings and conquering queens. Mortimer points out that this glorification was not unreasonable in a time without a strong central authority or democratic institutions to manage conflict. “They can't avoid war. It's a feature of everyday life. War is normal, and therefore to be good at war is a good thing, and by implication, great warriors are great people.”

It was over the course of the Middle Ages that that began to change. But, Mortimer warns, it would be a mistake to view this as a matter of straightforward progress. The long view of history shows that the basic coercive logic of the Medieval world is quite alive in our own societies.

“If you only count enacted violence, yes, we've got much more peaceful,” he says. “But what we've done is taken the real violence and created these threats, which are so powerful that we use them less and less — the ultimate being, of course, nuclear weapons.”

“So I think in the big scheme of things, since the Middle Ages, we have created a lot more potential violence and just locked it up for future generations to unleash.”

Produced by Joshua Martin

The case, which accuses Israel of committing genocide and war crimes in Gaza, has reignited discussions about South Africa’s post-apartheid history and its evolving position in the global political landscape.

Despite being celebrated for overcoming racism, South Africa has struggled with internal challenges, including sporadic and sometimes deadly violence targeting Black foreign nationals.

For more than three decades, foreign Black Africans have borne the brunt of widespread and recurring xenophobic attacks, with many having their businesses looted, while others have violently lost their lives.

The attacks stem from the belief that foreigners are to blame for South Africa’s social and economic woes. Many locals blame immigrants for taking their jobs and driving the unemployment level up.

“When we look at the statistics, when we look at the murder rate, the crime rate, we see that ever since Black foreigners were allowed to come to South Africa from independence, when we got freedom in South Africa, the crime rate has gone down by over 300%,” Rutendo Matinyarare tells New Lines’ Kwangu Liwewe.

Another aspect of the rise in xenophobia is belief in South Africa’s exceptionalism. This sense of exceptionalism has led many to see themselves as superior to the rest of the continent, which has led to widespread anti-immigrant sentiments and attacks.

“The thinking that was entrenched during apartheid was that South Africa is exceptional, that we are an exception and not like other African countries, as if we are not part of Africa,” Ntsikelelo Breakfast tells New lines.

“There is this great dichotomy at the heart of the French Republic that stems from its very constitution,” she tells New Lines magazine’s Faisal Al Yafai. “France is built on impossible idealism, born out of revolutions, and this is why myths are so important for holding it together.”

Of course, there’s nothing unique about having a national mythology. All nations do, to some extent. But France stands out for its persistent consecration of those ideals in public life— “a glorious republic, built on high ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity for all,” as Ramdani puts it — even as those promises seem increasingly thin and misguided to many of its people. 

“That’s why the country is in such a crisis, because millions of French citizens are far more pragmatic than that,” she explains. “There's a massive gulf between France, the myth, and France, reality. And they are very different worlds indeed.”

Though Ramdani’s critique is broad, drawing on a wide range of political, historical and cultural factors — an all-powerful president, paramilitary policing, postcolonial anxiety and anti-immigrant xenophobia all among them — that gulf, she believes, may lie at the heart of all of them. Yet the country’s elite still cling to the myth, even as increasing numbers of French citizens conclude that the system is no longer working for them.

“That's really what my book is about. It's about state institutions that are outdated. It's about the Paris establishment that is looking after its own interests,” she says. “As former president Charles de Gaulle himself said, France is a perpetual illusion and it's very hard to reform.”

Produced by Joshua Martin

“The volume of art and creative responses that we've seen to this uprising is really unprecedented,”says Nahid Siamdoust, author of “Soundtrack of the Revolution: The Politics of Music in Iran” and host of the podcast “Woman, Life, Freedom.” “Even in comparison to 1979, I think this is unprecedented.”

“In a sense, the ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ revolution is a revolution that's formed by culture, by art, by music, by poetry,” Malu Halasa, literary editor of The Markaz Review, tells New Lines magazine’s Danny Postel. It’s that art that is the subject of her new book, an edited anthology titled “Woman, Life, Freedom: Voices and Art from the Women's Protests in Iran,” which was released this month.

Unlike previous, more reformist protest movements in Iran, the Mahsa Amini protests became genuinely revolutionary. That revolutionary feeling was channeled into a great range of art forms, but especially music and hip-hop in particular. “Hip-hop in the West has lost its power. We haven't really had conscious rap for quite a long time,” Halasa says. But in Iran, she adds, “even before the ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ movement, hip-hop was very powerful. It was critical of the status quo. It wasn't just party music.” 

Artists can pay a high price for speaking out against the regime. For his blistering lyrics in support of the movement, a 32-year-old rapper from Esfahan named Toomaj Salehi was arrested and eventually sentenced to six years in prison after being held in solitary confinement for 252 days. He is one of many artists who have become figureheads of the wider movement, his songs played at protests while demonstrators wield placards with his name and face. 

It’s no accident that musicians have become such integral and iconic parts of the movement, Siamdoust says. “Music is still strictly regulated. Dance is certainly not permitted on the streets,” she explains, “I think it is because of the imposition of these rules that opposition necessarily takes this form.”

Produced by Joshua Martin. This episode originally aired September 22, 2023.

Many elderly Kenyans were mistreated, raped and tortured by British colonial forces during the Mau Mau uprising (1951-1960). Kikuyu tribe members were held in detention camps that have been called “Britain’s gulag,” where they faced systematic torture and severe sexual assault. 

However, during his recent visit Charles did not offer an apology. Such a step would take his country into “difficult legal territory,” said Neil Wigan, the British High Commissioner to Kenya, during the state visit. 

“An apology shows that you have acknowledged and accepted that something very wrong was done,” Kenyan author and producer Salim Amin tells New Lines. “In terms of the country moving forward, for the Mau Mau fighters still alive, for them being apologized to would vindicate some of the things that happened to them.”

Charles’ acknowledgement follows a succession of European leaders who have recently spoken about their nations’ historical responsibilities for past abuses in their former colonies.

Denmark, France and the European Parliament have officially recognized past wrongs. Germany recently apologized to Tanzania two years after they also apologized for a genocide against the Herero and Nama tribes in Namibia.

There is undoubtedly a growing awareness of past abuses by the former colonial powers prompting them to come to terms with the past. Whether China and Russia’s growing influence on the continent is the driving factor, or societal pressures and demands for justice and reconciliation, still needs to be determined.

“It's certainly not pure realpolitik behavior and it’s certainly not pure altruism either, and it isn’t some sort of deeply felt effort to apologize for past atrocities either,” Brooks Spector, a former U.S. diplomat in Africa and East Asia, tells New Lines. 

Africa Insights is hosted by Kwangu Liwewe and produced by Patrick Hagan.

By the evening, it had become clear that her parents were among the hostages kidnapped by Hamas. Her mother, Yochaved Lifschitz, was freed 16 days after the attacks, and images of her handshake with her former captor flashed around the world. Her father, Oded, remains in Hamas captivity. “So we are continuing to speak to whoever would listen in government and in media and try to advocate for their return.”

With over 200 hostages still in captivity in Gaza, it’s a nightmare she is far from alone in experiencing. “There's not one family who has not been affected,” she says. And yet many of those affected say that the Israeli government has all but abandoned them.

“The truth is that not only has the government not been forthcoming with them, but it's not clear what the government is doing, if anything, to get these hostages back,” says Noga Tarnopolsky, an Israeli journalist based in Jerusalem. “And so these families feel forsaken and abandoned.”

In the face of such apparent official indifference to their plight, some of the families have advocated for a bold proposal: everyone for everyone. In other words, release all of the Palestinians in Israeli detention — a number that has grown dramatically since the war began — in exchange for the hostages. “I am for everything that works,” Lifschitz says.

Tarnopolsky is more skeptical. “The offer has never been made in any way by Hamas,” she says. “I think that if this were a real offer, I think that the clamor for it would be so intense that the government would at least have to consider it.”

But such a prisoner swap remains the only real hope in the eyes of many of the families, who continue to push for it in the face of apparent government indifference. It may also be the only hope for some Palestinian detainees, many of whom are held without charge — and, according to civil rights groups, face serious human rights abuses in prison. 

Since Oct. 7, Muzna Shihabi, a former adviser to the PLO negotiation team says, “according to Palestinian officials, the number has doubled.” Many, she says, report that their treatment has become even more severe over the past month.

But as long as Israel and Hamas remain as unwilling to negotiate as they currently seem to be, their plight — like those of the Israeli, Thai and other nationals held in Gaza — is unlikely to end anytime soon.

Produced by Joshua Martin. This episode originally aired November 10, 2023.

This month, U.S. lawmakers, including those who have heard hours of additional testimony behind closed doors from Grusch and other former and active duty military and intelligence professionals, passed a bill that, for the first time, mandates the declassification and release of UAP records held by government agencies.

 The bipartisan bill was co-sponsored by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Shumer and Sen. Mike Rounds, a Republican, and was passed in the Senate without resistance. But when it landed in the House, several Republican lawmakers demanded the removal of two key provisions.

In this episode, renowned civil rights lawyer Daniel Sheehan, who has been on the forefront of pushing for this legislation, joins Rasha Elass to talk about how we got here, why important provisions in the bill were removed and what we can expect moving forward, as lawmakers continue to push the government to disclose what it allegedly knows about nonhuman technology.

Produced by Rasha Elass and Patrick Hagan

“It kind of came into my head years ago, really, when I went back to Afghanistan in 2019,” journalist Lynzy Billing tells New Lines magazine’s Amie Ferris-Rotman. Large numbers of American service personnel had been diagnosed with health problems caused by the improper disposal of toxic waste on military bases. Nobody seemed to be asking an obvious question: What about the local people?

“You could visibly see the pollutants and the waste that these bases were producing,” Billing explains. “You could see all of this waste coming out in trucks every day. You could see the smoke from the burn pits.”

Billing used freedom of information requests to find out more about the kinds of contaminants that had come from the bases. At the same time, she began to visit local people who had lived near the bases during the American occupation. “I started to see the same health problems that you see U.S. service members coming down with, after they've returned from deployment,” she says. “You would have whole families that have the same health problems — kidney problems, heart problems, gastrointestinal problems, skin ailments.”

Since the Americans left, however, any real accountability seems a distant prospect. “All of this is happening because it was just allowed to happen, right?” Billing says. “There really is nothing that the U.S. has to do to clean it up. So for me, it was very clear from the very beginning that we needed to tell these stories.”

On another continent, Nigerian journalist ‘Kunle Adebajo heads the investigations desk at HumAngle. “I started reporting on the Boko Haram crisis in 2020,” he tells New Lines magazine’s Erin Clare Brown. “And so I've done lots of stories in the past about how people have been victimized by this crisis. But when I started reporting about missing people, I realized that it was a different ballgame entirely.”

Nigeria’s war against Boko Haram, an insurgent group affiliated with Islamic State, left tens of thousands of people missing. State forces treated the local civilian populations brutally, with mass arrests and extrajudicial killings rife. But these abuses went mostly unrecorded. “People could not confirm the status and whereabouts of people who were arrested,” Adebajo says. “And that means even if your family member is dead, there's no way for you to know for certain.”

In collaboration with New Lines, Adebajo and his team set out to investigate. Combining local reports with satellite data, they were able to uncover a number of mass graves left by the Nigerian army. The army didn’t respond directly to their request for comment, he says, but just weeks afterward, some of the families began to get phone calls from their missing loved ones. They’d been held in detention for years without contact with the outside world, but because of the increased scrutiny from the investigation, the government was finally allowing them to contact their relatives.

“Hundreds of people had received phone calls,” Adebajo says. “The estimate at the time was about 200. And the calls kept coming in.”

Produced by Erin Clare Brown and Joshua Martin

“I grew up in a time where history in a way was taught primarily in the aftermath of the Second World War,” Lebanese sculptor Rayanne Tabet tells New Lines magazine’s Rasha Elass. “But I became convinced that our contemporary condition is really led by these moments in the 19th century, where language around the creation of nations, language around cultural property, language around history, really developed.”

Such big ideas are the inspiration for Tabet’s art, and his 2020 ‘Arabesque’ exhibition, shown all around the world, is no different. The term “Arabesque,” he explains, “comes from the Italian called Arabesco, which means ‘in the Arab style” but also extended to describe things that were foreign. So a shape that one could not understand or a movement that went beyond the standard form or even a sound that sounded maybe different.”

The expedition features fragments from 19th-century Orientalist manuscripts, cut out from their original contexts and rearranged into something new — “to deconstruct it and in a way to appropriate it, right?” Tabet says. “Confronting this past, not by negating it or destroying it, but by using the very tools it developed to figure out a way to reimagine it.”

It’s a recurring theme in Tabet’s art, which explores the nooks and crannies where history, politics, architecture and aesthetics intersect. “I think that within the tools that we have at our disposal or can help us challenge the very system that has created these tools,” he says.

For instance, the aesthetics of modernity — “clean, white, without ornament, without any decoration,” as he puts it. That style, he says, “came hand in hand with political doctrines that introduced this idea that modernity means the erasure of our own indigenous styles.”

“That has always been at the center of my work,” he reflects. “Trying to come to terms with the beauty, the elegance, but also the tragedy and the violence at the center of the creative process.”

Produced Joshua Martin

Historically, South Africa’s ruling African National Congress (ANC) has been a longtime supporter of the Palestinian cause, often likening it to the apartheid era, which was a system of institutionalized racial segregation and discrimination against the black majority and other nonwhite ethnic groups in South Africa.

The Israel-Palestine conflict has further split an already divided country still grappling with racial and ideological divisions.

“We can’t just look at Palestine and Israel without an appreciation of the South African context. So, when Jewish members of the synagogues which are largely if not exclusively white filter their hegemonic presence of a Zionist state in Israel, they filter this through their white consciousness,” the Rev. Michael Weeder, dean at St. George's Cathedral in Cape Town, tells New Lines’ Kwangu Liwewe.

The Jewish community in South Africa, which to a large extent supported the anti-apartheid movement, is divided over the conflict, with some reflecting on what the struggle in South Africa was able to achieve for minority groups.

“The community is extremely split. There probably is some understanding in the broader Jewish community that South Africa was able to address the issue of African majority and cede power and become a democracy,” says Jonathan Shapiro, a South African political cartoonist.

On the political front, the ANC-led government’s stance has been criticized for its tepid response to the Oct. 7 attacks. Ten days after the attack, South Africa’s Foreign Minister Naledi Pandor held a call with Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, which ignited fury among supporters of Israel within the country.

“From the ANC government there’s been sort of a fairly lukewarm condemnation of Hamas,” Shapiro says. The biggest difficulty amongst progressive and more radical Jews is how to approach what Hamas did on Oct. 7. There are Jews who won’t sign certain petitions, who won’t take a position as strongly opposed to what Israel is doing because they feel that there's too little condemnation.”

“Given the context of what was happening to Palestinians at the time, it felt really cruel that there couldn't even be, on some level, something to celebrate,” British-Palestinian author Salma Dabbagh tells New Lines magazine’s Lydia Wilson. “But to say one is shocked almost feels naive because there's a history here.”

Dabbagh cites the example of Caryl Churchill, a playwright who had been due to receive the lifetime achievement award at the 2022 European Drama awards in Stuttgart. Shortly after the announcement, the award was rescinded on the basis of her support for the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel. Since the attacks, Palestinians and others with Middle Eastern backgrounds have been treated with suspicion across the world, but that demonization has been particularly pronounced in Germany. Katharine Halls, a British Arabic-English translator who represents a number of Germany- and Berlin-based authors, says Shibli is far from the only author to feel the chilling effects.

“Book launches, conferences, prize-giving ceremonies — they're seeing them canceled,” she says. “Meanwhile, there is a very, very real threat of far-right activism and indeed violence, which seems to be going unchecked.”

Halls had been invited by Litprom to host a panel on Arabic literature at the Frankfurt Fair but dropped out after learning of their decision to cancel Shibli’s ceremony. Publisher Judith Gurewich had also been asked to speak, but though she too was appalled by the decision, she says the decision to drop out never crossed her mind. 

“I felt that it was very important to somehow take a stand, as a Jewish publisher in Germany,” she says.  “You have to be a little bit thoughtful about what you're doing, when you don't even acknowledge your own history and what you've done with this history.”

“Fear is one of the biggest drivers that allows the military machine and the politicians behind it to justify what their military machine is doing,” she says. 

But emotions aren’t only running high within Israel and Palestine. The Hamas attacks and subsequent invasion of Gaza have divided global opinion like no other conflict in recent memory. With both parties reliant on international political support, the battle for hearts and minds will be one of the most decisive fronts in the war. “This is in so many ways not just a physical war,” says Damon. “This is a war of disinformation, misinformation, manipulation, the scale of which has surpassed post-9/11, and I never thought I would see that.”

In previous conflicts where disinformation has played such a major role, the finger usually points straight to social media. But for all the antisemitism, Islamophobia and genocidal rhetoric metastasizing online, Damon adds that the picture this time around is more nuanced. “Social media is allowing a Western audience to see and feel the Palestinian narrative in ways that are not controlled by the Western media. Before social media, the press was really the only window into the Palestinian narrative that a Western audience had.”

Rather than blaming TikTok or X (formerly Twitter), Damon suggests that the press might want to start by looking inwards. “The Western media doesn’t question what Western officials say strongly enough,” she says. “And I think that really makes it that much more painful, especially for the Palestinian population. They know that their death is being broadcast. And that, in theory, it could be stopped.”

But even amid the doubt created by the unprecedented barrage of distortion coming from every angle, Damon still thinks that journalists need not keep fumbling around in the dark. 

“You bring it back to something undeniable,” she says. “You boil it down to what's in front of you. And that is what you then focus the story on. Because we also need to be fully cognizant — we are getting played by every single side at all times.”

Produced by Joshua Martin

But for the people of Darfur, a predominantly Black African region in Sudan’s arid west, the catastrophe has been particularly pronounced. Under Dagalo and Burhan’s predecessor, Omar al-Bashir, Arab supremacist Janjaweed militias terrorized the area for years, torturing and murdering countless civilians in a genocidal campaign aimed at wiping out the non-Arab population. In the intervening years, Dagalo turned those militias into the RSF, his own private paramilitary army — and since the outbreak of war in 2022, they have once more been unleashed upon Darfur to finish what they started.

“This time around is even worse than 20 years ago,” Niemat Ahmadi, founder and president of the Darfur Women Action Group, tells New Lines magazine’s Kwangu Liwewe.  “Now they have grown into more sophisticated militia, with training, equipment and international enablers supplying them with weapons and money.”

They are a specter that has loomed over the region for decades. Though the international community did eventually declare the Janjaweed campaign a genocide, and al-Bashir was indicted by the International Criminal Court, the RSF only grew in influence while al-Bashir was never handed over for trial. “People who have been displaced 20 years ago have never been able to go home because their attackers have yet to be held accountable,” Ahmadi says.  

Even today, the army has done little to protect people, she adds. Earlier this year, the RSF carried out the worst massacre of the war in front of them, murdering and torturing hundreds of civilians in El Geneina. “They didn't move.”

“This is actually a pattern,” says Gerrit Kurtz, a researcher at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs. When Dagalo and Burhan governed together, he explains, it was common for the regular armed forces to stand by without intervening while RSF fighters committed atrocities. Moreover, he points out, now they are at war, Dagalo’s forces are winning. 

“The RSF already controls most of Darfur,” he says. “They've captured the state capitals of  three states in Darfur. And they were already in control of the east.”

In the absence of anywhere else to turn, some have looked to the international community for help. They have received little. “International actors are overwhelmed,” Kurtz says. “They are not united, and they are not mobilizing sufficient efforts to actually reign in this kind of horrific violence.” 

“And what is most painful,” says Ahmadi, “is that it seems like this does not mobilize or generate outrage as it used to.”

By the evening, it had become clear that her parents were among the hostages kidnapped by Hamas. Her mother, Yochaved Lifschitz, was freed 16 days after the attacks, and images of her handshake with her former captor flashed around the world. Her father, Oded, remains in Hamas captivity. “So we are continuing to speak to whoever would listen in government and in media and try to advocate for their return.”

With over 200 hostages still in captivity in Gaza, it’s a nightmare she is far from alone in experiencing. “There's not one family who has not been affected,” she says. And yet many of those affected say that the Israeli government has all but abandoned them.

“The truth is that not only has the government not been forthcoming with them, but it's not clear what the government is doing, if anything, to get these hostages back,” says Noga Tarnopolsky, an Israeli journalist based in Jerusalem. “And so these families feel forsaken and abandoned.”

In the face of such apparent official indifference to their plight, some of the families have advocated for a bold proposal: everyone for everyone. In other words, release all of the Palestinians in Israeli detention — a number that has grown dramatically since the war began — in exchange for the hostages. “I am for everything that works,” Lifschitz says.

Tarnopolsky is more skeptical. “The offer has never been made in any way by Hamas,” she says. “I think that if this were a real offer, I think that the clamor for it would be so intense that the government would at least have to consider it.”

But such a prisoner swap remains the only real hope in the eyes of many of the families, who continue to push for it in the face of apparent government indifference. It may also be the only hope for some Palestinian detainees, many of whom are held without charge — and, according to civil rights groups, face serious human rights abuses in prison. 

Since Oct. 7, Muzna Shihabi, a former adviser to the PLO negotiation team says, “according to Palestinian officials, the number has doubled.” Many, she says, report that their treatment has become even more severe over the past month.

But as long as Israel and Hamas remain as unwilling to negotiate as they currently seem to be, their plight — like those of the Israeli, Thai and other nationals held in Gaza — is unlikely to end anytime soon.

Produced by Joshua Martin

In the aftermath, Mawad began work on her recently published book about the port blast, “All She Lost: the Explosion in Lebanon, the Collapse of a Nation and the Women Who Survive.” But when she set out to interview dozens of women about the distress they endured that day, she discovered that just like the fertilizer at the port, her country’s trauma had also been forgotten. 

“I thought, this is a history book,” she tells New Lines magazine’s Rasha Elass. “It's not just a book about the explosion. It's also about Lebanon's unprecedented collapse.”

Before the Beirut explosion, the country’s banking sector had collapsed, leaving countless citizens locked out of their life savings. By that time, Lebanon had spent 12 years enduring the shockwaves of the Syrian Civil War, all while the scars of its own civil war remain open and raw. “The Lebanese today, their life is a life of survival. They spend their days fighting for their basic rights,” Mawad says. “I felt like I owed it to myself and to the Lebanese to tell these stories.”

“Lebanese resilience” is often claimed as a mark of pride, but Mawad firmly rejects the notion.  “This to me is not resilience. It's trauma on top of trauma,” she says. “They haven't found justice. They haven’t found peace. And I think convincing ourselves that we are resilient is actually counterproductive.”

And now, as yet another war rages in the region, the Lebanese people are bracing themselves once more, hoping their country will not become a casualty yet again.

“The military plans can be drawn now. Will they be able to implement them? That's a big question mark,” says Gilbert Achcar, professor of development studies and international relations at SOAS, University of London.

In a recent essay published by New Lines, however, Achcar turned his attention to the other big question. Assuming Israel is able to oust Hamas, he tells New Lines’ Faisal Al Yafai, “the next question is what are we going to do with that?”

Achcar outlines two main scenarios for the day after Hamas. The first, which he calls the “Oslo” option, is the one preferred by the United States. This would involve handing control of Gaza to the Fatah government that rules in the West Bank. 

“They want the Israeli army to eradicate Hamas in Gaza and put the Palestinian Authority in control of the strip,” he explains. 

It would be a very difficult needle to thread. Not only has Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas refused to take part in such a scheme, but any Palestinian leader who did would be unlikely to last long in power if it was imposed at the barrel of a gun.

The other likely political course, Achcar suggests, is what he calls the “Greater Israel” option. In that scenario, Israel takes over Gaza — and stays there.

“And this is the view on the far right,” he says. “October 7 was, for them, an opportunity.”

But such an action might be even more of a pipe dream than the “Oslo” option. Occupying Gaza over the long term would stretch the IDF to capacity at the very least, and U.S. President Biden has already ruled out American support for such a scheme. 

A military strategy is one thing. But finding a political strategy for the day after Hamas will prove much trickier.

Produced by Joshua Martin

But the events of the next day and beyond have changed everything. The magnitude of Hamas’s attacks and Israel’s response were both unprecedented and have thrown the balance of power into flux. With tensions at a high mark, an escalation risks igniting a region-wide war. As the leadership of all three countries scramble to find their footing, New Lines magazine’s Faisal Al Yafai and Joshua Martin spoke to three different analysts to break down the political and military strategies at play. 

Produced by Joshua Martin

To understand the genesis of this crisis, New Lines magazine’s Danny Postel and Joshua Martin spoke to political scientists from three different countries about what the unfolding conflagration means for the future of the Israeli-Palestinian issue.

“Hamas would have known that by invading Israel itself and puncturing this myth of invincibility of Israel in its own land, Israel would have to respond even more harshly than normal,” says Jeroen Gunning, professor of Middle Eastern politics and conflict studies at King's College London and the author of “Hamas in Politics: Democracy, Religion, Violence.”

“It may be that Hamas’s calculation was that this was worth the cost, but they're sacrificing the lives of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza.”

In other words, the massive response from Israel was almost certainly part of the plan. Moreover, Gunning says, it’s unlikely to deliver lasting security and prevent such an attack from happening again. 

“A lot of Israelis, including former heads of the Mossad and former generals, have gone on record that there is no military solution to the conflict,” Gunning says. 

“Hamas is one of the few groups that still claims resistance against the Israeli occupation,” explains Dana El Kurd, a political scientist at the University of Richmond and the author of “Polarized and Demobilized: Legacies of Authoritarianism in Palestine.” 

“So what this moment speaks to is the fact that a lot of these other Palestinian actors have become very irrelevant to the ongoing conflict.”

Unlike their counterparts in Gaza, Fatah, the ruling party of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, has cooperated with Israel since the Oslo Peace Accords were signed in the 1990s. By provoking a response of this magnitude, Hamas has an opportunity to not only delegitimize their main rivals but also shore up its own support.

“In the context of Israel bombing Gaza, there is obviously a rally-around-the-flag effect where even people who are completely ideologically opposed to Hamas are not going to express something like that,” El Kurd points out. “I can't describe how outraged people are, how just dehumanized people feel, that violence against Palestinians is ignored.”

“It's the vicious cycle of humiliation and revenge. And we've seen it throughout the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” says Uriel Abulof, a political psychologist at Tel Aviv University and the author of “Living on the Edge: The Existential Uncertainty of Zionism.” 

“You feel the fear, you feel the humiliation caused by the others, and you want revenge.”

Yet the events of the past week, he believes, have shown the futility of that cycle. “The only thing you can do is live by the sword and hope that you'll be able to survive. And Netanyahu was the main agent of that doctrine over the past 30 years.”

But while he may be hoping that a forceful enough reprisal may placate the public, the attacks happened under Netanyahu’s watch, Abulof points out, and a great many Israelis blame him for the bloodshed.  

“Although it may sound completely ludicrous and utopian at this dark point, I think that it might also serve as a sort of an awakening for moderates on both sides. And I think there are many, many Palestinians who abhor what Hamas has done,” he adds. “I think there is a potential that both sides may come together and try to do something that we haven't really tried before, which is a real coexistence, truly, fully recognizing the existence of the other.”

“The disease is endemic to the Ganges Valley in India, but it did not have its international journey until the involvement of British imperial forces that took the disease from India to the Persian Gulf,” Grams tells New Lines magazine’s Rasha Elass. “And from there, the disease came to Syria, but did not reach Damascus until 1848.”

When it did hit, though, it hit hard. 

“It was a shock for everybody, not because of the novelty of epidemics but because of the horrific symptoms,” Grams says. Signs of infection came on suddenly, leaving the afflicted vomiting and unable to control their bowels. Many would be dead within hours. At the height of the epidemic, hundreds were dying over a single day.

“By 1902, we learned what causes the disease, and we learned how it is transmitted,” Grams says. Advances in epidemiology had revealed the pathogen behind the devastation —Vibrio cholerae, a bacterium that spread through contaminated water. Yet that same year, the city was struck by its worst epidemic yet. 

“Despite all measures and all precautions, people were still dying from cholera,” Grams explains. The situation became so severe that Ottoman officials feared V. cholerae would become endemic to the city’s water supply. 

By the time it ended, the outbreak had lasted for more than a year, several times the length of previous epidemics, leaving the city traumatized and its economy crippled by containment measures. Ottoman officials had found themselves caught in an endless cycle, cordoning off the city again and again as the outbreak flared and waned. Every few months, Grams explains, things would seem to die down, no new cases would be reported, and the administration would ease restrictions. 

“And then someone died or another case was reported. And then all the measures that were eased were reinstated again. And the misery started all over again,” she says.

“Researching cholera during the COVID pandemic,” she adds, “it was quite fascinating to see the similarities.”

Produced by Joshua Martin

“Over the last decades a genuinely new political tradition has started to coalesce in universities around the world,” the political scientist and commentator tells New Lines magazine’s Faisal Al Yafai, ”and then come to have significant influence on our culture and politics.”

Uncomfortable with the direction this new generation of progressives has taken, Mounk sought to understand them. His new book, “The Identity Trap,” presents a history of how these new ideas became mainstream.

“I think the problem is not that they go too far,” he says. Mounk is uncomfortable with the position that many of his fellow critics have taken toward what they would call “wokeness” and he calls the “identity synthesis.” “How can you go too far in fighting against racism?” 

In Mounk’s view, the problem is not how far, but which way. “I think the problem really is that they take us in the wrong direction,” he says. 

For Mounk, a proud believer in the liberal tradition, that wrong direction is the emphasis on identity and difference rather than more traditional universal values. It is not that he thinks identity is not important, he says. “The problem comes when we start to have a conception of politics which reduces people to those categories.”

Mounk believes that these ways of thinking have led activists to abandon their commitment to liberal values like free speech and equality before the law.  “Who's going to be sitting on the speech facilitation committee of some tech company? It's not the most marginalized in society. It's not the weakest in society. It's people who virtually by definition hold quite a lot of power,” he explains.

At a time where the far right is on the march, he concedes that a more confrontational and uncompromising approach might be compelling. But he fears that it may be misguided in the long run.

“Trump's election in the United States in 2016 made it so hard to criticize some of those ideas because you were immediately accused of somehow running interference for Trump,” he says. “But I think the deep influence that these ideas now have on many institutions in the United States and beyond leaves an opening to people like Trump to come back into power.”

“The volume of art and creative responses that we've seen to this uprising is really unprecedented,”says Nahid Siamdoust, author of “Soundtrack of the Revolution: The Politics of Music in Iran” and host of the podcast “Woman, Life, Freedom.” “Even in comparison to 1979, I think this is unprecedented.”

“In a sense, the ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ revolution is a revolution that's formed by culture, by art, by music, by poetry,” Malu Halasa, literary editor of The Markaz Review, tells New Lines magazine’s Danny Postel. It’s that art that is the subject of her new book, an edited anthology titled “Woman, Life, Freedom: Voices and Art from the Women's Protests in Iran,” which was released this month.

Unlike previous, more reformist protest movements in Iran, the Mahsa Amini protests became genuinely revolutionary. That revolutionary feeling was channeled into a great range of art forms, but especially music and hip-hop in particular. “Hip-hop in the West has lost its power. We haven't really had conscious rap for quite a long time,” Halasa says. But in Iran, she adds, “even before the ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ movement, hip-hop was very powerful. It was critical of the status quo. It wasn't just party music.” 

Artists can pay a high price for speaking out against the regime. For his blistering lyrics in support of the movement, a 32-year-old rapper from Esfahan named Toomaj Salehi was arrested and eventually sentenced to six years in prison after being held in solitary confinement for 252 days. He is one of many artists who have become figureheads of the wider movement, his songs played at protests while demonstrators wield placards with his name and face. 

It’s no accident that musicians have become such integral and iconic parts of the movement, Siamdoust says.

“Laicite is a form of secularism,” explains French legal scholar Rim-Sarah Alouane. But it’s a very specific form, one that took a very different path to its equivalents elsewhere. “In the U.S., the idea is to protect people's beliefs against abuses of the state,” she tells Rasha Al Aqeedi and Erin Clare Brown. “In France, it's the other way around.”

This unique form of secularism has its origins in the education system. “Schools were considered the place where we create the future citizen. So, we needed to protect pupils from any influence, and especially the influence of the Catholic Church,” Alouane explains. 

That secular principle would go on to become one of the cornerstones of public life in the French Republic. The Law of 1905 established the separation of church and state and guaranteed individual freedom of worship while also instituting a policy of religious neutrality for government employees, forbidding them from any public display of faith. 

“However, religious neutrality did not apply to the individuals,” Alouane adds. “Individuals were free to express their religiosity as long as public order is not disturbed.”

“The problem is not laicite itself because in France, laicite is supposed to guarantee freedom of religion and freedom of conscience,” Alouane says. “The problem is what we have done with it.”

But fanned by the flames of anti-immigrant animus, Alouane says the past few decades have seen the emergence of an increasingly illiberal and uncompromising conception of secularism. 

“We call it the new laicite,” she says. “This has been used as a reason to restrict religious visibility, especially targeted at Muslims. And right now, the victims are literally kids. I mean, can you imagine being so young and facing that?”

And so, as France’s youth returned to school last week, many Muslim girls had to choose between the clothes they feel comfortable in and their access to schooling. According to the education ministry, 67 girls were sent home in a single day for refusing to remove their abayas. 

“France is losing its own children, I would say,” Alouane laments. “These girls will come back to school dressed differently or they will go to private schools. Is it what we want? Girls to go to religious school instead of going to the school of the republic, where everybody should be treated equally?”

Produced by Joshua Martin

The result, explains Barnett, who traveled there in June to report for New Lines, is that large swaths of the country are actually controlled by local independent and autonomous governments that don’t always dance to the beat of Mogadishu’s drum. “Even though there's a veneer of statehood or state authority, a lot of it is essentially clan politics — elders or clan leaders that are building up their own institutions,” he says. Perhaps the most successful has been the Republic of Somaliland, which declared independence in 1991, though it has not achieved U.N. recognition.

With its own legal system, legislature and national anthem, Somaliland has often been hailed as a success story for its multi-party democracy and relatively stable administration. Yet in the border city of Las Anod, captured from the autonomous government of neighboring Puntland in 2007, the Somaliland independence movement now faces an independence movement of its own: the SSC, a militia group formed by the Dhulbahante clan and its allies.  

Barnett spoke to dozens of SSC fighters determined to establish their own autonomous state in what they consider to be their ancestral lands. 

“Their main goal right now is to break away these lands from Somaliland,” Barnett says. “Then they want to become a federal member state, similar to the status that Puntland has.”

Since the fighting started at the beginning of the year, the two sides were at a stalemate. But on Aug. 25, “the entire battlefield situation changed really overnight.” A shock SSC offensive drove the Somaliland Armed Forces out of Las Anod. “SSC activists are declaring August 25 victory day,” Barnett says. “Even some of them were surprised that it had happened so quickly.”

The consequences may spread far beyond the borders of Somaliland or the SSC’s nascent Dhulbahante state. 

Gabriel Gatehouse, an award-winning foreign correspondent with the BBC, recognized the man in the photos. He had met him just months before, while covering the 2020 election. Dismissing the man as nothing more than a fringe weirdo, he had passed up the chance to interview him. That same man was now the face of the Capitol riot. 

“It bothered me, because I realized that I had not given his story,” Gatehouse tells New Lines magazine’s Faisal Al Yafai.  “That was the question I hadn’t asked myself: There must be a reason why he believes this. It’s not true. But it means something. What is it telling us about the world that we live in?”

That was the question Gatehouse set out to find answers to on “The Coming Storm,” a  podcast series he made with the BBC. 

“We reach for conspiracy theories when the world doesn’t make sense to us,” he says. Distrust in traditional media and government institutions — not entirely unwarranted — has led many to reject what they say entirely, Gatehouse explains. “And they feel like the internet has put this powerful tool in their hands, to connect with people and uncover the hidden truth. And I think they genuinely believe it.”

QAnon itself may burn out or at least change into something new. But Gatehouse suspects it may not matter all that much. Something else will just take its place. 

“QAnon was like the match that lit the fire,” he says. “And the fire is now raging, and it is going to keep on burning, I think, until something quite fundamental changes.”

Produced by Joshua Martin. This episode originally aired March 3, 2023.

Choksi, author of the “The Newlyweds” and co-host of the latest season of NPR’s “Rough Translation” podcast, has spent many years untangling the fraught politics of marriage in the country. “On a family level, it's almost as if it's seen as a marker of success. Finding the right match for your son or daughter is like your ultimate duty towards your child,” she says. “And disobeying your parents' choice for marriage? Possibly the ultimate disrespect that you can have towards your parents.”

But in a nation where over 90% of marriages are arranged and seldom cross lines of class, caste and confession, a new generation of young people are questioning the traditional boundaries. “And love marriage is one of those fault lines,” says Choksi.

It’s not a choice that’s taken lightly, however. The consequences for couples who take it can be severe, especially when they come from different religious or caste backgrounds. “The stakes are really varied, right?” Choksi says. “Like the stakes can be as little as disappointing your parents to honor killing.” 

It should be no surprise, then, that marriage often features prominently in national politics. In July, the chief minister of Gujarat announced that he was considering a law which would require parental approval for love marriages. Hindu nationalist politicians promote conspiracy theories about ‘love jihad’ — “this idea that Muslims are are taking away Hindu women as part of a concerted effort to convert them to Islam and eventually outnumber the Hindu population,” Choksi explains. Meanwhile, despite the objections of Narendra Modi’s government, the Supreme Court is considering the extension of marriage rights to same-sex couples. 

“There's these conversations happening across the country,” says Choksi, “ I think that young people in India are just trying to figure themselves out. Like anywhere else in the world, I guess.

Produced by Joshua Martin

“These guys are used to rigging the election,” he tells New Lines magazine’s Kwangu Liwewe. “There's no change in Zimbabwe until these guys are removed from power.”

At the beginning of his career, Mapfumo mostly played covers of popular American songs by artists like Elvis Presley and the Rolling Stones. But soon his music began to take on a much more political — and unapologetically African — shape. “I started thinking, if these people don't want us to play their music, don't we have our own music, our own cultural music?”

He began to experiment by blending conventional rock and blues with the sounds of traditional Shona music, creating something new and vibrant and uniquely Zimbabwean.

“We were just playing guitars, imitating the mbira sound,” he says. “But eventually we thought it was right if we could bring the mbira itself, actually mix it up with the guitars, and that came out very well.”

That might be an understatement. With his new innovative style, which he dubbed “Chimurenga” — meaning “liberation” in the Shona language — Mapfumo became the voice of a generation of Zimbabweans crying out for change.

It was in 1980 that that change seemed to have finally arrived. Ian Smith’s white minority Rhodesian regime had collapsed, and Mugabe’s revolutionary movement took control of the government. But Mugabe’s autocratic leadership and personal corruption quickly left Mapfumo disillusioned.

“Mugabe was not the kind of person that I thought he was,” he reflects. “He was an oppressor and he wasn't there for the people.”

Mapfumo’s music began to take aim at the post-independence government. With the release of his 1989 hit “Corruption,” the regime decided to act. His songs were banned from the radio, and Mapfumo was forced into exile in the United States in the late ’90s, where he has lived ever since.

Mugabe remained in power for two more decades, until he was finally overthrown by his former ally Emmerson Mnangagwa following widespread protests in 2017. But while many Zimbabweans celebrated the dictator’s fall, Mapfumo was under no illusions that the ouster of the man at the top would change the nature of the regime. 

“There was no new dawn in Zimbabwe,” he says. “The situation was still the same.”

Produced by Joshua Martin

“U.S. evangelicals have been active here for nearly four decades,” journalist Lydia Namubiru tells New Lines magazine’s Danny Postel. “Uganda itself has a very active evangelical movement as a result. They've been doing the work of winning souls, as they say, to their cause for over 40 years.”

The movement infrastructure built up over those years is extensive, and U.S. Christian right groups like The Family (also known as the Fellowship Foundation) have come to enjoy close ties with influential lawmakers and politicians as well as building a robust indigenous Evangelical movement. Hardline Christian groups from the United States have spent more than $50 million in Africa over the past decade. Namubiru spent months as part of a team of journalists following the “dark money” flowing not only into Africa but also Europe, Asia and Latin America in the effort to promote far-right causes. The bulk of their spending was actually in Europe, she adds, but Africa may be where it has had its greatest effect. 

“Culturally, Africa still remains quite invested in Christian conservatism. I do think there's some sense that this is the last frontier for conservative Christianity. They fight for it as the last bit of territory that they hold.”

And in countries like Uganda, where the state is relatively weak and minority protections minimal, the political situation provides them the opportunity to consolidate their power. 

“I think part of the appeal to Africa is that the states are very overwhelmed; they're very young and still overwhelmed by bread-and-butter issues," Namubiru says. Without a strong state to protect minority rights, she points out, it’s relatively easy for these groups to find a foothold. Uganda, she says, “wasn't really building, you know, state power, state processes, democratic processes, checks and balances, until the mid-1980s.”

Still, she cautions against seeing it as a uniquely African problem. 

“Anti-LGBTQ, ultraconservative politics targeting women's rights in this particular global moment has real popular appeal, not just in Africa, but in countries like Hungary, Italy.”

Instead, it is better understood as a particular regional manifestation of a worldwide phenomenon: “The backlash is global. It's not just in Uganda.”

Produced by Joshua Martin

“If they fail to detonate on impact, they'll lay there dormant,” Sera Koulabdara tells New Lines magazine’s Danny Postel. “They have no self destruct mechanism, so they'll be there until it's triggered by an animal walking by or a child finding it and picking it up.”

Koulabdara is the CEO of Legacies of War, an international advocacy and educational organization working to address the long-term consequences of Cold War-era conflicts in Southeast Asia and grew up in Laos. Many of the millions of cluster bombs the United States dropped on the country in the 1960s and ’70s did not explode, and both clean-up efforts and loss of life continue to this day, decades after the war’s end. 

“Globally, 97% of casualties of cluster munitions are civilians,” Koulabdara says. “And in the case where the age is known, 60% are children.” 

Their presence leaves Laotians, she says, with the anxiety that their lives are always at risk, forever knowing that an unexploded bomb could kill them in the fields where they farm or the roads they take to school. “That is not the future that I want to see in any country.”

But, says Romeo Kokriatski, a journalist and managing editor of the New Voice of Ukraine, Kyiv can’t afford to be picky.

“These aren't weapons that Ukraine wants or that we would have chosen, but we were not given the things that we asked for,” he says. “We simply took them because they were offered to us.”

Kokriatski says that he is well aware of the dreadful consequences of cluster bombs but that Ukraine is already condemned to the long, arduous task of their clean-up — Russia has been using them since the invasion began. 

“Every extra day that this war stretches on is just an unimaginable tragedy. I simply can't imagine anything that would override that overwhelming priority to defeat the Russians as quickly as possible.”

Produced by Joshua Martin

“It wasn't an easy read, no doubt,” Al-Nakib tells New Lines’ Lydia Wilson. “But it spoke to me. It really resonated.” 

Now an award-winning novelist, she credits Joyce as a major influence on her as a budding writer.

“I was beginning to have a sense that writing was the thing I wanted to do,” she explains. “And here was an audacious young teenager coming into his own as a writer. And the text itself was incredibly experimental and it kind of pushed my sense of what I'd been reading my whole life.”

But it also resonated on a deeper level. In a piece published in New Lines’ summer print edition, she ponders how Joyce’s experiences as a young man growing up in colonized Ireland reflected her own as a young woman coming of age in 1970s and ’80s Kuwait, at the end of the country’s “golden age.”

“The second layer that really drew me to that novel was how critical Stephen [the protagonist] was of his environment, church, nation and family, and those ties resonated so much with me growing up in Kuwait,” she says. “Joyce’s Ireland appeals way beyond the borders and boundaries of Ireland. And so they spoke to me all the way to Kuwait when I was 14.”

“The best stories, the ones that are immortal, are the ones where it doesn't matter when they were written,” she adds. “It’s a bit of a cliche to say, but it's true, you know. It should resonate all the way through time and we can pick it up and connect. And that I think is the special thing that fiction can do.”

In the years since the teenaged Mai Al-Nakib first picked up the book, Kuwaiti society has changed a lot. 

“Kuwait at the time was very open and liberal,” she reflects. “So it isn't the place that it would become, where, in some ways, I think Joyce's words are even more applicable.”

Produced by Joshua Martin

“They may tell one story externally or to a domestic audience and reserve another story for themselves,” he tells New Lines magazine’s Faisal Al Yafai. “But in the end you need some kind of narrative in order to make political decisions possible at all.”

In other words, these stories are not just propaganda, and a narrative is not necessarily a lie. Whether true or false or somewhere in between, they provide the blueprint with which to understand the world, to answer fundamental questions like ‘Who are we?’ and ‘What are we fighting for?’

“It's a story that needs to be convincing to the very people who are telling it,” Devji says. “We're really quite wedded to narratives, and our political decisions really have no meaning without them.”

That loss of meaning, he adds, was the problem America ran into at the end of the Cold War. The United States and the Soviet Union spent decades defining themselves by their fight against one another until the latter’s collapse in the ‘90s left the U.S. with both uncontested global hegemony and a severe identity crisis.“The very thing that you wanted to happen  happens, and you no longer know what to do.”

Today, this kind of storytelling is everywhere. It’s the story of China overcoming its “Century of Humiliation” or India’s account of its rise as a great power. 

But the most pronounced case of the importance of a compelling story may be the war in Ukraine. The information war between Russia and Ukraine has been fought with no less intensity than what occurs on the battlefield. Russia has portrayed the war as a continuation of the Soviet fight against Nazism, while Ukraine sees it as the endpoint of a centuries-long struggle against Russian oppression, after which it can take its rightful place among its democratic peers in the West. But while that story has powerful resonances in Europe, it means very little to post-colonial nations in the rest of the world.

“The Global South needed to be appealed to by using a narrative that was more meaningful to them,” Devji  says. “So decolonization has been ramped up as part of the narrative, to argue that Ukraine is at the receiving end of a colonial invasion from its former colonial master and that countries which have had this kind of experience in the past need to realize this and identify with it. And how can you not identify with that?”

Produced by Joshua Martin

Valls was not just speaking in platitudes: The French Republic officially does not recognize racial or religious divides, to the point that the government refuses to collect data regarding race or religion. 

“They don't even recognize that as a category or as a box you can check on a form,” says sociologist Jean Beaman, an associate professor at University of California, Santa Barbara and the author of the book “Citizen Outsider: Children of North African Immigrants in France.”

“France really prides itself on not making distinctions between members of French society,” Beaman tells New Lines magazine’s Erin Clare Brown. “That no matter what your origins are, you're just as French as anyone else.”

And yet some, apparently, are more French than others. The state might not see race, but its agents in the street certainly do. Young Black and Arab men from working class immigrant neighborhoods report regular experiences of abuse and humiliation at the hands of police across the country.

“It's almost a ritual,” says journalist Chahrazade Douah. “They know it's going to happen.” 

After a 17-year-old boy named Nahel Merzouk was beaten and then shot in the head by French police during a traffic stop, a video of the incident kindled furious protests. Douah hit the embattled streets of France’s cities to talk to the young men involved.

“They're very aware that it's going to get them on the front page of the news,” Douah says. “That's what they told me all over France: ‘We're breaking everything because we know that's the only way they'll talk about us. They talk about us when we are dead or when we break things. Otherwise, we are invisible.’”

It was an act of fury, Douah explains. But it was also an act of desperation. In the eyes of the police, none of those protesting were any different from Nahel, the boy they had just seen murdered on video. 

“I think we forget that these are teenagers. They have feelings. They are scared,” she says. “They're not just angry; they're terrified.”

Still, in June, President Joe Biden rolled out the red carpet for Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in what was only the third formal state visit of his presidency. Agrawal, who spent many years as CNN’s New Delhi bureau chief, was watching closely. So were millions of people back in India. 

“This is something that India cares about but also Indians care about,” Agrawal explains. “India's global role is the topic of constant conversation on Indian prime-time TV, in Indian newspapers, in Indian advertising. It's a big part of the Indian psyche.”

And it is a sign of how rapidly that global role is increasing that America gave such a warm reception to a man who had once been banned from setting foot on U.S. soil. When Modi was Chief Minister of the state of Gujarat, he was accused of encouraging attacks against Muslims during the 2002 riots. Since entering government, Modi’s Hindu Nationalist government has continued to curtail Muslims’ religious freedoms and has faced strident criticism at home and abroad for its crackdowns against minorities and the free press. Nevertheless, Biden, whose administration has made the fight against authoritarianism a cornerstone of his foreign policy, chose not to address the elephant in the room. 

“Biden is looking at some sort of a larger picture and in that larger picture, what matters most of all is competition with China,” he adds. “In the last five years both countries have seen their relations with China sour. That is what has brought them closer together.”

If Washington was hoping for any concrete defense commitments, however, they were destined for disappointment.

“U.S. policymakers, and indeed the world, need to be very aware of what they're dealing with in New Delhi,” says Agrawal. “If U.S. policymakers are under the illusion that when there's a hypothetical war with China, India would come rushing to America's aid, then they are mistaken.”

India, he says, has other priorities, and its own vision for the 21st century’s multipolar global order. Washington was not the only stop on Modi’s world tour. Straight after leaving the U.S., Modi went to Egypt to meet President Abdul Fattah al-Sisi.

“India sees itself as a potential leader of the Global South, an alternative voice on the global stage,” Agrawal says. “If it can be the voice of the Global South today, it can be a bigger player on the global stage tomorrow.”

Produced by Joshua Martin

Today, many of those ideas and beliefs have filtered through into the mainstream. They have inspired terrorist attacks across the world that have taken hundreds of lives. Politicians repeat their talking points. Their most prominent proponents, like the British-American media personality and alleged human trafficker Andrew Tate, have global audiences.

But Tate, who converted to Islam in 2020, is part of a new wave of far-right figures who have ditched the movement’s traditional Islamophobia for admiration. As New Lines magazine’s Lydia Wilson and Rasha Al Aqeedi wrote in their recent piece “Tate and the ‘Red Pillers’ of Islam,”  many on the new right have come to see Islamists not as enemies but potential allies in their shared battle against feminism, LGBTQ rights, so-called “globalism” and secular modernity. 

“Even before he converted back in 2020, he said that Islam has the solution for modern society,” Al Aqeedi says. “His interpretation of Islam vindicated his pre-existing beliefs.”

Moustafa Ayad, executive director for Africa, the Middle East and Asia at the Institute of Strategic Dialogue, noticed the same thing.

“We're now in 2023. We have a group of youth, or young people, who have essentially been online their entire lives, who have witnessed massive, drastic shifts in the way that social media platforms have pushed cultures or broken down boundaries,” Ayad says. “And the same has happened in extremist communities. You have Islamists in white supremacist communities watching or listening or even taking part. And you have the same white supremacists in Islamist communities.”

But while it may now be far more widespread than in the past, that mutual admiration and cross-pollination is not necessarily new. “I mean, this has been going on since 2017 and before,” says Ayad. “If you look at, for instance, the September 11th attacks, you had Ku Klux Klan members in the United States say, ‘I wish our men had the balls to conduct an attack like that.’”

Produced by Joshua Martin

“My view is that African countries have decided to be part of this process probably because Russia now wants a deal, but it does not want to give the credit of having secured a deal to the West,” says Zimbabwean journalist Hopewell Chin’ono. “It would rather give it to Africa.”

The past decade has seen Russia expand its influence substantially on the continent, which has put many African countries in an awkward position as they try to preserve their ties to both the Kremlin and the West. The ostensibly neutral South Africa especially has come under intense criticism for its continued friendliness toward Russia. 

"We are facing a moral crisis when it comes to neutrality at a time like this,” says South African journalist Redi Tlhabi. “We cannot morally justify this as a country that needed other nations to support our fight against apartheid.”

"The problem that we have in Africa is that most of our dictators on the continent tend toward countries like Russia and China because they've been cornered," Chin'ono says. "They do not want to do certain things that require trade with the West. For instance, issues of human rights. Russia doesn't care about human rights. China doesn't care about human rights.”

Not all African nations have been so hesitant to rock the boat, however. “I'm grateful that countries like Kenya have decided to do the right thing and not go gung-ho and be seen to be supporting an aggressor in this war,” Chin’ono says. 

“They are in the minority,” Tlhabi adds. “But they are voting. They are taking the chances and they're taking a human race, a human rights based foreign policy stance.”

Part of the problem, Tlhabi says, is that Western criticisms of Russia often come off as hypocritical given their own history of brutality in Africa and their continuing support of dictators on the continent. “There's a lot for which we can criticize the West,” she says. “But then we need to decide as nations, to what extent are we hostages of history?”

The stakes are high. Though the continent may be miles from the fighting, the war has hit Africa hard. Both Russia and Ukraine are major exporters of food, and as a result, the war has left many nations that relied on that food facing alarming shortages.

"If a deal is struck, food can start coming in in huge quantities, as it used to,” Chin’ono says. 

Produced by Joshua Martin and Sabrine Baiou

When Amjad Youssef met “Anna,” a young Alawite Syrian who was studying abroad, the military man was skeptical at first. But as the weeks unfolded, he began to open up to his fellow pro-regime partisan over Facebook. What he didn’t know was that Anna had been created by genocide researchers Annsar Shahhoud and Uğur Ümit Üngör. In this podcast with New Lines’ Rasha Elass, they talk about how they used Anna to expose Amjad’s participation in the 2013 Tadamon massacre, carried out by the Syrian regime.

Created in 2018 “out of necessity,” Anna was able to build a rapport with dozens of Assad’s perpetrators through an elaborate catfishing scheme, giving the researchers unprecedented access into the minds of people like Amjad, ultimately leading to a chilling confession by the man who massacred dozens of Syrians. “Nobody’s ever done this before,” says Uğur. “There are no examples of people interviewing active intelligence officers.”

But “Anna was a double-edged sword,” he adds. “On the one hand we were unable to do any research without her; on the other hand it was also a burden, especially for Annsar, to crawl into the skin of a pro-regime person for over two years.”

So when the time came to terminate Anna, a simple Facebook deactivation wouldn’t do. Instead, they performed their own private funeral for her. It is moments like these that helped Annsar and Uğur find relief. They talk about how they also rely on satire and dark humor — exchanging macabre jokes that make sense only to each other — to survive the sort of work that most others will never relate to: “It might seem inappropriate to some people, but trust me, it’s the only way to stay sane.”

Hanging over the investigation was the question of what to do with the video when it came time to publish. For some of the countless Syrians still searching for missing family members, the video could yield answers, but it also meant making the victim’s final moments public. They needed to decide: Would it be better to allow the families to confront the graphic last moments of their loved ones’ lives? Or protect the victim’s dignity by keeping those brutal details private?

Produced by Joshua Martin and Christin El Kholy

“He talked about what a tragedy it was that Turkish and Kurdish mothers were both reading the same Islamic prayers over the bodies of their fallen sons,” says Nicholas Danforth, a nonresident fellow at the Hellenic Foundation for European Foreign Policy and the author of “The Remaking of Republican Turkey: Memory and Modernity Since the Fall of the Ottoman Empire.” 

“He saw the conflict between the Turkish military and the Kurds as a result of the military's hyper nationalist approach. He thought he could carve out a different relationship with them. He used religious rhetoric to do it.”

It is a sign of how much Erdogan has changed Turkey that, going into May’s presidential election, in which he faced his most serious opposition yet, both Kurds and nationalists were a prominent part of the coalition against him. And his victory is a sign that the Erdogan formula of religious conservatism and Turkish nationalism remains far more politically potent than his detractors would like to believe, Danforth says. 

“He's running a very authoritarian, rigged system,” he tells New Lines magazine’s Kareem Shaheen. And yet “he does have real popular support.”

The Erdogan brand of religious nationalism stands as a repudiation of Turkey’s traditional secular version, which more devout Turks have long resented, Danforth says. “Erdogan has done a very good job at playing on both a real and imagined sense of victimization amongst conservative religious people in Turkey.”

But his political project is much more ambitious than a simple course correction from secularism — and it has much wider appeal, earning him admirers not only within but beyond the borders of Turkey. It is both one that envisions his country as the main regional player in a future geopolitical order and one rooted in the memory of Turkey’s Ottoman past.

“What won Erdogan votes was his use of the Ottoman Empire as a symbol of when Turkey, and the Islamic world, were powerful,” Danforth explains. “He's created an image of redressing the wrongs in the global order.”

Erdogan, of course, has positioned himself at the heart of that project.

“It's left-wing third worldism. It's Islamism. It's Turkish nationalism. And he's become the avatar of all of these,” says Danforth. “That is, I think, part of what's made his appeal so widespread.”

Produced by Joshua Martin

As the author of the book “How to Fight a War,” Martin has spent a lot of time thinking about what it is that makes the difference between victory and defeat. “There are four things that if you get them right, you'll win,” he tells New Lines magazine’s Lydia Wilson. “And they are strategy, logistics, morale and training.”

The importance of those basic principles hasn’t changed, he says, and perhaps never will. But the process of implementing them has. Logistics is a good example. During the Second World War, the United States military used roughly a gallon of fuel a day for every soldier. By the time of the American invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan Wars, that number had increased to sixteen gallons per soldier. 

“Militaries are not sustainable. They are not eco-friendly,” Martin says. “Wars are incredibly carbon-intensive.”

That poses a fairly serious problem when climate change is already at a tipping point. But weaning an army off oil is no easy task, and attempting to do so would mean putting yourself at such a disadvantage that no military could seriously contemplate it. Modern military vehicles are incredibly fuel-hungry, and while electric vehicles are increasingly viable for civilian purposes, the demands of warfare are simply beyond the technology’s current capabilities, he explains. “It'll just get wiped out by hydrocarbon vehicles, because they just perform at a much higher rate.”

But climate change has even bigger implications as a driver of conflict.

“I think we already are seeing conflicts around climate change,” Martin says. “And these are only going to get worse.”

He points to the ongoing conflict in the Sahel as an example, where the devastating effects of climate change on rural communities, especially around the dramatically shrinking Lake Chad, have been deftly exploited by extremist groups. France’s intervention in the region ended last year, having failed to achieve its objectives.

“They didn't understand the problem that they were facing,” Martin says. “They treated it as a counterterrorism problem, rather than the problem of collapsing ecosystems.”

As climate change intensifies, the pressures will only intensify with it — and they won’t be confined to a single region.

“These are problems that we're not really solving,” Martin reflects. “I think many people are going to get quite desperate over the next 30 years.”

Produced by Joshua Martin

“The international community was engaging with these two generals, framing them as potential reformists,” says Elamin, an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Toronto. “When time and time again, they proved that they could not be trusted — that they had no interest in any transition to civilian rule.”

Before their coup, Sudan had been well on track. The Sudanese Revolution ended the 30-year military dictatorship of Gen. Omar al-Bashir in 2019, after hundreds of thousands of Sudanese citizens took to the streets. It didn’t happen overnight. Throughout the 2010s, neighborhood resistance committees had been mobilizing not only against the regime but also to demand local public services and to fill the gaps through mutual aid programs. 

“We saw them emerge kind of as the backbone of the revolution,” Elamin says.

After the coup, it was these resistance committees and other grassroots civil society groups who kept the dream of revolution alive. “Everyday protests continued until these generals were forced, once again, to try to join with the civilian leadership under the auspices of the international community to transition to a civilian government,” says Medani, an associate professor of political science and Chair of African studies at McGill University. “And it is this framework agreement that fell apart by April 15.”

The generals, he explains, felt they had been backed into a corner — Hemedti especially. Under the terms of the agreement, the RSF would be integrated into the army command structure, depriving him of control of the force with which he built his considerable wealth and power. 

“This war is essentially about them trying to preserve the vast wealth that they both generated through illicit coercive and violent means. And that, of course, is centrally undermined by the Sudanese revolution,” Medani says. “This war is really against the revolution and against the Sudanese people.”

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O’Regan had met Charles III more than 15 years ago, at a performance at Lincoln Cathedral, and he had clearly made an impression on the then-Prince of Wales. The king’s detailed interest in his work surprised him, given the 74-year-old monarch’s reputation as a man with generally conservative artistic tastes. As a composer, O’Regan is known for incorporating a diverse range of influences and inspiration in his work, blending genres and traditions from outside the world of classical music. 

“Increasingly, I don't think of the different genres of music or different styles of music, as being separated by how they sound,” he says. 

Many of his biggest influences came from childhood, he explains. Growing up with an Irish father and a North African mother, O’Regan explains that rai music was almost always playing on the radio when he would visit family in Algeria. “Those moments I remember very vividly,” he says. Rather than try to reproduce the technical conventions of rai, he wanted to try to capture the way those moments he felt when he was a child. 

“I was interested in trying to write pieces of music that are not ethnographic,” he explains. “So they're not interested in authenticity but more about focusing on the haze of memory and recollection and the inaccuracies that creep into recollections and memory.”

Rock and roll also featured. “I was born in ’78, but my mother was playing a lot of Led Zeppelin, which she'd grown up with in the late ’60s,” he says. “When you're 5 or 6, you're very reliant on what is played around you.”

Despite the long history of monarchs using music to shape their image and legitimize their rule, O’Regan says that he thought little about those dynamics while composing. 

“One of the biggest things I was thinking about was not just how it's going to fit into the service, but how other people might be drawn to it,” he reflects. “You want to write a piece that then lives on.”

Fearing that they might lose the physical past forever if they didn’t act, a massive volunteer effort began to protect, restore and preserve the historic buildings and artifacts that had been caught in the blast. It was hard and painstaking but also inspiring work. 

“We all felt some sort of healing taking place, unconsciously,” said Nadine Panayot, curator of the Museum of Archeology at the American University of Beirut, at the time. “Somehow we felt that there was a meaning to what we were doing, there was hope for the future.” 

Three years later, New Lines magazine’s Lydia Wilson visited Beirut to see the results for herself. She joined Panayot at the museum, which showed little sign of the devastation it had suffered at the time. The glass that had once been scattered across its floor has been cleaned up. The doors, which had been blown off by the force of the explosion, have been replaced with near-perfect replicas. 

“We're the third-most-ancient museum in the Near East, and we've survived so many wars. We have survived direct shelling on the campus, but seeing it destroyed like this over corruption is important,” Panayot says. (Evidence strongly suggests that negligence and corruption on the part of officials led to the explosion.) “I mean, this is also part of the history. This is part of today's life.”

That, she says, is why she made the decision not to fully repair everything in the museum’s possession. A collection of Roman-era glass flasks, for example, were sent to the British Museum for restoration, but Panayot requested that it be as minimal as possible. The damage, she specified, should be clearly visible. “I call them scars,” she says. “And everybody has started calling them scars, because this is exactly what they are. Because they represent the scars of every Lebanese person.”

In the years since the explosion, there has been no accountability for the criminal negligence that caused it. The official investigation has stalled, and the corruption that led to the blast continues to plague the country as its financial system collapses. 

“As long as justice hasn't been done,” says Panayot, “I think these scars should remain.” 

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“I didn't feel I had a torn identity at all, I felt a part of the fabric of this nation. I felt very Michigan,” says Heather Raffo, an Iraqi-American playwright, filmmaker and actress. But then, she tells New Lines magazine’s Rasha Al Aqeedi, the outbreak of the Gulf War in the early 1990s forced her to grapple with what it meant to have her identity split between two nations at war. “And it was really what has come to define me as an artist.”

Raffo finished her award-winning play, “The Nine Parts of Desire,” just as the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003. “I made a point of telling American citizens about Iraqi citizens and sharing very personal stories,” she says. “I think having an American perspective, having that much of a distance, I was able to write something that could communicate directly with the Western audience, which was an audience that needed to hear the material the most.”

As if to underscore Raffo’s point, at first no theater would take it. “It was a dangerous time. Nobody wanted to be humanizing Iraqis.”

Two decades later, she had the chance to adapt the play into a movie, which is streaming on PBS until the end of May. It tells the story of a young Iraqi-American woman in Michigan struggling with the loss of her father — a far cry from the war movies that have dominated American depictions of Iraqis since 2003. But attitudes have changed a lot over the past two decades, and Raffo is part of a generation of artists from Middle Eastern diaspora communities pushing that change forward. 

“They are helping define the cultural narrative for Americans, for the West,” Raffo says. “And they're uniquely positioned to tell complex stories of both sides.”

Yet there is also a darker reason that Americans have become more open to such narratives, Raffo suggests. In 2003, political violence and mass death weren’t issues Americans had any real frame of reference for. That has changed. 

“We're in a different psychological space,” she explains. After the pandemic, she says, “Americans knew loss in a more intimate way than they ever had before. And loss is tragic, but it's also a moment of connection.”

“When things are happening that need to be spoken about, often it's the artists that will understand that first,” Raffo adds. “And I really think Arab Americans and Middle Eastern Americans are some of the first to know what happens when a society suddenly dissolves into sectarian identities.”

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The relationship between the two rival generals had long been strained, but earlier this month, the tensions between them boiled over and a shooting war between the army and the RSF began on the streets of Khartoum. 

“We all knew it was going to happen,” former journalist and activist Dallia Abdelmoniem tells New Lines magazine’s Kwangu Liwewe from Port Sudan. “The world should have paid attention to the Sudanese, when they were saying after the coup of 2021, that you cannot deal with these two men.”

So far, attempts to mediate have failed, with neither side showing any sign of backing down. Many fear it could be the beginning of a new civil war.

“I think that it's very hard to get inside the heads of the warring generals,” says Sharath Srinivasan, a political scientist at the University of Cambridge and the author of “When Peace Kills Politics: International Intervention and Unending Wars in the Sudans.” 

“They have a tremendous sense of their coercive capacity and their right to rule,” Srinivasan says. “They have faced off in a way that makes it quite hard for one to retreat without the other taking advantage. We certainly are standing at a precipice.” 

With the country teetering on the edge of that precipice, many in Sudan have made the painful decision to leave the country while they still can, Abdelmoniem and her family among them.

“People are just fleeing. They're just leaving. I mean, I don't think I have one family member left in Khartoum,” she says. “We've all gone off in different directions, but there's no one left.”

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“History and the myths of the past have been very carefully constructed by the state,” Dr. Ian Garner, a historian and analyst of Russian war propaganda, tells New Lines Magazine’s Amie Ferris-Rotman. “It's a mythological narrative of death and rebirth of utopias created through sacrifice and martyrdom, and of Russia’s supposedly holy mission to be at the vanguard of history.”

Garner is the author of the forthcoming book “Z Generation: Into the Heart of Russia’s Fascist Youth,” which dissects the state’s efforts to reshape the minds of Russia’s young people.

Casting Russia as the defender of tradition and righteousness in a civilizational battle against a treacherous and decadent West, the state seeks to legitimize its aggressive foreign policy and quell internal dissent through a fervent barrage of ultranationalist messaging.

“The power of the propaganda machine is immense. The weight of social pressure and peer pressure in Russia is terrifying. And the state pushes it in schools with propaganda lessons,” Garner explains. “It pushes it on television. It pushes it through sort of semi-mandatory volunteer activities in youth groups.”

Those youth groups, he explains, are the heart of the Kremlin’s nation-building project.

“There are now 1.3 million members of the youth army,” says Garner. “And the organization's website explicitly says we intend to pipe boys into the army.” Children are taught to use Kalashnikovs and compete to win prizes for partaking in patriotic activities. Most alarmingly of all, Garner believes, they are being taught that to be a good Russian means being willing to sacrifice yourself for the state. 

“It is re-creating children from the ground up. It is preparing them for war.”

“We were very much living in limbo; we did not know where we were going to go,” Miller tells New Lines magazine’s Joshua Martin. “And I was really curious about how people's relationships do survive and how people do stay together.”

Yet though they rule so many people’s lives today, the systems governing migration were not always so restrictive. It was only during the First World War that the passport as we know it today entered widespread use, she explains, and it was conceived as a wartime security measure. Once the war ended, the League of Nations held a conference to consider its abolition. “It is powerful to imagine what that world might look like,” Miller says. “Instead, things started becoming more and more restrictive.”

Today, she says, those century-old questions are even more urgent than ever. “There are so many more people moving than ever before, and so many reasons that people are being pushed out of their homeland,” she says. Likely foremost among them will be climate change, which threatens to displace millions in the increasingly less-distant future. 

“If coastlines are disappearing, and people's homes are being swept up,” says Miller, “and you're not allowing them to transit to somewhere to be safe … I don't see how that's going to be physically sustainable in the future.”

“There's a popularized version of his theories that’s extremely widespread today among far-right intellectuals,” says Richard Wolin, an intellectual historian and the author of the book “Heidegger in Ruins.” That’s no accident, he tells New Lines magazine’s Danny Postel. It was a strategic choice. The embrace of Heidegger in mainstream academic philosophy allowed them to cloak their ideas in respectability: “The most significant philosopher — according to some — of the 20th century comes, of course, with a lot of intellectual prestige and cachet.”

But that’s not to say that the substance of the philosopher’s ideas had nothing to do with it either, adds Wolin. “Heidegger was an arch critic of Western civilization. And, along with that, goes, of course, the heritage of the Enlightenment, liberal democracy,” he explains. It isn’t just that Heideggerianism was useful for the New Right that emerged in the 1970s and the decades after — his work also played a genuine role in the formation of their political project. “The connections are much, much thicker and much more significant than would meet the eye.” 

Of Heidegger’s acolytes among the New Right, the Russian fascist thinker Alexander Dugin, who has written multiple books about the philosopher, might be the most prominent. “After Russia's invasion of Crimea in 2014, Dugin was dubbed ‘Putin's brain,’” says Wolin. “The extent of his influence on Putin is debated, but there's no question that he's a leading intellectual figure, not only amongst Russian ultranationalists but across Europe.”

The influence of Dugin and other New Right thinkers has become increasingly apparent in recent years. One of their most pernicious ideas is the “great replacement theory,” which alleges a conspiracy among elites to replace white European populations through non-white immigration and has inspired terrorist attacks, pogroms and genocide. It has traveled far beyond its European origins — from Tucker Carlson’s primetime show on Fox News to the speeches of Tunisian President Kais Saied.

“It was the New Right who took up this cudgel and began using the phrase ‘population replacement’ in favor of the idea of an Aryan or white nationalist Europe,” says Wolin. “And it has, in recent years, been reborn in rather insidious ways.”

“Both of my parents were born in Riga, Latvia, during the Soviet Union,” she tells New Lines’ Amie Ferris-Rotman. “But they came from very different backgrounds.”

Her mother came from an old Jewish family in Ukraine. During World War II, many of her family members were gunned down at Babyn Yar, alongside hundreds of thousands of others, by Waffen SS and Wehrmacht forces. It was one of the largest single mass killings of the Holocaust. Her father’s family was from Latvia. “His father was a member of the Arajs Commando,” Kinstler says, “which was one of the most brutal killing units of the Holocaust in the Baltic states.”

Kinstler only discovered this a few years ago. She wrote about her family’s story in her 2022 book “Come to This Court and Cry: How the Holocaust Ends,” which interrogates the painful politics of remembrance in a part of the world that is only just beginning to grapple with the legacy of World War II. In Eastern Europe, she explains, “It is like World War II happened yesterday. These questions of complicity and guilt and vengeance, and responsibility for what occurred, remain extremely active and inform daily politics.”

On the battlefields of Ukraine, those questions are more urgent than ever. “Putin framed this phase of the invasion as a campaign of denazification,” says Kinstler, who covered the war for The New York Times. “He's invoking all of these myths of Ukrainian complicity with the Germans and framing Ukraine as a Nazi nation to justify this war.”

As Ukrainians pursue charges against Russian officials at the International Criminal Court, including Putin himself, it remains to be seen whether any of them will be brought to justice. For many of the tens of millions of victims of Nazi extermination, it is too late. Only a few experienced any kind of justice in court. The same was true for the victims of Soviet oppression. But memory, Kinstler says, can also be a kind of justice in its own way, and the failure at Nuremberg only underscores the need for remembrance — especially at a time when some would seek to rehabilitate men like her grandfather’s commander as heroes of the anti-Soviet resistance, and fewer and fewer witnesses remain.

“We are very much in this much anticipated moment, when the Holocaust is going to pass from memory into history, when the people who witnessed it themselves — who survived it — are, increasingly, no longer with us.”

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“I was in my 20s. It was after 1989. And it seemed as if we’d lived through the end of history, as Francis Fukuyama told us,” he explains to New Lines Magazine’s Faisal Al Yafai. Post-Cold War triumphalism was at its apex, and in those heady days, it seemed that there was nothing left to stop the United States from spreading democracy and human rights around the world. “And that was incredibly appealing to lots of Americans, especially young people like me.”

But today, Moyn, now a professor of Law and History at Yale University and one of America’s most prominent public intellectuals, is a fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a cross-partisan think-tank urging restraint in US foreign policy. It’s a significant shift from the politics of his youth. Like many Americans, he watched neoconservative American interventions turn repeatedly to catastrophe in Iraq, Afghanistan and, he contends, Libya. “And so I began to conclude that maybe great powers, using force for a good cause — allegedly — always made the world not better, but worse,” he says. “I think a lot of us made a big mistake in identifying America with humanity.”

The shift in Moyn’s views reflect a growing discontent within American politics on the use of force abroad — and not only among the left-of-center. As a presidential candidate, Donald Trump became the first major Republican politician to condemn the invasion of Iraq. In doing so, he paved the way for the rise of the ‘America First’ wing of the party — a far-right, illiberal faction that has risen to dominance in recent years. 

“It's an incredibly interesting moment,” says Moyn. “I think the Republican party has completely given up neoconservatism and, and really no major force in the Republican Party anymore backs those sorts of ideas, which is why neocons for many years now have been reorienting to the Democratic Party.”

Though they share a deep suspicion of American power, Moyn sees himself as having little in common with the new ideals of the Republican right. “If you're on the left, like me,” he says, “You resist the idea that when you call for less war, that you're committed to isolationism. You might be committed to a better internationalism.” 

“One of the attractions of the isolationist views that the Republicans are embracing is that they're simple,” he adds. “It's easier to sell that position to a fickle public, on Fox News.”

Produced by Joshua Martin 

“We gathered at my grandparents; house, because it was far away from any strategic location that might be targeted by the coalition,” she tells New Lines magazine’s Rasha Al Aqeedi, who also lived through the war. “I was listening to the clock ticking. It sounded very slow, like it was just dragging itself out to stop this war from happening.”

But her family couldn’t avoid the presence of the foreign troops forever. At first it wasn’t so bad — Ghazi recalls soldiers handing out food and toys to neighborhood children. Yet things soon changed as the occupiers fought to quell the mounting resistance. When a passing American convoy was attacked, her best friend, Raghad, was killed in front of her in the ensuing shootout. “They just randomly opened fire, and she fell on the ground, and she died instantly.” 

The Americans recorded her death as “collateral damage.” 

“For me, it hurts,” Ghazi remembers. “Knowing that she was just buried as a statistic. As a number.”

As the violence intensified, many Iraqis made the painful choice to flee the country. After her father’s cousin was tortured to death by sectarian militants, Ghazi’s own family eventually came to the same decision. “I cried, and I said, ‘But you said we will never go on to leave,’” she recalls. “We came to the United States, and I was in a state of denial. … How do I live in America now? This country who invaded us?”

Today, she still lives in the U.S. She has visited Iraq, but after nearly two decades of war, she no longer recognizes it as the home she left behind. “So I decided that my heart is in Iraq,” she says. “But I'm still living here today, because I want to offer my little girl a better life.”

“I don't want her to suffer or be through what we have all been through.”

Produced by Joshua Martin and Christin El-Kholy 

“Early cyberpunk writers like William Gibson wanted to change that they wanted to change how we viewed the future, because they didn't think we were heading into a good place,” science fiction writer J.D. Harlock tells New Lines magazine’s Lydia Wilson. But today, in the face of global crises like climate change, that warning has lost its edge: “We're just oversaturated with dystopian and post-apocalyptic imagery,” says writer and researcher Elia Ayoub. “It's very easy today to imagine the apocalypse. And so I think there's been this growing need to have something beyond cyberpunk.”

Something, perhaps, like solarpunk, a literary and art movement which imagines a future where humanity actually succeeds in solving its major challenges, like global warming and inequality. Though it has retained cyberpunk’s focus on the social consequences of technology, solarpunk is optimistic, imagining a utopian future where humanity has the potential to work through its problems. If cyberpunk was the warning, solarpunk hopes to be the solution.

“If we want to imagine what we want as an alternative to the things that we oppose, we need to literally be imagining it, we need to exercise that muscle, so to speak,” says Ayoub. “What is this vision that we are fighting for? What does it look like? What does it feel like? How does it feel to live in such a society?”

“The point of solarpunk is that it's a radical solution to radical times,” agrees Harlock. “We're going to be forced into these radical solutions, whether we're willing to go along with it or not, because the world can't really continue the way it has been for the last 30 years.”

Produced by Joshua Martin and Christin El-Kholy 

Gabriel Gatehouse, an award-winning foreign correspondent with the BBC, recognized the man in the photos. He had met him just months before, while covering the 2020 election. Dismissing the man as nothing more than a fringe weirdo, he had passed up the chance to interview him. That same man was now the face of the Capitol riot. 

“It bothered me, because I realized that I had not given his story,” Gatehouse tells New Lines magazine’s Faisal Al Yafai.  “That was the question I hadn't asked myself: There must be a reason why he believes this. It's not true. But it means something. What is it telling us about the world that we live in?”

That was the question Gatehouse set out to find answers to on “The Coming Storm,” a  podcast series he made with the BBC. 

“We reach for conspiracy theories when the world doesn't make sense to us,” he says. Distrust in traditional media and government institutions — not entirely unwarranted — has led many to reject what they say entirely, Gatehouse explains. “And they feel like the internet has put this powerful tool in their hands, to connect with people and uncover the hidden truth. And I think they genuinely believe it.”

QAnon itself may burn out or at least change into something new. But Gatehouse suspects it may not matter all that much. Something else will just take its place. 

“QAnon was like the match that lit the fire,” he says. “And the fire is now raging, and it is going to keep on burning, I think, until something quite fundamental changes.”

“Citizens are tired of simply repeating and rinsing electoral cycles. So they want elections that lead to governance, not just governance, but good governance, and the benefits of having democratic processes,” Oby Ezekwesili tells New Lines magazine’s Kwangu Liwewe. 

“People actually boasted that they didn't waste their time to go and vote, because they're all the same. That was the basic premise on which people didn't waste their time with our democracy. And it's not just in Africa, it's actually across the continent.”

But elections have consequences, especially in a country like Nigeria. In an effort to curtail attempts at corruption related to the elections, the Central Bank of Nigeria, working with the Independent National Electoral Commission, announced that the country will move to a cashless economy and that the current naira notes will no longer be valid in the days close to the elections. But this creates its own set of systemic issues for low-income groups who rely on cash transactions. Ezekwesili, who is the senior economic adviser of the Africa Economic Development Policy Initiative and the former vice president of the World Bank (Africa region), predicts that this will affect Nigeria’s productivity in the months ahead. 

For now, she is among those who remain hopeful that this election has the potential to deliver what Nigerians ultimately want: accountability, economic growth, human capital development, infrastructure to support their needs as citizens as well as businesses and a better environment for doing business. And though Ezekwesili says that the presidential candidates put forth by the incumbent All Progressives’ Congress (APC) and long-dominant People’s Democratic Party (PDP) simply don’t resonate with the culture of good governance that citizens want to see, it is ultimately up to those citizens to make the decision that will move their country, and indeed the continent, forward.

“The less attention that citizens pay to democracy, the more that they should be ready to take any consequences of their absence from a process that is actually defined by the level of participation,” Ezekwesili says. “But it is vital, it is critical for us to have a peaceful election —  Nigeria is too big to fail.”

And so when polls open Saturday morning, the elections will be watched closely — even by those not participating in them, whether in Nigeria or abroad.

Produced by Faisal Al Yafai, Sabrine Baiou and Christin El-kholy

“I'll never forget that night,” Olesya Khromeychuk tells New Lines magazine’s Amie Ferris-Rotman, as she looks back on it almost a year later. A historian and the director of the Ukraine Institute London, Khromeychuk says that her shock soon turned to defiance and determination. “We were all prepared for an escalation. We expected it to happen.”

The invasion, she points out, was not the beginning. It was the culmination of centuries of repression and eight years of war — a war which started when Russia began arming separatist paramilitaries in the Donbas region, in response to the overthrow of the Kremlin-backed Yanukovich regime during the 2014 Maidan revolution. 

“My brother was the first one who warned me of it when he returned to the frontline after his first deployment,” she says. “He was absolutely certain that it was going to escalate. All of my veteran friends said the same thing. It was just a matter of time.” Yet Khromeychuk’s brother never lived to see it. He was killed in action in 2017, five years before his prediction came tragically true. 

She wrote a book about him, called The Death of a Soldier Told by His Sister. “I wrote it in order to try and raise awareness about this forgotten war,” she recalls. At the time of his death, the Donbas war had faded from view in the eyes of the rest of the world. 

“It took a full-scale war for the world to actually discover Ukraine.”

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Since 1993, Chopra has been covering India’s cinema industry — or industries — and is the founder and editor-in-chief of the digital platform Film Companion. In the past, she tells New Lines magazine’s Surbhi Gupta, the Indian movie culture was dominated by the goliath that is Bollywood, the Hindi-language industry. Yet Indian film is larger than Bollywood alone. “Every other state has its own thriving, regional cinema, with its own local stars,” she explains. 

With the rise of streaming, a trend accelerated by the Covid pandemic, those regional cinema industries have burst through the boundaries of state borders. “We all discovered the brilliance of Malayalam cinema and how Telugu cinema does the sort of over-the-top commercial film in such a brilliant way, or all the kinds of really exciting stuff happening in Tamil cinema or Kannada cinema,” says Chopra. “We are no longer fixating on what region of India a film comes from. We are all watching everything.”

And it isn’t only domestic audiences who are watching, either. The Telugu language movie “RRR” was a surprise hit with international audiences, including in the United States, where it won several awards. “Honestly, I've never seen anything like it for any other Indian film,” Chopra says. “It's not just playing in the U.S.; it's running to packed houses in Japan.”

But back in India, not everyone has been celebrating. At a time of rising nationalistic fervor, the movie is one of several to draw criticism from those who believe such films are fanning the flames. Chopra is skeptical. “Films are not removed from society,” she says. “That is the current mood, and that is what films will reflect.”

For better or for worse, film and society are inextricably linked. “You have to understand that films in India are not just entertainment, right? It's a way of life.”

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“It's weird that we're both considered conservative,” French remarks to New Lines’ Faisal Al Yafai. “Someone can say that they're a Republican, and it won't necessarily tell you their view of individual liberty or their view of the power and role of government and economic affairs or their view of foreign policy. That's how divided the right is right now.”

The author of the book “Divided We Fall: America’s Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation,” French has spent the past few years increasingly worried by the intensity of partisanship that now characterizes U.S. politics. “I think it's a public service to humanize each other,” he says. But that was precisely Ahmari’s objection.

“The right is, I would say, by and large on Ahmari’s side,” explains French. “In other words, this idea that we're not going to play by gentlemen's rules here. We're going to roll up our sleeves and we're gonna have at it.” From the point of view of Ahmari and his fellow travelers, that partisanship is a feature, not a bug. Feeling increasingly out of step with the direction of American society, French argues that they have embraced an uncompromising, ends-justify-the-means approach to politics embodied by politicians like Trump or his potential rival Ron DeSantis — even to the point where some are questioning their commitment to democracy itself. "Many folks are not necessarily after majority rule at all.”

It’s a line of thinking that extends beyond the realm of the strategic and into the intellectual.“This is sort of where you're going to see the classical liberal versus authoritarian approach,” he explains. “The more authoritarian approach takes a very negative view of individual liberty, because they argue it breeds individualism, which fractures, community bonds and ultimately harms all of us. What Ahmari and others are saying is, ‘Well, when people fail in their responsibility to exercise liberty virtuously, then the government has to step in and eradicate that liberty.’ And I firmly disagree with that.”

So that may be what the division comes down to — power vs. persuasion. “And it's so weird that in our politics, we've become so polarized that a lot of people just scorn persuasion entirely,” French says. 

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The images in question were medieval paintings of the Prophet Muhammad. At the time it was produced, the art was intended to be celebratory. However, due to shifting religious practices, many Muslims have come to consider such depictions of the prophet to be forbidden or offensive. López Prater says that she tried to be mindful of these sensitivities and warned students before displaying them. But after a complaint was lodged with the administration, university officials turned on her and her contract was subsequently canceled.

After Christiane Gruber, a professor of Islamic art at the University of Michigan, wrote an essay in New Lines condemning the university’s actions, López Prater’s story became a national controversy. In this podcast with New Lines magazine’s Rasha Elass, they discuss the rich variety of artistic traditions within Islam and unpack the complicated web of factors behind the current controversy. 

“These anxieties around images of the Prophet Muhammad started to really emerge over the course of the 20th century,” Gruber says. Attitudes among Muslims have varied widely across time and place, and aniconic beliefs were far from universal historically. She traces modern concerns back to very recent origins — to controversies over disrespectful cartoons published in Charlie Hebdo in France and the Jyllands Post in Denmark. Such depictions should not be conflated with the depictions found in Islamic art, she argues: “The intent behind those cartoons was to shock. And of course it overlapped with xenophobia.”

But another big part of the problem, López Prater says, comes from the increased marketization of higher education in recent years. “Colleges and universities have adopted a customer-service model,” she explains. “They’ve slashed tenure track positions in favor of cheap adjunct labor. Meanwhile, that is accompanied by administrative bloat.” That trend, she suggests, has encouraged institutions to prioritize financial and reputational concerns over academic enquiry and enabled officials to treat academic staff as disposable. 

“There is this hugely tragic irony that the administration was trying to sweep this issue under the rug through the quick dismissal of an adjunct professor,” she adds. “And instead have been having to reckon with a long history of racist and Islamophobic events on their college campus and within the Twin Cities and within our country.”

Monica Marks, an assistant professor of Middle East politics at New York University Abu Dhabi, has been a keen observer of Tunisian politics for over a decade. “I think if we're going to really understand Saied’s ‘self-coup’ in 2021, what led to it and whether or not Tunisia can return to some sort of democratic path, we have to grapple with the so-called ‘Ennahda problem,’” she tells New Lines magazine’s Erin Clare Brown.

Ennahda is Tunisia’s Islamist party. After the Arab Spring swept away the regime of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, the party emerged as the new democracy’s foremost political force. But the optimism of the revolution soon gave way to disappointment. It was in the face of corruption and economic woes that many Tunisians turned to a demagogue like Saied. “They claimed that Ennahda was primarily or even single-handedly responsible for the country's failures to make good on its revolutionary promises of 2011,” says Marks. 

Likewise, many secular Tunisians fear that the party’s relatively moderate platform is a front for a more sinister agenda. They point to Erdogan in Turkey, whose stated commitment to secularism fell away the moment it became unnecessary. In Marks’ view, “When a lot of people remember that and say, well, listen, there's no reason to think Ennahda wouldn't do the same thing.”

But whatever reservations the opposition may have about working with Islamists, they may have to if they want to challenge Saied’s autocratic rule. “Do I think that there's a future for democratic politics in Tunisia without Ennahda? Absolutely not,” says Marks. “The fact remains that Ennahda is the only political party that can mobilize big numbers on the streets.” Without a broad united front, the dream of the 2011 revolution may well be dead for good.

“Exiting dictatorship relies on building cross-ideological opposition coalitions,” she adds. “There is strength in unity.”

Produced by Joshua Martin and Erin Clare Brown

The use of the word horde, she says, was quite intentional, given the negative connotations associated with the word today: “It's a very old word especially in Asian culture and Indo-Asian languages,” she tells New Lines magazine’s Faisal Al Yafai. “The word itself means an organized nomadic state. I think it's important to think about the words we use and, you know, how we can change the meaning.”

Historians have to put their bias aside and be fair in examining the record, she says, which can help us start to see the benefits and rationale behind the Mongols’ decisions. And there are lessons we can learn from the Mongols about how to strike a balance in our relationship to the natural environment and how to combat xenophobia: So long as they swore allegiance to the khan, the Mongols didn’t attempt to force their religion or way of life on their subjects.

But Favereau rejects any romanticized view of nomadic living.

“I know how difficult nomadic life can be. So the idea is not to say, ‘Oh, this is the ideal way of living.” Instead, when looking at past nomadic empires like the Mongols — and nomadic societies still in existence today — we can begin to envision different possibilities for living and doing today.

“It's important to know that it was not always like this,” she says.

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The Russian invasion of Ukraine was, for many, the defining story of 2022. A year on, it’s easy to forget how shocked the world was when Vladimir Putin’s forces pushed across the border and along the road to Kyiv. But even in those first weeks, many signs already hinted at the direction the war would take. As Ukraine pushed back, the extent of the rot in the Russian armed forces became increasingly clear, as did the evidence of atrocities against civilians. 

But while Ukraine dominated headlines, conflicts elsewhere went increasingly ignored. In Ethiopia, the central government’s wars in the regions of Tigray and Oromia were fought with no less brutality than the war in Ukraine. In the face of the international community’s apathy, peace seemed a distant prospect. And yet in November, government and Tigrayan forces did manage to reach a peace agreement. The war in Oromia, however, appears only to be intensifying. 

The year 2022 also marked a historic anniversary — a century since the fall of the Ottoman Empire. For better or for worse, its rise, 600-year reign and ultimate collapse left an undeniable mark on the vast swathe of territories it once ruled. The Empire might be gone, but its legacy remains, serving as a reminder that the past is never really past. Similarly, the death of Queen Elizabeth II in September was another perfect case in point, pulling 70 years’ worth of history into the public consciousness and provoking fierce debates across the Commonwealth about what that history meant. 

Such battles over history have become increasingly prominent in recent years, and 2022 continued that trend. For strongmen like Putin, Ethiopia’s Ahmed Abiy and others, these battles have proved to be a crucial part of their political strategy. In an age in which old certainties about history, identity and nation no longer hold firm, such autocrats and would-be autocrats offer a seductive promise: to turn back the clock to a simpler time. 

If the past year is anything to go by, 2023 will be anything but. 

“It really was like being taught a new language,” she tells New Lines’ Faisal Al Yafai on The Lede. “Almost overnight, you’re told that all of these names that you had for things are now different—you have different names and different categories and different ways of making sense of the world.”

They talk about how to see the gap between ideology and reality, where people look for certainty in uncertain times and what it actually means to be free. 

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Bill Browder, author of two books about Russia (including his latest, “Freezing Order”) and CEO of Hermitage Capital Management, was once one of the largest foreign investors in Russia and has seen the country go through pivotal changes before. But during his time in Russia, massive corruption was revealed in some of the companies that Hermitage had invested in. Browder knew he couldn’t continue to turn a blind eye to what the oligarchs and corrupt officials were doing.

“So I started to do what are known as naming and shaming campaigns, where we would research how these people went about doing the stealing, and then share the research with the international media,” he tells New Lines magazine’s Amie Ferris-Rotman. By 2005, Browder had been expelled from Russia after having his offices raided and being declared a threat to national security. 

One young Russian lawyer named Sergei Magnitsky investigated the raids, reporting on the subsequent $230 million fraud involving Russian tax officials. In retaliation, Magnitsky was arrested, tortured for 358 days and beaten to death in Russian police custody. This tragedy marked a pivotal moment in Browder’s life and a turning point in his career. “I've made it my life's work to go after the people who killed him to make sure they face justice. I can use these skills to try to help all of these new victims as best as I can.” One result is the Magnitsky Act, which freezes the assets and bans the visas of human rights violators. It became law in the U.S. in 2012, and 35 other countries have since adopted its standards. 

Browder continues working tirelessly to expose the web of corruption among Russian leadership. “There's two ways you can fight the Russians: You can fight them with tanks, which I have no expertise in, and you can fight them in the banks. And I'm one of the people who knows more about this than just about anybody.”

It’s easy to see why today Browder is one of the Kremlin's biggest enemies and a thorn in Vladimir Putin’s side. 

According to Browder, there’s still plenty of corruption left to uncover, not least of which stems  from Putin himself. He calls the war in Ukraine “a war of distraction,” aimed at redirecting the potential backlash over this to a foreign enemy. “There’s nothing new about this. Dictators have done this, you know, through eons.” And the West ought to bear responsibility for enabling Putin, if not encouraging him. Now the sanctions are too little, too late.

“This is probably the biggest misconception that most Western policymakers and politicians have: that there is some kind of end game, that there's a negotiated settlement,” Browder says. “That if Putin gets X and Y, he'll be happy. And then we can all go and live in peace. But I don't believe there's any chance whatsoever of a negotiated settlement.” 

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Those were the words on Tsitsi Dangarembga’s placard when she was arrested in July 2020 for a peaceful protest against Zimbabwe’s government. Recently she was convicted on a charge of inciting public violence for that act. And yet, the award-winning novelist, playwright, poet and filmmaker— named one of the Top 25 Most Influential Women of 2022 by the Financial Times — hesitates to label herself as an activist.

“I do not call myself an activist, but I call myself somebody who believes in citizen engagement as a responsible citizen of the country,” she tells New Lines magazine’s Kwangu Liwewe. “I think that is an idea that they simply do not want to prevail in Zimbabwe. They cannot afford to have increasing numbers of Zimbabweans thinking of themselves as responsible citizens who need to be engaged.”

Dangarembga is referring to what she calls Zimbabwe’s current military dictatorship, which came to power after November 2017, when Robert Mugabe was removed and replaced by Emmerson Mnangagwa as president and party leader of ZANU-PF. While Dangarembga is resolute in her view of those events, she recognizes that not all Zimbabweans share her interpretation. To her, this signals the skill with which the military manipulated the narrative, getting people out into the streets to celebrate the coup.

“Zimbabweans will debate anything from here to heaven,” she contends. “They were able to pretend it was not a coup. But what happened was a coup.”

While she recognizes that the economic situation in Zimbabwe is dire—and much worse now than during Mugabe’s time—she argues that this is not due to mismanagement, as some might suggest. Rather, it is a deliberate attempt to force Zimbabweans to rely on the ZANU-PF for basic survival resources. So why haven’t the Zimbabweans revolted? It has nothing to do with weakness, says Dangaremba.

“Zimbabweans are afraid that if they go against the government, the military will retaliate. I think that Zimbabweans have been so oppressed that they are no longer able to access the necessary agency. Yet they are the ultimate power.”

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But Skorzeny’s story didn’t end there. He escaped prison and fled to Franco’s Spain before continuing his career in the shadowy world of Cold War intelligence. He became a military adviser to the Spanish, Egyptian and Argentinian governments, and spent time as a bodyguard for Argentina’s first lady, Eva Peron. Over the course of his post-war career, he worked for the CIA, West German intelligence and even Israel’s Mossad. 

“As a CIA official wrote after the war, old intelligence hands are always attracted back to the job they know best,” says Danny Orbach, a historian at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the author of “Fugitives: A History of Nazi Mercenaries During the Cold War.” This is why, he tells New Lines Magazine's Faisal Al Yafai, Skorzeny and those like him ended up as mercenaries, informants and spies. 

And there were many like him. “The vast majority of Nazi criminals either got off with meager  punishments, or just escaped completely unharmed,” Orbach says. As the Second World War ended and the Cold War began, intelligence services on both sides of the Iron Curtain quickly shifted their priorities from hunting down Nazi war criminals to recruiting them, in hopes of getting some sort of advantage over their new adversaries. “People are very, very quick about forgetting past hatreds when a new enemy comes on the agenda,” Orbach remarks. 

This, he explains, was why so many agencies were willing to work with such men — some of whom, like Alois Brunner or Klaus Barbie, were personally responsible for hundreds of thousands of killings during the Holocaust. The calculus was as simple as it was cynical: “What's more important: the past or the future?”

“The condemnation usually comes after there is no longer a practical need in employing them,” he adds.

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“Truth is definitely a slippery idea,” she tells New Lines Magazine's Faisal Al Yafai. “The way truth works, especially in democratic settings, is that we don't authorize any one person, or one institution, or even one method, say, as the way to know something. That is wonderful in certain ways. But of course, it also makes knowing anything very messy.”

But while the truth may never have been as certain as many like to imagine, today’s degree of polarization nevertheless poses a new and dire challenge.“To have a good debate, we have to first agree that there's a problem,” says Rosenfeld. “If we can't even agree on something like the unemployment rate, democracy starts to fall apart.”

“The law doesn't help us much here,” she adds. “The technology doesn't help us much here. We're catching up with a phenomenon that we didn't know we were unleashing when we did."

Produced by Joshua Martin