Serious research asks open-ended questions, and often produces insight but no clear answers. Every now and then, however, good-faith research hits the jackpot. That’s what happened when Century International fellow Peter Salisbury assembled a team that asked a deceptively simple question: how do Yemen’s Houthi rebels smuggle parts and build drones?

The answer is a blockbuster research project that changes our understanding of the current war with Iran, and resoundingly demonstrates to policymakers that no amount of war can put the genie of modern arms supply chains back in the bottle.

While the United States and its partners rely on brittle legacy strategies—billion-dollar weapons deals and unachievable plans to bomb enemies into total submission—those same adversaries are deftly adapting their ways of war to the modern global economy. 

On this episode of Order from Ashes, Peter shares how his team tackled a question about Iran’s drone network and followed their research to its logical, and global, implications. No amount of war can solve political problems or eliminate states and state-supported movements, but Peter’s research suggests some steps that modern states must take if they want to operate in the modern globalized war economy. 

“Beyond the Axis” will change your reading of today’s war and peace negotiations in the Middle East—and for much longer than that, will shape your perspective on the unstoppable, creative process by which militants and militant states are able to compete with vastly better-resourced powers.

Related Reading

• Report, “Beyond the Axis,” by Peter Salisbury
• Launch event, “Worldwide Webs of Weapons: Beyond the Axis.”
• Report, “From Smugglers to Supply Chains: How Yemen’s Houthi Movement Became a Global Threat,” by Peter Salisbury, Henry Thompson, and Veena Ali-Khan. 

Participants

Peter Salisbury is a fellow at Century International.

Thanassis Cambanis is director of Century International. 

Date: Tuesday, July 7, 2026

Episode: Order from Ashes 118

President Donald Trump launched his full-scale war on Iran in February without an announcement, a clear cause of war, or any declared goals. In similar fashion, the on-and-off hostilities came to some sort of close, for now, with a “memorandum of understanding” announced on June 15. 

Six fellows at Century International join Order from Ashes for a first look at the deal. It’s not a peace treaty or even a formal ceasefire. Like much of what passes for diplomacy in recent years, it’s ad hoc, not binding, and includes no enforcement mechanism.

If it’s not a real peace deal, what is it? Will Israel keep fighting expansionist wars anyway, or withdraw from Lebanon? How will the wealthy monarchies in the Gulf position themselves now that the war has punctured their branding as a safe haven removed from geopolitics? 

Century International’s fellows help make sense of the agreement and what might change short of an outright, lasting end to the war.

Participants

Peter Salisbury is a fellow at Century International.

Dahlia Scheindlin is a fellow at Century International.

Nicholas Danforth is a fellow at Century International.

Frederick Deknatel is a fellow at Century International.

Rohan Advani is a fellow at Century International.

Sam Heller is a fellow at Century International.

Thanassis Cambanis is director of Century International. 

Date: Wednesday, June 17, 2026

Episode: Order from Ashes 117

Israel’s wars since October 7 have produced a great deal of death, displacement and destruction, but very little security. Nathan Brown, a political scientist and longtime scholar of hte Middle East, has cut through the confusion of recent history with a penetrating and provocative set of eight theses.

Drawing on Israeli statements and discourse, he outlined in a recent essay the elements of Israel’s new doctrine. Prior to October 7, Brown argues, Israel used warfare as a means to a political outcome. Today, Israelis plan for war itself to be the end state.

On this episode of Order from Ashes, he elaborates on his piercing description of Israel’s new doctrine, and why it’s not likely to produce security or stability for anyone.

Readings

Nathan Brown, “Rubble is Israel’s Doctrine, Not a Case of Improvisation,” Carnegie Endowment, May 21, 2026.

Laura Silver and Laura Clancy, “Most people across 36 countries have negative views of Israel and little confidence in Netanyahu,” Pew Research, June 4, 2026 

Participants

Nathan J. Brown is professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University and a non-resident senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Thanassis Cambanis is director of Century International. 

Date: Wednesday, June 10, 2026

Episode: Order from Ashes 116

The nature of peace talks and conflict resolution has radically changed. Historically, most wars end with political settlements, usually the result of formal negotiations. The prototypical modern peace talks were hosted a major or mid-size power that wasn’t a party to the conflict, negotiated by professional diplomats and technical experts, and implemented with some international oversight by the United Nations or a group of governments.

Recent wars have departed from this script. Negotiations these days occur in all manner of venues. There are secret or semisecret talks by unofficial emissaries, sometimes known as “track two diplomacy.” There are official talks managed by tiny powers like Qatar and Oman, all the way to powerful but new players in the peacemaking space, like China. And official superpower diplomacy in the current era looks nothing like the old: today, the US president’s personal lawyer and son in law, with no staff, try to negotiate peace agreements and simultaneously private deals for the Trump Organization.

Michael Wahid Hanna has followed many of the peace talks, successful and failed, of recent decades. On this episode of Order from Ashes, he takes stock of how the peace negotiations have changed, and whether we should downgrade our expectations for what diplomacy can 

Participants

Michael Wahid Hanna is US program director at International Crisis Group.

Thanassis Cambanis is director of Century International. 

Date: Thursday, June 4, 2026

Episode: Order from Ashes 115

After the assassination of its leader in September 2024, Hezbollah sank to its weakest point since its founding in 1982. Supporters began to doubt Hezbollah’s capabilities, and detractors—inside Lebanon and abroad—planned to dismantle the group. In March of this year, Lebanon’s government outlawed Hezbollah’s powerful militia. Many of Hezbollah’s competitors and critics declared the end of the group’s military capability and political base.

But Hezbollah’s strength has returned. This spring, as Israel has expanded its occupation of southern Lebanon, Hezbollah has fought effectively. It’s all looking very much like a comeback.

Century International fellow Sima Ghaddar has closely tracked Hezbollah’s constituents and power, and shares a granular look at how the group has revived, and how researchers can assess the notoriously opaque organization.

Related reading

• Nathan Brown, “Rubble is Israel’s Doctrine, Not a Case of Improvisation,” Carnegie Endowment, May 21, 2026
• Sam Heller, “Trump’s Lebanon Negotiations Are Breaking the Country,” Foreign Policy, May 15, 2026
• Sima Ghaddar, “Doubting the Party, Revering Its Ideology: Hezbollah’s Battered Constituencies Reckon with a Year of Loss.” 
• US Treasury, “Treasury Targets Hizballah-Aligned Officials Obstructing Peace and Disarmament,” May 21, 2026
• Mohamad Bazzi, “Is This What War Looks Like Now?” Guardian, April 24, 2026

Participants

SIma Ghaddar is a fellow at Century International and a sociologist whose research spans humanitarianism, the politics of international aid, political sociology, and popular mobilization in the Middle East and the Global South. She holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of California, Los Angeles. Her dissertation, “Brokers of the Humanitarian Interface: The Politics of Aid in Lebanon’s Urban Peripheries,” examines humanitarian aid, transnational NGO governance, and the intersections of patronage, clientelism, and global aid systems in Lebanon. She is also a policy researcher specializing in Middle East politics. Her policy research focuses on hybrid armed actors, regional Shia politics, and social movements in Lebanon.

Thanassis Cambanis is director of Century International. 

Date: Tuesday, May 25, 2026

Episode: Order from Ashes 114

After five months of negotiations, Iraq’s power brokers have agreed on a completely unknown compromise candidate for the country’s new prime minister. Ali al-Zaidi, a businessman with no experience in politics or public administration, took over leadership of Iraq on May 14 as the country faces multiple emergencies. Iraq can’t sell its oil because of the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz and is running out of money to pay salaries. Iraqi militias, beyond the government’s control, have been attacking Saudi Arabia and targets inside Iraq. And Iraq just found out that its supposed ally, the United States, has been covering up the existence of multiple Israeli bases that were operating in the Iraqi desert.

Zaidi, perhaps the weakest prime minister to take office since the U.S. invasion in 2003, faces a sovereignty crisis of epic proportions from his first day in office.

Sajad Jiyad, Century International’s fellow in Baghdad, analyzes the many challenges for Iraq’s new prime minister.

Participants

Sajad Jiyad is a fellow at Century International. 

Thanassis Cambanis is director of Century International. 

Date: Tuesday, May 19, 2026

Episode: Order from Ashes 113

The United States has resolved a long debate about its own decline by attacking Iran and failing to achieve any of Washington’s war aims. Winning and losing might not be the most useful paradigm, but for students of global power the war marks a watershed: America can’t simply have its way by force — and pays a price along with the rest of the world for global conflict and economic disruption.

Century International fellow Peter Salisbury has been studying complex global supply chains and financial instruments developed for the express purpose of escaping American scrutiny and sanctions. A growing back end of global power and economic activity serves major states, like China, middle powers like Iran, and a large community of economic actors that operate simultaneously in legal and illegal spaces.

What does the world look like after America’s self-inflicted defeat in the Iran war? How do power and economics function when states (and others) are free to pursue any goals they want and experiment with blunt force?

Participants

Peter Salisbury is a fellow at Century International.

Thanassis Cambanis is director of Century International. 

Date: Tuesday, May 12, 2026

Episode: Order from Ashes 112

Mohamad Bazzi was born in southern Lebanon in 1975, and spent his first years in the border town of Bint Jbail. In the half century since, his family’s village has been invaded and destroyed multiple times.

Today, Bazzi’s extended family shelters in the far-flung spots where they have sought shelter during the war that began at the end of February, while Bazzi takes stock of what is drearily familiar about the latest round of violence —and what is shockingly new.

This latest Israeli war against Lebanon has transgressed the norms of war to an unprecedented degree, with a staggering level of destruction in southern Lebanon. Israeli leaders have proclaimed their intention to depopulate the border area, where more than half a million Lebanese people live.

The world has gotten used to a steady stream of war, displacement, and avoidable death in the Middle East, but Bazzi argues that Israel’s war on Lebanon, modeled after Gaza, has crossed a line. The United States and its allies could stop Israel’s wars—and they should.

Related reading

• Mohamad Bazzi, “Is This What War Looks Like Now?” Guardian, April 24, 2026

Participants

Mohamad Bazzi is director of the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies and a journalism professor at New York University. He is the former Middle East bureau chief at Newsday.

Thanassis Cambanis is director of Century International. 

Date: Tuesday, May 5, 2026

Episode: Order from Ashes 111

The Arab monarchies of the Gulf invested colossal wealth to build modern, diversified economic power. But their growing power depended on safety in the Persian Gulf, which in turn depended on an American military umbrella. Now, Trump’s war on Iran has shown just how flimsy that umbrella really is.

Still, these cash-rich and economically powerful monarchies retain tremendous influence as a cornerstone of the global economy and the Middle Eastern order.

Rohan Advani, a sociologist and Century International fellow, offers a tour of the political economy of Arab monarchies of the Gulf during a period of shifting world order that threatens to reduce their influence. 

Gulf wealth can no longer rely on the monarchies’ reputation for absolute peace and security, but will continue to act as a central force. What shifts can we expect in Gulf economic power and security in an era of declining American influence and increasing armed conflict in the Middle East?

Participants

Rohan Advani is a fellow at Century International. He is writing his doctoral dissertation at the University of California-Los Angeles on the financial tools of state power..

Thanassis Cambanis is director of Century International. 

Date: Tuesday, April 28, 2026

Episode: Order from Ashes 110

The forever costs of America’s war on Iran could disfigure economic life for generations to come, around the world and in the United States.

In an earlier era, war spending helped pull the United States out of the Great Depression by pulling unemployed farmers into the cities and retraining them for manufacturing. Even through the Cold War, many Americans viewed war spending as a major driver of high-quality manufacturing jobs and consumer well-being.

The war economy since 9/11 has been different. The wars themselves drive antidemocratic currents and undermine well-being even for people, like most Americans, who are far from the battlefields. These wars also undermine economic life in less obvious ways, like incentivizing endless private sector investment in defense rather than more productive industries.

Eamon Kircher-Allen joins Order from Ashes to explain the profound distortions of the modern American war economy.

Inflation and a possible recession are only the most immediate economic costs of the Iran war. As the forever wars after 9/11 proved, runaway war spending disfigures every aspect of the economy. The true long-term costs of this war will be much higher than the price of military operations.

Related article

Commentary: “The Iran War’s Forever Costs Will Far Exceed the Immediate Pain for Consumers,” Century International, by Eamon Kircher-Allen

Reports Referenced

Report: “The Cold War and the U.S. Labor Market,” National Bureau of Economic Research, by Ilyana Kuziemko, Donato A. Onorato & Suresh Naidu

Joseph Stiglitz, “Structural Transformation, Deep Downturns, and Government Policy” (referenced in the podcast by a one-time working title, “Sectoral Dislocations and Long-Run Crises”), National Bureau of Economic Research working paper no. 23794, September 2017.

See also: Joseph Stiglitz et al., “Mobility Constraints, Productivity Trends, and Extended Crises,” Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 83 (2012): 375–93.

Participants

Eamon Kircher-Allen is editor-in-chief at Century International.

Thanassis Cambanis is director of Century International. 

Date: Tuesday, April 21, 2026

Episode: Order from Ashes 109

American policy has not kept up with the punishing realities unleashed by the war President Donald Trump started with Iran. 

Iran and the United States announced a truce, even as they’re still fighting to control shipping through the Strait of Hormuz – and more tellingly, Israel accelerated its attacks on Lebanon the day after the truce supposedly took effect.

A similar disconnect is at play in the negotiations between two powers with opaque decision-making processes and an apparent high tolerance for ambiguity and instability.

Associated Press correspondent Kareem Chehayeb joins Order from Ashes from Lebanon, with a bracing report on the staggering harm to Lebanese society. In the second segment of the podcast, Michael Wahid Hanna from Crisis Group takes stock of the tremendous costs to the world and to the US of Trump’s unjustified war of choice, and what we’ve learned about how the US government is making decisions.

Participants

Kareem Chehayeb is a correspondent with the Associated Press in Lebanon.

Michael Wahid Hanna is the U.S. program director at International Crisis Group.

Thanassis Cambanis is director of Century International. 

Date: Tuesday, April 14, 2026

Episode: Order from Ashes 108

Iraq’s government has maintained friendly relations simultaneously with Iran and the United States. The war launched by President Donald J. Trump at the end of February upended that equilibrium. 

Now the United States is directly at war with some Iraqi militias, and the Iraqi state is caught in the middle, too weak to control the militias, too dependent to antagonize either Washington or Tehran. 

Century International fellow Sajad Jiyad argues that Iraq will try to revive its precarious middle course once the current phase of the war subsides — but that Iraq’s economy and security will suffer unless it can create a state strong enough to operate independently of Iran and the United States.

Participants

Sajad Jiyad is the Iraq fellow at Century International.

Thanassis Cambanis is director of Century International. 

Date: Monday, March 23, 2026

Episode: Order from Ashes 107

Is there an off ramp to the war of choice that Israel and the United States initiated at the end of February? The violence has spiraled across the region, directly threatening hundreds of millions of people in the Middle East, and straining the entire global economy.

Meanwhile, Israeli officials have publicly floated plans to invade southern Lebanon once more.

On this episode of the Order from Ashes podcast we hear from two Century International fellows, Sam Heller in Beirut and Dahlia Scheindlin in Tel Aviv, who provide strategic analysis to contextualize the dizzying cascade of events.

With US support, Israel has embraced an approach that it can only achieve security through total war, with no serious consideration of diplomacy and a political resolution with its neighbors, or with Palestinians in occupied territory. That approach won’t produce enduring security for Israel, but will destabilize the entire Middle East and set the region on course for an unresolved cycle of wars.

Participants

Sam Heller is a Century International fellow in Beirut.

Dahlia Scheindlin is a Century International fellow in Tel Aviv.

Thanassis Cambanis is director of Century International. 

Date: Monday, March 16, 2026

Episode: Order from Ashes 106

Just a week into America’s war of choice on Iran, the costs already are spiraling out of control. The lives lost and broken are the most important cost. But there’s a colossal price tag for waging war, and America’s opening salvo has a number: $5 billion for the first week and a reported $50 billion that the Trump Administration is planning to seek from Congress.

The American defense budget this year is the world’s largest, at $1 trillion. As a point of comparison, it would have cost less than $30 billion to extend health care subsidies to Americans through 2026. 

Analysts have spent decades tallying the costs of America’s forever wars: direct costs in equipment and personal and indirect costs in long term health care. Perhaps the most powerful long-term cost is in opportunities: when the United States pours its resources into warmaking, it starves resources to the spheres that create opportunity and well-being: health care, education, research and development.

William D. Hartung, long-time researcher of the American defense-industrial complex and author of The Trillion-Dollar War Machine joins Order from Ashes this week to survey the staggering costs of the Iran war.

Related reading

Analysis, “The Costs of the War With Iran Will Mount For Decades,” William Hartung, Forbes

Report, “The Trump Administration’s Reckless War in Iran Has Already Cost More Than $5 Billion,” Allison McManus, Center for American Progress

Fact Sheet, “How Much Is the War in Iran Costing American Taxpayers?” Institute for Policy Studies

Roundtable, “War on Iran Was Easy to Start. It Won’t Be Easy to End,” Century International

Open-source tool: The Iran War Cost Ticker

Project: Brown University Costs of War

Participants

William D. Hartung is a senior research fellow at The Quincy Institute. Bill is the co-author, with Ben Freeman, of the recently released The Trillion Dollar War Machine: How Runaway Military Spending Drives America into Foreign Wars and Bankrupts Us at Home.

Thanassis Cambanis is director of Century International. 

Date: Monday, March 8, 2026

Episode: Order from Ashes 105

By the fourth day of its war on choice against Iran, the United States government was offering a shifting and contradictory set of reasons it attacked — to stop Iran from acquiring a nuclear bomb, or because Iran had missiles that could reach the US, or to preempt Iran from responding to Israel's preemptive attack.

It was clear from the start that the United States had no critical national security interest at stake, and that the war violates American and international law. It's also a guaranteed disaster for international security and American standing.

Century International fellow Sam Heller joins the Order from Ashes podcast from Beirut to discuss Hezbollah's entry into the conflict, the new dangers created by the war, and the baffling decision-making in Washington.

Related reading

Commentary, “Attacking Iran Is a Guaranteed Disaster,” Century International, by Thanassis Cambanis

Participants

Sam Heller is a fellow at Century International.

Thanassis Cambanis is director of Century International. 

Date: Wednesday, March 3. 2026

Episode: Order from Ashes 104

In his historically long State of the Union speech, President Donald J. Trump spent just three minutes talking about Iran, saying he would never let Iran develop a nuclear weapon but preferred diplomacy to war.

Meanwhile in the Middle East, Iran and the United States are negotiating, but are also both preparing for war. On this episode of the Order from Ashes podcast, Naysan Rafati grounds the conversation in the realities on the ground, including Iran’s incentives and capabilities, and the substantial dangers of escalation.

Participants

Naysan Rafati is Iran Senior Analyst at International Crisis Group.

Thanassis Cambanis is director of Century International. 

Date: Friday, February 27, 2026

Episode: Order from Ashes 103

Almost as soon as the international liberal order came into being after World War II, detractors began announcing its death or irrelevancy. Some disliked its hypocrisy: the United States and its allies preached democracy and human rights for all, but in practice only guaranteed them for some. Others disliked the restraints that the system placed on states that wanted to dominate or invade neighbors.

But while obituaries for the liberal order are nothing new, the last year has felt truly different. Donald Trump has used his second term to embrace a free-for-all of global competition, with no limits on the use of military and financial power, to pursue narrow, short-term interests. Gone is talk of the common good, universalism, and international law. 

Nicholas Danforth joins a raucous discussion on this episode of Order from Ashes, drawing on his recent essay in Foreign Policy. How much order and liberalism was there, really, to the international pact that prevailed from 1945 until, perhaps, 2025? And is that order really, finally, dead this time around? Are there more just and equitable ways to share a global commons?

Related reading

* Argument: Nick Danforth, “Who Killed the Liberal International Order? A Contested Idea Has Seen Many Alleged Deaths,” Foreign Policy, February 9, 2026

* Report: Nick Danforth, “Beyond Bad Borders: How Nationalism, Imperialism, and Power Politics Shaped the Modern Middle East,”  Century International, October 20, 2025

Participants

Nick Danforth is deputy editor of Foreign Policy and a fellow at Century International.

Thanassis Cambanis is director of Century International. 

Date: Monday, February 16, 2026

Episode: Order from Ashes 102

On this episode of the Order from Ashes podcast, Peter Salisbury reports on his recent trip to the Gulf, new developments in the Yemen war, and the spread of drone and missile technology.

The Houthis have matured with astonishing speed from a traditional militia to a group capable of sourcing parts and building long-range drones. They're also capable of teaching other armed groups how to do the same thing.

One consequence: while the United States is walking away from peacemaking, Gulf powers—including Saudi, the United Arab Emirates, and the Houthis—are all increasing their military interventions in African conflicts.

Related reading

* Report, “From Smugglers to Supply Chains: How Yemen’s Houthi Movement Became a Global Threat,” Century International

Participants

Peter Salisbury is a fellow at Century International.

Thanassis Cambanis is director of Century International. 

Date: Monday, February 9, 2026

Episode: Order from Ashes 101

President Donald Trump’s invasion of Venezuela is just the latest American war initiated with no Congressional authorization. 

According to the Constitution, only Congress can decide to go to war. In practice, however, since 9/11 presidents have enjoyed complete freedom to go to war, or even wage secret and undeclared wars, without authorization from Congress, and with no accountability or oversight.  

On this episode of Order from Ashes, legal expert Brian Finucane explains how Congress could reassert its Constitutional power to decide when America goes to war. 

Finucane charts America’s descent into a norm of illegality in international conflict, how much that abuse of power has cost Americans at home, and how to restore Constitutional checks and balances. 

Participants

Brian Finucane is a senior adviser at International Crisis Group. He previously worked for a decade in the Office of the Legal Adviser at the U.S. Department of State.

Thanassis Cambanis is director of Century International. 

Related reading

* Brian Finucane, “Dissecting the Trump Administration’s Effort to Circumvent the War Powers Resolution for Boat Strikes,” Just Security 

* Brian Finucane, “America Unbound in the Caribbean,” Foreign Affairs

* Report, “Bending the Guardrails: U.S. War Powers after 7 October,” International Crisis Group

Date: Monday, February 2, 2026

Episode: Order from Ashes 100

Syria’s new president, former rebel leader Ahmed al-Sharaa, has just made another quantum leap in establishing his power over Syria, by persuading the United States to let Sharaa take over the Kurdish statelet in northeast Syria.

Sharaa has presented himself as an inclusive agent of change. On this episode of Order from Ashes, Century International fellow Frederick Deknatel discusses Syria's reconstruction agenda, which worries many Syrians and should concern international policymakers as well.

Syria's reconstruction has an estimated cost of up to $400 billion, some twenty times the size of Syria’s GDP, and so far has mirrored many of the authoritarian practices of the deposed Assasd regime.

Without reforms, reconstruction risks ushering in a new era of clientelism and corruption in Syria, benefiting only Sharaa’s allies and international developers, while the Syrian people continue to be locked out of the decisions that will shape their future. 

*Commentary, “Syria’s Reconstruction Risks Cutting Out the Syrian People,” by Frederick Deknatel

Participants:

* Frederick DeKnatel, non-resident fellow, Century International

* Thanassis Cambanis, director, Century International

Episode: Order from Ashes 99

Date: Jan. 26, 2026

Shownotes

Just how badly has American democracy eroded during the first year of the second Trump administration? The Century Foundation’s new United States Democracy Meter objectively analyzes that question—and the answer is discomfiting. 

The index, which is the brainchild of veteran human rights researcher Nate Schenkkan and Century International director Thanassis Cambanis, ranks the health of American democracy on a 100-point scale across 23 indicators. The result: in the first year of Trump 2.0, the United States went from being a passing if imperfect democracy to behaving like an authoritarian state. In fact, American democracy is now at greater risk than at any time since Watergate, and it may even be approaching its pre-Civil Rights Movement nadir. 

Century’s chief of policy programs Angela Hanks joins Schenkkan and Cambanis to assess this dangerous moment for American democracy. The core problem is an all-powerful executive branch, made worse by a pliant Congress, a compromised judiciary, and grand corruption. But civil society, higher education, and rights also severely suffered in 2025. Elections remain mostly free—and a possible way out—but there are storm clouds on that horizon, as well.

* Report, “Century’s New Democracy Meter Shows America Took an Authoritarian Turn in 2025,” by Nate Schenkkan and Thanassis Cambanis

Participants

Nate Schenkkan is an independent human rights researcher. From 2012 to 2025 he worked at Freedom House, most recently as senior director of research. While at Freedom House, he ran the annual index Nations in Transit from 2015 to 2018, and wrote the overview essay for Freedom in the World in 2019.

Angela Hanks is chief of policy programs at The Century Foundation. Angela has extensive experience developing and advancing policies and narratives that promote an inclusive and expansive vision for the economy. Angela most recently served as the associate director of external affairs at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), where she led the bureau’s external engagement strategy to ensure its policy agenda was informed by experts, industry stakeholders, and consumers across the country. 

Thanassis Cambanis is director of Century International. 

Date: Monday, January 19, 2026

Episode: Order from Ashes 98

Order from Ashes returns after a long hiatus. On this episode of the podcast, Zaid Al-Ali and Thanassis Cambanis remember the real lessons of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq—and that history's stark warning for American interventionist fantasies in Venezuela.

Participants

* Zaid Al-Ali, Princeton University School of Public and International Affairs

* Thanassis Cambanis, director, Century International

Zaid Al-Ali is a visiting fellow at Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs and a senior adviser at the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance. Zaid’s first book, ‘The Struggle Iraq’s Future’ was published by Yale University Press in 2014.  His second book, ‘Arab Constitutionalism: The Coming Revolution’ was published by Cambridge University Press in 2022. You can find him on X at @zalali, BlueSky at @zalali.bsky.social, and on his website, zaidalali.com.

Episode: Order From Ashes 97

Date: Monday, January 12, 2026

On this episode of Order from Ashes, Century International fellow Sajad Jiyad explains how Sistani has appealed to a majority of the world’s millions of Shia Muslims with his indirect model of clerical authority, a stark contrast to the competing model of direct clerical rule advanced by his compatriots in Iran. 

Jiyad has published a new political biography,  God’s Man in Iraq: The Life and Leadership of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, which offers the first comprehensive account of Sistani’s legacy and draws on original sources and hundreds of interviews during decades of fieldwork inside Iraq. Jiyad 

Observers of Iraq and of Shia power will find God’s Man in Iraq an incomparable appraisal of Sistani’s legacy—and an invaluable guide to the perilous transition that will follow his tenure.

You can learn more and order copies on the book’s homepage.  God’s Man in Iraq is also available in Arabic.

Read: 

• Commentary: "The Man Who Saved Iraq," by Sajad Jiyad (in English and Arabic)

• Book page: God’s Man in Iraq: The Life and Leadership of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, by Sajad Jiyad
• Arabic book page: رجل الله في العراق

Participants:

• Sajad Jiyad, fellow, Century International
• Thanassis Cambanis, director, Century International

Most attention is understandably focused on Israel, where 1,200 people were killed in a single day, and Gaza, where the death toll is steadily climbing past 11,000, the majority children and women. 

But the wider region is experiencing a level of violence that is cause for alarm: near-daily clashes between Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Israel; steady attacks on the U.S. military in Iraq and Syria; and increasingly bold military initiatives by Yemen’s Houthi rebel forces.

How has the Gaza war changed the wider Middle East? What new dynamics are shaping conflicts and diplomacy among the regional powers and in the region’s many simmering conflicts? How will America’s bear hug of Israel affect other American interests in the Middle East?

Century International fellows Aron Lund, Sam Heller, and Thanassis Cambanis are joined by Michael Wahid Hanna from International Crisis Group to step back from the day-to-day developments of the Gaza war and assess the changing regional context.

Read: 

• Commentary: “It’s Time for a Ceasefire in Gaza—and Then a New Push for Peace,” by Thanassis Cambanis, Dahlia Scheindlin, and Sam Heller
• Commentary: “America Needs to Prevent a Regional War in the Middle East,” by Sam Heller and Thanassis Cambanis

Participants:

• Sam Heller, fellow, Century International
• Aron Lund, fellow, Century International
• Michael Wahid Hanna, director, U.S. program, International Crisis Group
• Thanassis Cambanis, director, Century International

On this episode of Century International’s Order from Ashes podcast, fellow Sam Heller discusses the alarming findings of his report, “Adopt a Ministry: How Foreign Aid Threatens Lebanon’s Institutions.”

As Lebanon’s crisis worsens, foreign donors have stepped in to take over many core functions normally fulfilled by the government. Is this aid, which is vital in the short term, threatening the viability and long-term recovery of Lebanon? 

Donors, aid agencies, Lebanese officials and experts can start by getting honest about the tradeoffs, Sam argues. A first step toward changing the counterproductive aid dynamic requires a full picture of foreign support for Lebanon, so donors and the Lebanese government can coordinate aid to useful ends and not just perpetuate dependency and state breakdown.  

Read: 

• Report: “Adopt a Ministry: How Foreign Aid Threatens Lebanon’s Institutions,” by Sam Heller
• Commentary: “International Aid Keeps Lebanon Afloat. It Could Also Be Destroying Its Institutions,” by Sam Heller [in English and Arabic]

Participants:

• Sam Heller, fellow, Century International
• Thanassis Cambanis, director, Century International

This episode of Order From Ashes is the fourth and final episode in “Shia Power,” a series about the transformation of Shia politics in Iraq, and what Iraq’s experience teaches us about the role of religion in politics everywhere. 

In episode 1 of “Shia Power,” Sajad Jiyad and host Thanassis Cambanis chart the powerful role of religion and the Shia clergy in the creation of a new Iraqi order after Saddam Hussein. In episode 2, Marsin Alshammary draws on her fieldwork in the seminaries of Najaf to argue that clerical authority has not diminished, despite setbacks over the last twenty years. In episode 3, Taif Alkhudary chronicles the revolutionary efforts of the Tishreen protest movement to establish an alternative to religious politics. In episode 4, the final in this series, Ali Al-Mawlawi connects some of today’s sectarian rhetoric to Iraq’s long history of anti-Shia prejudice.

Participants:

• Ali Al-Mawlawi, 
• Thanassis Cambanis, director, Century International

Read:

Report: “Iraqi Shia Factions Are Supposedly ‘Anti-state.’ But State Power Is What They Want,” by Ali Al-Mawlawi

Book: Shia Power Comes of Age

Project: Shia Politics

The Tishreen protests movement, Alkhudary argues, represents an indigenous democratization movement that is resisting the putative democracy put in place after the U.S. invasion. Since 2003, Iraqis have endured corruption, dysfunction, and ethno-sectarian tensions, which the political elite justified as the cost of democracy. The Tishreen movement, while still politically immature, has revealed an alternate path. 

This episode of Order From Ashes is the third in a four-part series about the transformation of Shia politics in Iraq, and what Iraq’s experience teaches us about the role of religion in politics everywhere. 

In episode 1 of “Shia Power,” Sajad Jiyad and host Thanassis Cambanis chart the powerful role of religion and the Shia clergy in the creation of a new Iraqi order after Saddam Hussein. In episode 2, Marsin Alshammary draws on her fieldwork in the seminaries of Najaf to argue that clerical authority has not diminished, despite setbacks over the last twenty years. In episode 3, Taif Alkhudary chronicles the revolutionary efforts of the Tishreen protest movement to establish an alternative to religious politics. In episode 4, the final in this series, Ali Al-Mawlawi connects some of today’s sectarian rhetoric to Iraq’s long history of anti-Shia prejudice.

Participants:

• Taif Alkhudary, research officer, LSE Middle East Center, and PhD candidate, Cambridge
• Thanassis Cambanis, director, Century International

Read:

• Report: “Young Revolutionary Parties Are Still Iraq’s Best Hope for Democracy,” by Taif Alkhudary
• Book: Shia Power Comes of Age
• Project: Shia Politics

Protest movements have rejected religion in politics, while corrupt politicians have sullied the reputations of religious factions. But clerics and their institutions remain powerful players in Iraqi society even as their roles change.

This episode of Order From Ashes is the second in “Shia Power,” a four-part series about the transformation of Shia politics in Iraq, and what Iraq’s experience teaches us about the role of religion in politics everywhere. 

In episode 1 of “Shia Power,” Sajad Jiyad and host Thanassis Cambanis chart the powerful role of religion and the Shia clergy in the creation of a new Iraqi order after Saddam Hussein. In episode 2, Marsin Alshammary draws on her fieldwork in the seminaries of Najaf to argue that clerical authority has not diminished, despite setbacks over the last twenty years. In episode 3, Taif Alkhudary chronicles the revolutionary efforts of the Tishreen protest movement to establish an alternative to religious politics. In episode 4, the final in this series, Ali Al-Mawlawi connects some of today’s sectarian rhetoric to Iraq’s long history of anti-Shia prejudice.

Read:

Report: “Shia Clerics in Iraq Haven’t Lost Their Authority,” by Marsin Alshamary

Book: Shia Power Comes of Age

Project: Shia Politics

Participants:

• Marsin Alshamary, assistant professor of political science, Boston College
• Thanassis Cambanis, director, Century International

This episode of Order From Ashes is the first in “Shia Power,” a four-part series about the transformation of Shia politics in Iraq, and what Iraq’s experience teaches us about the role of religion in politics everywhere. 

A new edited volume from Century International, Shia Power Comes of Age: The Transformation of Islamist Politics in Iraq, 2003–2023, maps the radical transformation of Shia Islamist politics in Iraq over the last two decades. Contributors include Taif AlKhudary, Ali Al-Mawlawi, Marsin Alshamary, Thanassis Cambanis, Maria Fantappie, Fanar Haddad, Sajad Jiyad, Renad Mansour, and Ben Robin-D’Cruz.

Sajad and Thanassi, directors of Century International’s Shia Politics project, reflect on the lessons of Iraq’s Shia Islamists for politicians, policymakers, and researchers.

In episode 1 of “Shia Power,” Sajad Jiyad and host Thanassis Cambanis chart the powerful role of religion and the Shia clergy in the creation of a new Iraqi order after Saddam Hussein. In episode 2, Marsin Alshammary draws on her fieldwork in the seminaries of Najaf to argue that clerical authority has not diminished, despite setbacks over the last twenty years. In episode 3, Taif Alkhudary chronicles the revolutionary efforts of the Tishreen protest movement to establish an alternative to religious politics. In episode 4, the final in this series, Ali Al-Mawlawi connects some of today’s sectarian rhetoric to Iraq’s long history of anti-Shia prejudice.

Read:

Book: Shia Power Comes of Age

Project: Shia Politics

Participants:

• Sajad Jiyad, fellow, Century International
• Thanassis Cambanis, director, Century International

On this episode of the Order From Ashes podcast, Century International fellow Zeinab Shuker explores the unhappy mix of factors that has made Iraq so inhospitable.

Zeinab is leading “Living the Climate Emergency: Lessons from Iraq,” a new Century International project exploring how policymakers and researchers can draw on the case of Iraq and its neighbors to translate into action the growing consensus that the climate crisis is already here. 

Century’s Climate Emergency Project will connect field researchers, policymakers, and a wider audience through roundtables, public events, podcasts, and reports. Future research in this project will place today’s crisis in a historical context; map the contours and human impact of climate change in Iraq and its neighborhood; and finally, drawing on the lessons of the extreme case in Iraq, make projections about the future and propose solutions. 

Read: 

• “The Deep Roots of Iraq’s Climate Crisis,” Century International report by , Zeinab Shuker
• “Iraq Is Overheating. How Can It Mitigate the Effects of Climate Change?,” Century International commentary by Zeinab Shuker

Explore:

Project homepage, “Living the Climate Emergency: Lessons from Iraq”

Participants:

• Zeinab Shuker, fellow, Century International
• Thanassis Cambanis, director, Century International

On this episode of the Order From Ashes podcast, researchers Sami Zoughaib, from The Policy Institute in Lebanon, and Sam Heller, from Century International, reveal how Lebanon’s elites have misled the public on the reality of the country’s dire situation.

Without some course change, Zoughaib and Heller argue, Lebanon will not have the IMF program it needs to halt its economic collapse. But public pressure could still force elites to act responsibly—or at least hold those elites accountable.

The two researchers discuss the findings in their new report, a joint production of Century International and The Policy Institute in Lebanon. It is part of “Networks of Change: Reviving Governance and Citizenship in the Middle East,” a Century International project supported by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Open Society Foundations.

Read:

“The Shadow Plan: How Lebanese Elites Are Sabotaging Their Country’s IMF Lifeline,” by Sami Zoughaib and Sam Heller.

Participants:

• Sami Zoughaib, economist and research manager at The Policy Initiative in Lebanon
• Sam Heller, fellow, Century International
• Thanassis Cambanis, director, Century International

On this episode of the Order From Ashes podcast, Century International fellow Zachary Cuyler talks about the competing interest groups that reap the benefits of Lebanon’s failed electricity system. 

Zack delves deeper into the dysfunction in Lebanon’s electricity sector in his recent Century International commentary, “Lebanon’s Grid Has Collapsed. What Comes Next?”

Participants:

• Zack Cuyler, fellow, Century International
• Thanassis Cambanis, director, Century International

A close look at two border towns in Iraq’s western desert illustrates the law of unintended consequences. The Iraqi government, bordering countries, and the international community moved to more tightly control official border crossings in order to defeat ISIS. As a result, however, militias and smugglers have moved a great deal of commerce, legal and illicit, to other crossing points. In the meantime, people along once-prosperous trade routes suffer privation and violence, driving new conflicts.

Researchers Renad Mansour and Hayder Al-Shakeri tell the tale of trade, smuggling, and conflict across Iraq’s borders. The trajectory of trade route towns Rutba and Qaim help explain the mechanics of conflict supply chains and the unintended consequences of efforts to secure parts of the border without thinking of the spinoff effects.

Participants:

• Haydar Al-Shakeri, research associate, MENA Program, Chatham House
• Renad Mansour, director, Iraq Initiative, Chatham House
• Thanassis Cambanis, director, Century International

In this final episode of Broken Bonds, Amr ElAfifi explores the Brotherhood’s crisis of membership and the implications for policy. 

Some have left the Brotherhood because they’ve lost trust in the leadership; others, because they say the organization “is not being brotherhood enough.” The Brotherhood’s fractious trajectory after the Rabaa massacre of 2013 makes clear that there is no single Brotherhood path during a period of unprecedented violent repression. 

The Brotherhood’s scattered grassroots have followed divergent paths, some embracing militancy, some withdrawing to the private sphere, and others abandoning faith altogether. 

The Brotherhood tried to claim the mantle of Islamist politics, but found itself beset by contradictions and crises. “Islamism,” like the Brotherhood, is not a clearly defined or monolithic movement. 

Broken Bonds is a five-part special season of the Order From Ashes podcast. The first episode charted Abdelrahman Ayyash’s personal coming of age in a Brotherhood milieu. In the second episode, Ayyash, Noha Khaled, and Amr ElAfifi mapped how the crises of identity, legitimacy, and membership simultaneously explain the organization’s weaknesses, and staying power. In the third episode, Khaled dissected the identity crisis that has defined the Brotherhood since its establishment. In the fourth episode, Ayyash sketched the leadership vacuum and power struggles that have hobbled the Brotherhood since 2013.

Broken Bonds explores the evolution of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood from the apex of its power, when it won Egypt’s presidency in 2012, to the organization’s disarray and marginalization today.

The podcast season is a companion to a new book, Broken Bonds: The Existential Crisis of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, 2013–22, published in February 2023 by TCF Press. Broken Bonds is part of “Faith and Fracture,” a TCF project supported by the Henry Luce Foundation.

Participants:

• Amr ElAfifi, PhD candidate at Syracuse University; research manager, Freedom Initiative
• Thanassis Cambanis, director, Century International

Years after being forced to become a transnational organization because of its leadership’s expulsion from Egypt, the Brotherhood is now at an even more complex crossroads. Its old strategies for managing its relationship with the Egyptian state, and maintaining a quasi-clandestine presence in Egypt, are no longer relevant. 

Abdelrahman Ayyash explains the power struggles and inchoate efforts to create a coherent strategy among the Brotherhood’s fragmented leadership after the 2013 coup and subsequent crackdown. The Brotherhood has been riven by power struggles and fundamental debates over resources, its international orientation, and the use of violence. This leadership crisis has hobbled the Brotherhood.

This is the fourth episode of Broken Bonds, a five-part special season of the Order From Ashes podcast. The first episode charted Abdelrahman Ayyash’s personal coming of age in a Brotherhood milieu. In the second episode, Ayyash, Noha Khaled, and Amr ElAfifi mapped how the crises of identity, legitimacy, and membership simultaneously explain the organization’s weaknesses and its staying power. In the third episode, Khaled dissected the identity crisis that has defined the Brotherhood since its establishment. The fifth and final episode of Broken Bonds explores the crisis of membership and the implications for policy.

Broken Bonds explores the evolution of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood from the apex of its power, when it won Egypt’s presidency in 2012, to the organization’s disarray and marginalization today.

The podcast season is a companion to a new book, Broken Bonds: The Existential Crisis of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, 2013–22, published in February 2023 by TCF Press. Broken Bonds is part of “Faith and Fracture,” a TCF project supported by the Henry Luce Foundation.

Participants:

• Abdelrahman Ayyash, fellow, Century International 
• Thanassis Cambanis, director, Century International

Noha Khaled plumbs the first of three crises besetting the Brotherhood: its internal identity conflict over what kind of organization it aspires to be. 

Throughout its history, the Brotherhood has struggled to accommodate its mission as a religious and social service network, alongside its ambitions for political power. That ambivalence, or contradiction, forms the cornerstone of the Brotherhood’s ongoing triple crisis.

This is the third episode of Broken Bonds, a five-part special season of the Order From Ashes podcast. The first episode charted Abdelrahman Ayyash’s personal coming of age in a Brotherhood milieu. In the second episode, Ayyash, Khaled, and Amr ElAfifi mapped how the crises of identity, legitimacy, and membership simultaneously explain the organization’s weaknesses and its staying power. The remaining episodes of Broken Bonds go deeper into the crises of legitimacy and membership, and the implications for policy.

Broken Bonds explores the evolution of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood from the apex of its power, when it won Egypt’s presidency in 2012, to the organization’s disarray and marginalization today.

The podcast season is a companion to a new book, Broken Bonds: The Existential Crisis of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, 2013–22, published in February 2023 by TCF Press. Broken Bonds is part of “Faith and Fracture,” a TCF project supported by the Henry Luce Foundation.

Participants:

• Noha Khaled, writer and researcher
• Thanassis Cambanis, director, Century International

The Brotherhood, they argue, is experiencing multiple crises—of identity, legitimacy, and membership—which accelerated after Egypt’s military coup in July 2013. 

Based on unprecedented access to Brotherhood leaders, rank-and-file members, and internal dissenters, the three researchers—Abdelrahman Ayyash, Amr ElAfifi, and Noha Khaled—take a new granular view of the organization. 

The Brotherhood and its detractors alike have misunderstood it as a mass ideological organization, missing its evolution into an elite membership organization disconnected from its constituents. 

This is the second episode of Broken Bonds, a five-part special season of the Order From Ashes podcast. The first episode charted Ayyash’s personal coming of age in a Brotherhood milieu. Remaining episodes of Broken Bonds go deeper into each of the three crises facing the Brotherhood and the implications for policy.

Broken Bonds explores the evolution of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood from the apex of its power, when it won Egypt’s presidency in 2012, to the organization’s disarray and marginalization today.

The podcast season is a companion to a new book, Broken Bonds: The Existential Crisis of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, 2013–22, published in February 2023 by TCF Press. Broken Bonds is part of “Faith and Fracture,” a TCF project supported by the Henry Luce Foundation.

Participants:

• Abdelrahman Ayyash, fellow, Century International 
• Amr ElAfifi, PhD candidate at Syracuse University; research manager, Freedom Initiative
• Noha Khaled, writer and researcher
• Thanassis Cambanis, director, Century International

Ayyash recounts his early history cocooned in a Brotherhood community that took care of its members’ schooling, moral training, social life, and career counseling. And he recalls with stark frankness his shock, as a young blogger and political activist, at the political rigidity of the movement in which he’d been raised.

Ayyash’s personal journey from a young movement standout to dissident, critical researcher opens Broken Bonds, a five-part special season of the Order From Ashes podcast. The remaining episodes of Broken Bonds explore the triple crises facing the Brotherhood, the organization’s likely resurgence, and how observers and policymakers mischaracterize the Brotherhood and its significance.

Broken Bonds explores the evolution of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood from the apex of its power, when it won Egypt’s presidency in 2012, to the organization’s disarray and marginalization today.

The podcast season is a companion to a new book, Broken Bonds: The Existential Crisis of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, 2013–22, published in February 2023 by TCF Press. Broken Bonds is part of “Faith and Fracture,” a TCF project supported by the Henry Luce Foundation.

Participants:

• Abdelrahman Ayyash, fellow, Century International 
• Thanassis Cambanis, director, Century International

On this episode of the Order from Ashes podcast from Century International, Aron Lund discusses Syria’s unending catastrophe, its origins in bad governance, and what donor nations can do to help.

Years of war, drought, and climate change have ravaged Syria’s water supply and infrastructure, forcing half of the population to drink unsafe water. Now, the earthquake has compounded the damage to Syria’s built environment, exacerbating Syria’s already dire humanitarian situation.

Read more about the human and environmental origins of Syria’s deadly cholera outbreak in Aron’s Century International report “Cholera in the Time of Assad.”

Participants:

• Aron Lund, fellow, Century International 
• Thanassis Cambanis, director, Century International

On this episode of the Order From Ashes podcast, Sajad Jiyad talks about the sordid theft and the way forward to fight corruption.

Sajad shares more about the origins of Iraq’s consociational system of power sharing, and public graft, in his report “Corruption Is Strangling Iraq.”

Participants:

• Sajad Jiyad, fellow, Century International 
• Thanassis Cambanis, director, Century International

On this episode of the Order From Ashes podcast, Becca Wasser considers some of the practical ways in which a progressive-minded United States could shift away from its overinvestment in military bases.

Despite the war in Ukraine and rising tensions with China, the United States retains a massive and problematic military footprint in the Middle East, which creates moral hazard and often locks Washington into military solutions ill-suited for complex policy problems.

Figuring out how to get the balance right in the Middle East can help the United States strike a more healthy, and less militarized, balance throughout the world.

This episode of Order from Ashes is part of a regular series on progressive foreign policy in the United States. We’re looking to start a constructive conversation about the specifics of a progressive foreign policy that remains invested and engaged in the world, while moving away from reflexive militarism and toward a framework based on rights and values.

Participants:

• Becca Wasser, senior fellow, Center for a New American Security
• Thanassis Cambanis, director, Century International

But what is the better, progressive alternative?

On this episode of the Order From Ashes podcast, New America fellow Alex Stark outlines some of the specific ingredients of a policy that tries to promote genuine stability. 

Sound, progressive counterterrorism would build on a complex and sustainable vision of stability, rooted in rights and better governance. Instead of seeking to eliminate violent groups, it has designated as terrorists, a progressive counterterrorism policy would invest in accountability and development, along with military operations, to marginalize violent groups. 

This episode of Order from Ashes is the first in a regular series on progressive foreign policy in the United States. We’re looking to start a constructive conversation about the specifics of a progressive foreign policy that remains invested and engaged in the world, while moving away from reflexive militarism and toward a framework based on rights and values.

Participants:

• Alex Stark, fellow, New America
• Thanassis Cambanis, director, Century International

In their experience, movements go through similar cycles. Carty and Kassir emphasize the importance of developing movement infrastructure to avoid the pitfalls associated with these cycles, and to capitalize on moments of mass mobilization—to seize opportunity. Movements must also be able to create moments, not just react to them. 

A lack of transmission of skills between generations and a disconnect between movements causes stagnation and the repetition of mistakes. Both activists describe learning lessons from movements across the globe in terms of tactics, discourse, and political imagination. And both emphasize careful thinking about learning and the transmission of skills. 

By fostering both transnational and intergenerational learning, movements may have some hope of avoiding the familiar pitfalls.

This podcast is the final of a special eight-part season of Order from Ashes, as part of “Transnational Trends in Citizenship: Authoritarianism and the Emerging Global Culture of Resistance,” a TCF project supported by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Open Society Foundations. 

Participants include: 

• Jean Kassir, co-founder of Lebanese media platform Megaphone
• Nicole Carty, core team member, Momentum, a social movement incubator and training institute
• Naira Antoun, director, Transnational Trends in Citizenship, Century International

Ivan Marovic cut his teeth as a student activist in Serbia in the 1990s and as a leader of the Optor movement that brought down Slobodan Milosevic. Since then, he has worked with dissidents and movements all over the world. In this episode of “Transnational Trends in Citizenship”—the new season of Order from Ashes—Marovic talks about the importance of skill-building for movements.

Unlike many other factors that affect movements, skill-building is something that can be controlled. The skills of organizing, communicating, strategic planning, and tactical innovation must be nurtured at the grassroots level. This is all the more crucial in authoritarian settings where crackdowns seek to break any civil society networks and may seek to eliminate leadership. Marovic emphasizes the importance for movements of learning, self-reflection, and time spent together.

This podcast is part of “Transnational Trends in Citizenship: Authoritarianism and the Emerging Global Culture of Resistance,” a TCF project supported by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Open Society Foundations.

Participants: 

• Ivan Marovic, director of field education, International Center on Nonviolent Conflict in Washington, DC
• Naira Antoun, director, Transnational Trends in Citizenship, Century International

In this episode of “Transnational Trends in Citizenship”—the new season of Order from Ashes— anthropologist Hayal Akarsu and sociologist Alex Vitale argue that policing crises around the globe are connected; that is, they are all part of one broad crisis with different local permutations. These permutations may include repressive political policing, long-term corruption and ineffectiveness, everyday policing, or a combination of these, as well as economic factors such as increasing inequality. As awareness of the climate crisis deepens, the role of police in protecting corporate interests may become an increasingly prominent feature of the crisis of policing legitimacy. 

Police reform is, more than ever before, a global industry, which circulates experts, tools, standards, models, and training programs. As such, police reform is a key part of foreign policy initiatives, diplomacy efforts, and development programs. A transnational framework enables us to see these connections.

This podcast is part of “Transnational Trends in Citizenship: Authoritarianism and the Emerging Global Culture of Resistance,” a TCF project supported by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Open Society Foundations. 

Participants include:

• Hayal Akarsu, assistant professor of anthropology, Utrecht University
• Alex Vitale, professor of sociology, Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center
• Naira Antoun, director, Transnational Trends in Citizenship, Century International

Moral panics are an increasingly prominent feature of the political landscape around the world, and they increasingly focus on gender. This episode of “Transnational Trends in Citizenship”—the new season of Order from Ashes—draws on examples from Egypt, Poland, and elsewhere to show how leaders, media, and other actors cultivate, promote, and even invent these moral panics. These actors exploit moral panics to rapidly construct social coalitions that might not otherwise coalesce. And in case after case, moral panics are shown to be about power—more policing of the marginalized; stifling social and economic change that would cost the elite; fighting democratic reforms; and redirecting grievances toward scapegoats. 

This podcast is part of “Transnational Trends in Citizenship: Authoritarianism and the Emerging Global Culture of Resistance,” a TCF project supported by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Open Society Foundations. 

Participants include:

• Lobna Darwish, gender and human rights officer, Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights
• Kate Korycki, assistant professor of gender, sexuality, and women’s studies, Western University Canada
• Naira Antoun, director, Transnational Trends in Citizenship, Century International

In this episode of Order from Ashes, the scholars Karma R. Chávez and Maya Mikdashi talk about moving beyond the common exceptionalizing frameworks that surround region, gender, and sexuality. They argue that, if straight and queer sexualities are analyzed together—rather than treated as if the condition of LGBTQ minorities is solely its own separate issue—observers can better understand how state and social power operate. Queer or marginalized genders and sexualities are policed or controlled, but so too are straight sexualities and all genders, in ways that are fundamental to how state power operates. The broader implication of their analysis: when we stop seeing the Middle East as exceptionally authoritarian, backward, and violent—and stop seeing the United States and Europe as particularly democratic and civilized—the transnational contours of war and power become clearer.

This podcast is part of “Transnational Trends in Citizenship: Authoritarianism and the Emerging Global Culture of Resistance,” a TCF project supported by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Open Society Foundations. 

Participants:

• Karma R. Chávez, chair and associate professor in the Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies, University of Texas, Austin
• Maya Mikdashi, assistant professor in the Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies and a lecturer in the program in Middle East Studies, Rutgers University
• Naira Antoun, fellow, Century International

In this episode of “Transnational Trends in Citizenship”—the new season of Order from Ashes—scholar Jacob Mundy discusses what might be driving the “militiafication” of thinking about mass organized violence. The legacies of “new war” theories and the emerging global order—in which North Atlantic powers no longer call all the shots—are essential to understanding the alleged age of militias. 

While there are ways in which militias play an important role in constituting the global terrain of organized violence, this role does not appear to be proportionally larger in recent years than in previous decades. How can we explain, then, the disproportionate intellectual and policy weight given to militias? 

This podcast is part of “Transnational Trends in Citizenship: Authoritarianism and the Emerging Global Culture of Resistance,” a TCF project supported by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Open Society Foundations. 

Participants include:

• Jacob Mundy, associate professor in peace and conflict studies, Colgate University
• Naira Antoun, director, Transnational Trends in Citizenship, Century International

Common frameworks that emphasize violence do not have the tools to fully understand how these ideological movements function. Important elements that tend to be overlooked in such approaches include gender and religion.  

Rogers identifies other gaps in discussions of armed groups: Even though analyses of Islamist groups incldue gender, they usually treat women as peripheral. And wildly different groups—Hezbollah, the Islamic State, al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and Hamas—are treated as the same analytical unit simply because of their supposed connection to Islam. When it comes to white supremacist groups, however, religion is barely considered at all, even thought many o have an explicit religious ideology. 

This podcast is part of “Transnational Trends in Citizenship: Authoritarianism and the Emerging Global Culture of Resistance,” a TCF project supported by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Open Society Foundations. Participants include:

• Naira Antoun, director, Transnational Trends in Citizenship, Century International
• Amanda Rogers, fellow, Century International 

Today, Naira Antoun, director of Century International’s Transnational Trends in Citizenship project, talks with Century International director Thanassis Cambanis about the connections between the crises in the Middle East, Western Europe, and North America.

For more than a year, Century International hosted discussions among experts who usually focus on their own regions—the Middle East or Western Europe and North America—and asked them to compare their regions and policy areas.

As a result of this exercise, the project’s teams of researchers, activists, and academics revealed commonalities and connections in their study of militias, gender and sexuality, police accountability, and protest. They also demonstrated how bringing experts on different regions together can test assumptions, create new knowledge, and inspire powerful new insights into old but persistent policy problems.

This podcast is part of “Transnational Trends in Citizenship: Authoritarianism and the Emerging Global Culture of Resistance,” a TCF project supported by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Open Society Foundations. 

Participants include:

• Naira Antoun, director, Transnational Trends in Citizenship, Century International
• Thanassis Cambanis, director, Century International

On this episode of Order from Ashes, Century International fellows Sam Heller and Aron Lund assess some of the most immediate humanitarian, diplomatic, and military consequences of the Ukraine war for Syria. 

Heller’s recent Century International report argues in some detail how humanitarian pressures and increased diplomatic tension are likely to exacerbate hunger and precarity for Syrians. In this podcast, he and Lund make the case that Syria is vulnerable in other ways to harmful spinoff effects of the war in Ukraine.

Participants include:

• Sam Heller, fellow, Century International
• Aron Lund, fellow, Century International 
• Thanassis Cambanis, director, Century International

A progressive U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East should encourage Israeli–Palestinian peace, reduce militarization, support democracy, and strengthen the rules-based international order. So far, the Abraham Accords have mostly undermined these goals. In a new report for Century International, Scheindlin argues that diplomatic relations between Israel and Arab states can promote the core aims of progressive foreign policy in the Middle East—but it will take focused American leadership to turn the Abraham Accords around.

This podcast is part of “Transnational Trends in Citizenship: Authoritarianism and the Emerging Global Culture of Resistance,” a TCF project supported by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Open Society Foundations. 

Participants include:

• Dahlia Scheindlin, fellow, Century International
• Thanassis Cambanis, director, Century International

Participants include:

• Sam Heller, fellow, The Century Foundation
• Aron Lund, fellow, The Century Foundation
• Thanassis Cambanis, senior fellow, The Century Foundation

On this episode of Order from Ashes, Syria expert Sam Heller discusses the case that Western governments should do what they can to help, even though they have a limited ability to fix the crisis. Food security, Sam argues, should top Western policymakers’ Syria agenda, and inform their other Syria policy choices. 

Participants include:

• Sam Heller, fellow, The Century Foundation
• Thanassis Cambanis, senior fellow, The Century Foundation

On this episode of Order from Ashes, we hear Middle East expert Dina Esfandiary and Iraqi analyst Sajad Jiyad about the new round of diplomacy. What has prompted Iran and Saudi Arabia to be willing to talk, and where might they be willing to calm tensions?

Participants include:

• Dina Esfandiary, senior adviser for the Middle East and North Africa, International Crisis Group
• Sajad Jiyad, fellow, The Century Foundation
• Thanassis Cambanis, senior fellow, The Century Foundation

Tensions between Egypt and Turkey have run high for nearly a decade. Turkey has hosted Egyptian dissidents and opposition parties since the Egyptian coup in 2013; and the two countries support opposite sides in the Libyan War and have very nearly come into direct military conflict. Both are major U.S. partners, at least on paper: Turkey is a formal treaty ally in NATO, and Egypt is a top recipient of U.S. military aid.

On this episode of Order from Ashes, we hear from Turkey expert Nicholas Danforth and Egypt expert Michael Wahid Hanna about the recent, tentative thaw in relations between the two countries. Turkey and Egypt’s rivalry, and its unsettling consequences, serve as a reminder that there are many countries with power to drive events, and conflicts, in the Middle East. 

Participants include:

• Nicholas Danforth, senior visiting fellow, Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy
• Michael Wahid Hanna, senior fellow, The Century Foundation
• Thanassis Cambanis, senior fellow, The Century Foundation

On this episode of Order from Ashes, we talk to two analysts who know Yemen intimately: Nadwa al-Dawsari and Peter Salisbury. It might be possible for the United States to wash its hands of the Yemen war, they argue, but very hard for Washington to catalyze a resolution. What are the realistic options, and what’s best for the long-suffering civilians caught in the conflict?

Participants include:

• Nadwa Al-Dawsari, non-resident fellow, Middle East Institute
• Peter Salisbury, senior analyst, Yemen, International Crisis Group
• Thanassis Cambanis, senior fellow, The Century Foundation

Dassa Kaye argues that the United States can redefine stability and invest in better governance, moving away from dysfunctional partnerships and counterproductive policies. The United States doesn’t have to choose between perpetual war and complete disengagement; as it ends its forever wars, Washington has an opportunity to invest in diplomatic, social, and political leverage that will bring more enduring stability to the Middle East.

Participants include:

• Dahlia Dassa Kaye, fellow, the Wilson Center and senior political scientist, the RAND Corporation
• Thanassis Cambanis, senior fellow, The Century Foundation

On this episode of Order from Ashes, close observers of Egyptian political life explore the still unfolding legacy of the unsuccessful revolution of 2011. The threat and promise of Egypt’s uprising still makes Egypt’s military dictatorship nervous—and still suggests prospects for future democratic reforms.

Participants include:

• Naira Antoun, Mada Masr and The Century Foundation
• Michael Wahid Hanna, senior fellow, The Century Foundation
• Thanassis Cambanis, senior fellow, The Century Foundation

Democracy is threatened in the United States because of global trends. Stephen Miles and Kate Kizer argue that deep systemic trends will continue to threaten democracy after Trump’s presidency. A serious attempt at accountability, and an investment in peaceful tools of power, can shift the United States away from the dangers of militarization.

Participants include:

• Stephen Miles, executive director, Win Without War
• Kate Kizer, policy director, Win Without War
• Thanassis Cambanis, senior fellow, The Century Foundation

We apply some of the lessons learned from studying authoritarian relapse around the world—from the importance of calling a coup attempt by its proper name, to the limits of the “war on terror” model for dealing with violent insurrectionists and white supremacist terrorism in the United States.

Participants include:

• Michael Wahid Hanna, senior fellow, The Century Foundation
• Thanassis Cambanis, senior fellow, The Century Foundation

The United States has many opportunities to incorporate environmental and climate change concerns into all its policymaking. Because of its acute crises of climate, governance, and security, the Middle East is particularly ripe for a new approach.

Drawing on the reports he spearheaded in TCF’s new initiative, “Nature and National Security in the Middle East,” Schwartzstein suggests some encouraging possible moves for Middle Eastern governments, civil society, and the United States to address this slow-burning emergency.

Participants include:

Peter Schwartzstein, independent researcher and 

Thanassis Cambanis, senior fellow, The Century Foundation

The Middle East’s long authoritarian relapse increasingly has echoes in the crisis in the United States. On this episode of “Order from Ashes,” we talk with Amy Hawthorne, deputy director for research at the Project on Middle East Democracy. We discuss the obstacles that the Trump presidency created for aspiring reformers in the Middle East, and assess the emboldened crop of autocrats who will challenge the Biden administration.

Participants include:

• Amy Hawthorne, deputy director for research, Project on Middle East Democracy
• Thanassis Cambanis, senior fellow, The Century Foundation

With tens of thousands of members surviving in exile in Turkey, the Muslim Brotherhood is undergoing new strains. Youth in the diaspora have experimented with new, liberal approaches to life, politics, and religion, pitting them against a rigid and aging Brotherhood leadership.

Abdelrahman Ayyash, author of the recent report, “The Turkish Future of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood,” discusses how the Brotherhood has changed under unprecendented repression, and whether it can adapt enough to survive.

Participants include:

• Abdelrahman Ayyash, Egyptian researcher
• Michael Wahid Hanna, senior fellow, The Century Foundatio
• Thanassis Cambanis, senior fellow, The Century Foundation

On this episode of “Order from Ashes,” we talk with Syria-watchers Daphne McCurdy and Sam Heller about ways the United States can provide meaningful assistance to Syrian people, without endorsing the Assad regime. With Assad securely in power and the war in Syria largely over, how can the United States balance the conflicting imperatives to stabilize Syria, help civilians, and hold war criminals accountable?

Participants include:

• Daphne McCurdy, associate, Center for Strategic and International Studies
• Sam Heller, independent researcher, Beirut
• Thanassis Cambanis, senior fellow, The Century Foundation

Now solidly ensconced in power as a crown prince in his early thirties, Mohammed Bin Salman could rule for decades to come, steering the policy of one of the world’s wealthiest countries and the planet’s single most powerful oil producer. 

On this episode of Order from Ashes, we hear about the emerging long-term trend lines of Mohamed Bin Salman’s rule from Ben Hubbard, New York Times reporter and author of the recent book MBS: The Rise to Power of Mohammed Bin Salman.

Participants include:

• Ben Hubbard, Beirut bureau chief, the New York Times
• Thanassis Cambanis, senior fellow, The Century Foundation

Now, however, cases are increasing across the region. The pandemic is straining areas already buckling under sanctions, armed conflict, regional rivalries, corruption, and economic depression. On this episode of Order from Ashes, international affairs researchers at The Century Foundation discuss how the pandemic is accelerating regional crises and why it has not yet led to any systemic change. (There’s more TCF analysis of the pandemic in the Middle East in the new roundtable, “Middle East Strained by COVID-19, But Not Transformed.”)

Participants include:

• Dina Esfandiary, fellow, The Century Foundation
• Michael Wahid Hanna, senior fellow, The Century Foundation
• Aron Lund, fellow, The Century Foundation
• Thanassis Cambanis, senior fellow, The Century Foundation

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the weaknesses of a health system suffering from corruption and gaping inequalities between public and private hospitals. What role have neoliberal international aid demands for austerity and privatization—known as the Washington Consensus—played in setting up Lebanon’s health system for failure? And what does Lebanon’s case show about the need to reinvest in strong public goods? 

On this episode of Order from Ashes, Sima Ghaddar joins Kareem Chehayeb, who in a recent commentary for The Century Foundation argued that austerity and privatization have left residents of Lebanon extremely vulnerable during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Participants include:

• Kareem Chehayeb, journalist, Beirut
• Sima Ghaddar, doctoral candidate, University of California, Los Angeles
• Thanassis Cambanis, senior fellow, The Century Foundation

In what ways has the European model worked, and in what ways has it failed? Only a revived international order can address global problems like health, finance, and climate change. Veteran observers of the European Union discuss the continent’s response to COVID-19, and suggest lessons for international cooperation going forward. 

Participants include:

• David Carretta, journalist, Brussels
• Rolla Scolari, journalist, Milan
• Thanassis Cambanis, senior fellow, The Century Foundation

After World War II, policymakers responded to widespread social collapse and upheaval with bold, visionary investments in a new international and domestic order, spending money on long-term institutions and programs that produced deep and lasting stability. But other critical moments ended up as missed opportunities, characterized by chauvinism and isolationism: the end of World War I, the end of the Cold War, and 9/11. 

On this episode of Order from Ashes, Ilan Goldenberg and Mieke Eoyang assess this history and argue that we aren’t necessarily condemned to repeat past mistakes. Today, Americans have a rare opportunity to dramatically transform government, society, and the international order for the better—or else risk worsening the defects that have left the world so vulnerable to the pandemic in the first place.

Participants include:

• Mieke Eoyang, vice president, Third Way
• Ilan Goldenberg, senior fellow, Center for a New American Security
• Thanassis Cambanis, senior fellow, The Century Foundation

These twin shocks have shaken vulnerable people across a region already buffeted by conflicts and political crises. Countries like Iraq and Iran seem ill-positioned to handle a health emergency—and falling oil prices threaten to make the Iraqi state insolvent. The virus and the spiralling effects of an oil price war also highlight the deep connections among countries in the MIddle East, and between the Middle East and the world economy.

Participants include:

• Karen Young, resident fellow, American Enterprise Institute
• Thanassis Cambanis, senior fellow, The Century Foundation

The decades since the 2003 invasion of Iraq have witnessed an acceleration of this trend. What is the cost of a full-fledged abandonment of the norms promoted by international law and human rights? International law and Middle East policy scholar Aslı Ü. Bâli discusses the many disturbing practical outcomes of our current state of eroded international law, including the impact on sanctions regimes, assassinations, and wars.

Participants include:

• Aslı Ü. Bâli, UCLA professor of law
• Michael Wahid Hanna, senior fellow, The Century Foundation
• Thanassis Cambanis, senior fellow, The Century Foundation

Now Iraq is asking the United States to withdraw its troops, and the United States is threatening sanctions against Iraq—one of its most important strategic partners in the Arab world.

How will this crisis affect security in Iraq and the resurgence of the Islamic State? How much of the relationship can be salvaged? What will be the costs for Iraq, the United States, and the surrounding region?

Participants include:

• Sajad Jiyad, managing director, Bayan Center
• Maria Fantappie, special adviser, Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue
• Thanassis Cambanis, senior fellow, The Century Foundation

Sajad Jiyad is the managing director of Al-Bayan Center for Planning and Studies in Baghdad.

Maria Fantappie is a special adviser on the Middle East–North Africa region at the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue in Switzerland.

A close look at its operations in the Horn of Africa reveals the ways that a government can exert control through a modern state-chartered company. A closer look at the operations of DP World also casts light on a key driver of disastrous state fragmentation in the Horn of Africa and the Red Sea. 

DP World functions like a modern-day version of the British East India Company, serving as both a foreign policy tool and a profit engine. The analysis in Advani’s report, and our discussion with him here, help explain how governments exert political power outside the confines of traditional statecraft.

Participants include:

• Rohan Advani, researcher
• Michael Wahid Hanna, senior fellow, The Century Foundation
• Thanassis Cambanis, senior fellow, The Century Foundation

These groups form a new category of actor, which draws power from the state, and at the same time competes with the state or even undermines it. The authors of a new report from The Century Foundation discuss the concept of “hybrid actor,” which allows us to make better sense of the pivotal players in conflict zones and shaky states across the Middle East, and beyond. 

Participants include:

• Renad Mansour, research fellow, Chatham House
• Dina Esfandiary, fellow, The Century Foundation
• Michael Wahid Hanna, senior fellow, The Century Foundation
• Thanassis Cambanis, senior fellow, The Century Foundation

What do the protests reveal about state failure—and what kind of pressure do they exert on governments to change? Iraq and Egypt, like many governments in the region, have rigid systems that appear incapable of serious changes in policy or governance. What can we learn from the latest round of revolts?

Participants include:

• Maria Fantappie, Iraq senior adviser, International Crisis Group
• Michael Wahid Hanna, senior fellow, The Century Foundation
• Thanassis Cambanis, senior fellow, The Century Foundation

The United States is by far the most significant donor to the United Nations and has, for much of the UN’s history, been one of its primary boosters. American support for the United Nations has fluctuated, and, since President Trump took office, has plummeted. But Washington’s love-hate relationship with the United Nations and with the compromises and niceties of international diplomacy predates Trump, and has come in for bipartisan criticism.

However, a pressing global emergency like climate change, or another worldwide financial crisis, cannot be solved without the international system. How can the United States revive the effectiveness of the United Nations, so that the international institution can help address ongoing crises and manage burgeoning great-power competition between the United States, Russia, and China?

Participants include:

• Richard Gowan, UN Director, International Crisis Group
• Thanassis Cambanis, senior fellow, The Century Foundation

On this podcast, we learn about the shifting views of Israelis and Palestinians, and the different visions of the future that they are considering in addition to the two states envisioned in the Oslo Accords—including confederation, a single state, annexation, and indefinite occupation. 

Politics in Israel–Palestine can seem unpredictable, but some long-term trends are clear. The Israeli electorate has moved decisively to the right, and support for a “two-state solution” has fallen to historic lows among both Palestinians and Israelis.

What are the possibilities for the United States to affect Israeli policies on settlements and annexation of occupied territory? 

Participants include:

• Dahlia Scheindlin, political scientist and fellow, The Century Foundation
• Thanassis Cambanis, senior fellow, The Century Foundation
• Michael Wahid Hanna, senior fellow, The Century Foundation

America has had an inflated military presence since 9/11, especially in the Middle East. Defense budgets are historically bloated, and policymakers have avoided making choices about closing bases and reducing troop deployments. 

Political support is waning for the forever war and politicians from both major American parties agree that the United States needs to scale back its global military entanglements and set real priorities. The Middle East, many of them say, has occupied policy attention that should be directed to other, more pressing priorities. 

Now the tough questions concern the details: What would a right-sized U.S. military presence look like in the Middle East? If the U.S. military shouldn’t have quite so many bases in the region and troops deployed, what is the right amount? What wars should the United States be prepared to fight? How, politically, can American leaders sell the idea of containing threats instead of setting impossible but popular goals, like entirely eliminating terrorism? What’s a reasonable budget? 

Participants include:

• Mara Karlin, director of strategic studies, Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies
• Michael Wahid Hanna, senior fellow, The Century Foundation
• Thanassis Cambanis, senior fellow, The Century Foundation

As part of our running series exploring in detail what an alternative progressive U.S. foreign policy would look like, on this episode of TCF World we turn to Iran. We analyze what an effective foreign policy toward Iran should look like, taking into account Iran’s destabilizing record of expansion and militarism in the Middle East.

Tensions with Iran are as high as they’ve been in decades, after U.S. President Donald J. Trump withdrew from the nuclear deal negotiated by his predecessor. Today, the most pressing matter is how to avoid an escalation with Iran that leads to war. 

If and when this crisis passes, what are the options for salvaging the deal, or managing the fallout of its collapse? The original nuclear deal was negotiated in 2015 and is known by its formal title, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). Many of the deal’s supporters, including several candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination, argue that the United States should reenter the original deal after Trump is no longer in office. We explore how the original deal could be revived, or what could take its place if it has completely collapsed by the time Trump’s successor takes office in 2021 or 2025. 

Participants include:

• Ariane Tabatabai, associate political scientist, RAND Corporation
• Dina Esfandiary, fellow, The Century Foundation
• Michael Wahid Hanna, senior fellow, The Century Foundation
• Thanassis Cambanis, senior fellow, The Century Foundation

Participants include:

• Thanassis Cambanis, senior fellow, The Century Foundation
• Michael Wahid Hanna, senior fellow, The Century Foundation
• Daniel Benaim, senior fellow, Center for American Progress, and visiting assistant professor, New York University

For years, the United States has invested significant political capital in attempting to broker a peaceful resolution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. However, these attempts have largely failed. Israel’s occupation is more entrenched than most Americans realize, and Palestinian politics appear increasingly splintered. Many commentators and policymakers now believe a two-state solution is no longer viable. In this podcast, Khaled Elgindy identifies two main blind spots that have hobbled America’s role as an effective mediator: Israeli power and Palestinian politics.

Participants include:

• Khaled Elgindy, nonresident fellow, Brookings Institution
• Michael Wahid Hanna, senior fellow, The Century Foundation

This podcast is part of “Citizenship and Its Discontents: The Struggle for Rights, Pluralism, and Inclusion in the Middle East” a TCF project supported by the Henry Luce Foundation.

Participants include:

• Fanar Haddad, senior research fellow, Middle East Institute, National University of Singapore
• Rohan Advani, senior policy associate, The Century Foundation

From the Queen Boat incident in 2001 to the waves of arrests following Mashrou’ Leila’s concert in Cairo in 2017, Egypt’s LGBTQ community has always endured a precarious position. In recent years, Egyptian authorities have directed a brutal crackdown against its members. Ahmed El Hady discusses the recent intensification of repression and the crisis facing LGBTQ Egyptians. El Hady, an activist and a neuroscientist, situates the struggle for LGBTQ rights in Egypt within the broader quest for political freedoms that began in 2011. Any discussion of rights, he argues, must incorporate LGBTQ rights as well.

This podcast is part of “Citizenship and Its Discontents: The Struggle for Rights, Pluralism, and Inclusion in the Middle East” a TCF project supported by the Henry Luce Foundation.

Participants include:

• Ahmed El Hady, activist and neuroscientist, Princeton University
• Michael Wahid Hanna, senior fellow, The Century Foundation

This podcast is part of “Citizenship and Its Discontents: The Struggle for Rights, Pluralism, and Inclusion in the Middle East,” a TCF project supported by the Henry Luce Foundation.

Participants include:

• Cale Salih, research officer, United Nations University Centre for Policy Research
• Maria Fantappie, Iraq senior adviser, International Crisis Group
• Thanassis Cambanis, senior fellow, The Century Foundation

The question of universal rights in the Middle East is a delicate one. As pluralism and rights come under threat from communal violence, authoritarianism, and religious identity politics, the call for universal rights becomes even more necessary. Yet marginalized groups face unique challenges that set them apart from the wider population. Our guests discuss the basis of rights and how to create inclusive forms of citizenship. The biggest challenge they contemplate is how to push for universal rights without erasing difference.

This podcast is part of “Citizenship and Its Discontents: The Struggle for Rights, Pluralism, and Inclusion in the Middle East,” a TCF project supported by the Henry Luce Foundation. This podcast is in Arabic.

Participants include:

• Karl Sharro, architect and critic
• Lina Attalah, editor of Mada Masr
• Rabab El Mahdi, associate professor, American University of Cairo
• Michael Wahid Hanna, senior fellow, The Century Foundation

This podcast is part of “Citizenship and Its Discontents: The Struggle for Rights, Pluralism, and Inclusion in the Middle East,” a TCF project supported by the Henry Luce Foundation.

Participants include:

• Karl Sharro, architect and critic
• Lina Attalah, editor of Mada Masr
• Rabab El Mahdi, associate professor, American University of Cairo
• Michael Wahid Hanna, senior fellow, The Century Foundation
• Thanassis Cambanis, senior fellow, The Century Foundation

The group’s territory is gone, but the followers that El Deeb interviewed have not given up their allegiance to the violent group and its extreme, nihilistic ideology. El Deeb discusses the conundrum of what to do with thousands of captured Islamic State supporters—and her fear that it’s only a matter of time before the group returns in yet another incarnation.

Participants include:

• Sarah El Deeb, reporter, Associated Press
• Michael Wahid Hanna, senior fellow, The Century Foundation
• Thanassis Cambanis, senior fellow, The Century Foundation

Shimrit Lee discusses the expanding Israeli security industry and how it promotes its products and security philosophy with a profound, if often unexamined, impact on global police tactics. Lee argues that the marketing tropes used by this growing security industry have contributed to further normalization of violence against civilians.

Participants include:

• Shimrit Lee, curator, writer, and educator, New York University
• Rohan Advani, senior policy associate, The Century Foundation

Participants include:

• Loubna Mrie is a Syrian activist, journalist, and writer. She covered the Syrian war as a photojournalist for Reuters from 2012 to 2014 in rebel-held areas. She came to the United States in 2014 and earned a MA in Near Eastern Studies from New York University. Currently based in Oakland, she is a frequent commentator on Syrian and Middle Eastern affairs and has written for The Nation, Time Magazine, Vice, and The New Republic, to name a few. She is currently writing her first book.
• Anne Barnard is a journalist for the New York Times who led coverage of the Syria war for six years, reporting from across the Middle East as Beirut bureau chief. Since 9/11, she has chronicled the human and strategic impact of U.S. war policies on frontline areas, from Iraq to Syria and Gaza. She is currently the Edward R. Murrow press fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

On this episode of TCF World, two journalists who have written extensively about the American and international left discuss the politics and risks of international progressive alliances, and the challenges of crafting a new foreign policy for the United States without retreating into isolationism.

Participants include:

• Atossa Araxia Abrahamian is a journalist, author, and currently a senior editor at The Nation. She has written for The New York Times, New York Magazine, and the London Review of Books, among others. Her topics of interest include Left internationalism, citizenship, global inequality, borders, and the proliferation of tax havens. Her first book was The Cosmopolites: The Coming of the Global Citizen (2015).
• Sam Adler-Bell is a writer whose work focuses on issues such as surveillance, corruption, labor organizing, and criminal justice. He has written for numerous publications including The Nation, the New Republic, The Intercept, Jacobin, and was a senior policy associate at The Century Foundation.

Dina Esfandiary is a fellow at The Century Foundation. Her research focuses on Persian Gulf security, Iran’s foreign relations, and relations between states and non-proliferation in the Middle East. She is also an international security program research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, and an adjunct fellow in the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ (CSIS) Middle East Programme.

Participants:

• Dina Esfandiary, The Century Foundation
• Thanassis Cambanis, The Century Foundation

Nabih Bulos, a staff writer for the Los Angeles Times, discusses the difficulties of reporting on the Syrian conflict from government-controlled areas. He recently travelled to the Syrian cities of Damascus, Mhardeh, and Quneitra, as well as to the Ghouta region. On this episode of TCF World, Nabih speaks about the challenges of entering the country; what Assad’s government hopes to gain from allowing foreign journalists to enter; and the regime’s ability to control the flow of information. He also discusses life in Syria for ordinary citizens, as well as the challenges Assad faces in constructing a post-civil war order.

Participants:

• Nabih Bulos, Los Angeles Times
• Thanassis Cambanis, The Century Foundation
• Michael Wahid Hanna, The Century Foundation

Sarah Margon, the Washington director for Human Rights Watch, discusses the complicated relationship between American foreign policy and human rights. From the Cold War to the War on Terror, the United States has cultivated an ambiguous relationship to the issue of human rights. Since September 11, human rights discourse has been marginalized more than ever, despite the steady efforts of a small community of lawmakers, diplomats, and advocates. Values and rights still play a fundamental role in America’s self-image and, for a dwindling constituency, undergird our foreign policy. This podcast explores how to make the case for a human rights-based approach to U.S. foreign policy at our current, fraught historical moment.

Participants

• Sarah Margon, Washington director for Human Rights Watch
• Thanassis Cambanis, The Century Foundation

Gregory Johnsen is a Yemen expert who served on the Yemen Panel of Experts for the UN Security Council from 2016 to 2018. He was a Fulbright fellow in Yemen and resident scholar at the Arabia Foundation, and holds a PhD in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton University. Johnsen is also the author of The Last Refuge: Yemen, Al-Qaeda, and America’s War in Arabia.

Participants

• Gregory Johnsen, author and Yemen scholar
• Michael Wahid Hanna, The Century Foundation
• Thanassis Cambanis, The Century Foundation

Maria Fantappie, a senior advisor for the International Crisis Group, discusses the long-standing stalemate within the Iraqi parliament and the deleterious impact of competition between the United States and Iran. She argues that the next four years are likely to bring a hybrid system of governance, including both pre-existing, sectarian alliances, and new, cross-sectarian coalitions over certain issues.

Meanwhile, next-door Syria is also entering a new political phase. President Bashar Al Assad is attempting to rebuild parts of the country, even as the war continues into what appears to be its final phase. The government’s enactment of the Urban Renewal Law and Decree 66 has made it possible to undertake urban development projects such as Marota City and Basilia City in the outskirts of Damascus.

Joseph Daher, a Swiss–Syrian activist and researcher at University of Lausanne in Switzerland, has tracked the dynamics of the first reconstruction efforts. Neighborhoods that were formerly home to lower-middle class citizens are being developed for wealthy Syrians, while areas that opposed the regime have yet to witness any reconstruction efforts. According to initial research, it appears that reconstruction is being used to reconstitute the Assad regime and reconfigure society in ways that might prevent future uprisings.

Participants

• Maria Fantappie, International Crisis Group
• Joseph Daher, University of Lausanne
• Thanassis Cambanis, The Century Foundation

Tamer El-Ghobashy covered the protests in Basra, and here discusses why Iraq’s second city reached a breaking point. He also reflects on the decidedly post-sectarian turn in Iraq’s dysfunctional politics. The mostly poor, mostly Shia residents of southern Iraq provided the rank-and-file fighters for the war against the Islamic State. Now, they want to see some improvement in their quality of life. The protests ended incumbent prime minister Haidar al-Abadi’s quest for another term. What impact will they have long-term on Iraq’s appalling governance?

Participants include:

• Tamer El-Ghobashy, Baghdad bureau chief, The Washington Post
• Thanassis Cambanis, senior fellow, The Century Foundation

Lily Hindy traveled to Germany and interviewed dozens of people involved in this great social engineering project, from Syrian refugee families to vocational instructors to government officials. She shared her findings in a multimedia TCF report. She found that Germany’s coordinated re-sponse had produced some surprising successes, like the vocational training and language programs designed to assimilate newcomers and prepare them for the workforce. She also documented some of the bumps in the road, from social tensions and discrimination against immigrants and the ambiguous response of some of the immigrants to their new host society.

There are considerable lessons here for the United States, or any other country that is willing to welcome new immigrants and invest in their integration. -

Participants include:

• Lily Hindy, doctoral student, University of California–Los Angeles
• Thanassis Cambanis, senior fellow, The Century Foundation

Paul Staniland has joined the debate with a forceful essay in the Lawfare blog entitled “Misreading the ‘Liberal Order’: Why We Need New Thinking in American Foreign Policy.” He argues that an international liberal order did exist, although it wasn’t as rosy as some of its staunchest defenders proclaim—nor is President Trump solely responsible for the erosion of the postwar international order. A better understanding of the ambiguous record of internationalism since 1945 is required if the United States is to design a more effective foreign policy in years to come. Paul Staniland discusses the debate about the international liberal order and its implications for crafting an improved order to succeed it.

Participants include:

• Paul Staniland, political scientist, University of Chicago
• Thanassis Cambanis, senior fellow, The Century Foundation

Synaps is a new research collective based in Beirut and founded by veteran policy analyst Peter Harling. It has taken an innovative approach to training local researchers, and has adopted a method of radical transparency, addressing in public on its website the challenges of conducting fieldwork, shaping research, finding funding, and reaching an audience. Peter and Aya discuss the wider challenges of shaping policy while producing deep, original, and relevant research.

Participants include:

• Aya Fatima Chamseddine, fellow, Synaps
• Peter Harling, founder and director, Synaps
• Thanassis Cambanis, senior fellow, The Century Foundation

Developments in Iraq and Lebanon have given us a better understanding of the interplay of ideas and material rewards for militia recruitment. Legacy militia groups like Hezbollah have been joined by relative newcomers like Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Units (“Hashd al Shaabi”) at the epicenter of power. On this podcast, Renad Mansour, a leading expert on Iraq’s paramilitaries, joins Sima Ghaddar, a keen observer of Hezbollah, to discuss the new insights about paramilitary recruitment and loyalty that they’ve learned from Iraq and Lebanon.

Participants include:

• Sima Ghaddar, policy associate, The Century Foundation
• Renad Mansour, research fellow, Chatham House
• Thanassis Cambanis, senior fellow, The Century Foundation

Two scholars of Iran and Iraq examine the situation, and the picture they paint is decidedly more mixed. On this podcast they discuss Iran’s missteps, as well as the ways it has successfully extended its power in the MIddle East. Iran might have edged out the United States in Iraq, for now, but it hasn’t established anything close to hegemony.

Participants include:

• Dina Esfandiary, a CSSS fellow in the war studies department at King’s College London, and an adjunct fellow in the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ (CSIS) Middle East Programme.
• Renad Mansour, research fellow, Chatham House
• Thanassis Cambanis, senior fellow, The Century Foundation

How much do these electoral contests serve to bring more democracy? Status-quo players have learned how to navigate the electoral process without engaging in any significant reform or opening—whether outright authoritarians like Egypt’s Sisi, or more complex but profoundly undemocratic warlords and demagogues like many of the sectarian leaders in Iraq and Lebanon.

Our guests examine the connections between elections and democracy in this latest cycle of voting in the Middle East, in a global context where basic political propositions about the viability of electoral democracy are being called into question.

Participants include:

• Sima Ghaddar, policy associate, The Century Foundation
• Michael Wahid Hanna, senior fellow, The Century Foundation
• Thanassis Cambanis, senior fellow, The Century Foundation

Dalia Dassa Kaye and David Griffiths debate some of the incremental possibilities to begin constructing (or reconstructing) the region’s security architecture. If expectations are kept low and governments are willing to improvise, these researchers suggest there are prospects to establish rudimentary security architecture.

Griffiths argues that sailors can find common ground on technical matters like incidents at sea and search and rescue, which can provide the basis of some security cooperation. Dassa Kaye suggests that new initiatives can come out of difficult period like the present. Can technical agreements over sea lanes, nuclear waste, or disputed boundaries ever translate into the type of political process necessary to effectively manage conflict, or resolve it?

Read Dalia Dassa Kaye’s “Can It Happen Here? Prospects for Regional Security Cooperation in the Middle East,” David N. Griffiths’ “Oceans of Opportunity: Maritime Dimensions of Security in the Arab World,” and Thanassis Cambanis’ “The Israel-Hezbollah Channel: UNIFIL’s Effective but Limited Conflict-Management Mechanism.” These reports are part of the TCF project “Order from Ashes: New Foundations for Security in the Middle East.”

Participants include:

• Dalia Dassa Kaye, director, Center for Middle East Public Policy, the RAND Corporation
• David N. Griffiths, independent researcher and former Canadian naval officer
• Thanassis Cambanis, senior fellow, The Century Foundation

In this podcast, AlSharekh talks with Hindy about the challenges and opportunities for those pushing for legal reform in the the region.

AlSharekh is the founding director of the Abolish 153 campaign to end legislation that effectively gives men regulatory, judicial, and executive power over their female kin—including minimal repercussions for honor killings—in Kuwait and the Arabian Gulf region. She is an outspoken advocate for women’s rights in a region where so-called “disciplinary violence” by men against their female kin remains permissible by law and by social practice. Article 153 of Kuwait’s penal code treats “honor killing”—when a man murders his sister, wife, daughter, or mother after becoming enraged by her adulterous or sexual transgression—as a misdemeanor, punishable with a maximum three-year prison sentence or a $50 fine. Last summer, three Arab countries passed legislation on violence against women following years of advocacy by local and international campaigns.

AlSharekh is also a consulting partner at Ibtkar Strategic Consultancy, where she is training a group of Kuwaiti women political leaders to run for office. In 2016 AlSharekh was awarded a knighthood (National Order of Merit) by the French government for her work promoting women’s rights in the region. She holds a PhD from SOAS London in Comparative Literature and Feminism.

Participants include:

• AlAnoud AlSharekh, founding director of the Abolish 153 campaign
• Lily Hindy, senior associate, The Century Foundation

Editor's Note: This podcast was updated as of April 3, 2018.

Also in this episode, Aron Lund discusses the latest developments in Syria, where a war that is supposed to be entering its final phase is presenting new dangers. A complicated standoff in the north, around the town of Afrin, has brought NATO allies Turkey and the United States to the brink of conflict. Russia provides a slim, and unlikely, bulwark against further internationalization of Syria’ war. A siege of the rebel enclave of eastern Ghouta, in the Damascus suburbs, threatens still more harm to civilians, unless the international community plans for the defeat of their allies. The new phase in Syria’s war is proving as deadly, and risky, as all the previous ones.

Read Fanar Haddad’s analysis of the Iraqi militias here, Aron Lund’s commentary on the crisis in eastern Ghouta here, and his exploration of Syria’s war economy through a single cement factory here.

Participants include:

• Fanar Haddad, senior research fellow, Middle East Institute, Singapore
• Aron Lund, fellow, The Century Foundation
• Thanassis Cambanis, senior fellow, The Century Foundation

There have been repeated, failed efforts over the decades to assemble some kind of Middle Eastern regional security force, something like an “Arab NATO.” Brian Katulis, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, examines those initiatives all the way to the present. Grand initiatives are impossible, he argues, but small-scale, piecemeal, and tactical efforts to build cooperation among Arab security forces might make headway. America’s role remains important because of its deep bilateral security ties with so many Middle Eastern governments.

Meanwhile, the Arab states of the Gulf are enjoying warm relations with the United States but have fallen deep into internal feuds. Many of the Arab monarchies consider themselves in an existential struggle with Iran, and are also involved in regional conflicts elsewhere. Instead of building deeper relationships and coalitions, they have resorted to a constantly shifting mosaic of alliances, says Emile Hokayem, a senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies. America’s insistence that Gulf countries exhibit more independence has increased instability, as Arab leaders in the Gulf hedge their bets with a greater number of often contradictory partnerships.

Katulis and Hokayem talk with TCF senior fellow Thanassis Cambanis about their contributions on these issues to Order from Ashes: New Foundations for Security in the Middle East. Their reports, and others in this TCF project, can be read online.

Participants include: 

• Brian Katulis, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, based in Washington, D.C.
• Emile Hokayem, a senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, based in London.
• Thanassis Cambanis, a senior fellow at The Century Foundation, based in Beirut.

In the second segment of this podcast, former U.S. government official and current Duke University professor Bruce W. Jentleson proposes a blueprint for a rebalanced American foreign policy. The United States has drifted away from a clear strategy based on its fundamental interests, Jentleson argues. It’s time to clean house and go back to basics.

Esfandiary and Jentleson talk with TCF senior fellow Thanassis Cambanis about their contributions to the TCF project Order from Ashes: New Foundations for Security in the Middle East. Their reports, and others in this project, can be read online.

Participants include:

• Dina Esfandiary, a CSSS fellow in the war studies department at King’s College London, and an adjunct fellow in the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ (CSIS) Middle East Programme.
• Bruce Jentleson,  a professor of public policy and political science at Duke University. He served as senior advisor to the State Department policy planning director from  2009–11. His book The Peacemakers: Leadership Lessons from Twentieth Century Statesmanship will be published in April.
• Thanassis Cambanis, a senior fellow at The Century Foundation.

The Century Foundation has launched the results of a multi-year research project, supported by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, that examines the Middle East’s current regional security environment at a time of perhaps unprecedented turmoil and instability.

In this podcast, TCF senior fellows Michael Wahid Hanna and Thanassis Cambanis discuss the findings in Order from Ashes: New Foundations for Security in the Middle East, which will be released online beginning January 2018 and in book form in March 2018.

We look at (mostly failed) efforts to create security cooperation. Bold ideas like a pan-Arab peacekeeping force or a new peace process might be impossible in the current climate, but there are plenty of piecemeal efforts that could create security architecture that still improves human security in meaningful ways. This research suggests that security and reform cannot be considered in isolation; they are inextricably linked. Any effective conversation about reform and stability ought to address the security threats, fears, and domestic politics that underlie government decisions.

Participants include:

• Thanassis Cambanis, Senior Fellow, The Century Foundation
• Michael Wahid Hanna, Senior Fellow, The Century Foundation

Syrian activist Marcell Shehwaro was at the center of the popular uprising in Aleppo, and won a reputation as an unflagging supporter of civil society and a critic of abuses by the government and also by rebel militias. Today she is working from Beirut to give voice to her fellow citizens trapped in Eastern Ghouta. “Every morning I ask myself what did I not do for Aleppo, so that I can do it for Ghouta.”

In our second segment, we hear from James Sadri, executive director of the Syria Campaign, which works with citizens’ groups inside Syria and tries to carry their message abroad. His organization is best known for its efforts to publicize the work of the White Helmets, volunteers who rescue Syrians from bomb sites. He marvels at the resilience of Syrians and the failure of the international system to uphold its commitments to human rights and law—and wonders what the international liberal order can salvage from its shameful record in Syria.

Participants include:

• Marcell Shehwaro, a Syrian civil society activist from Aleppo, currently based in Istanbul and Beirut.
• James Sadri, executive director of The Syria Campaign.
• Thanassis Cambanis, senior fellow at The Century Foundation.

This podcast was produced by Harrison Cramer. 

• Thanassis Cambanis is a senior fellow at The Century Foundation.

This episode was produced by Harrison Cramer. 

On November 30, The Century Foundation published a report on national identity and belonging among Syrian exiles by TCF Foreign Policy associates Lily Hindy and Sima Ghaddar, based on their series of extended narrative interviews with displaced Syrians in Lebanon, Europe, and the United States. 

Participants include: 

• Thanassis Cambanis, Senior Fellow, The Century Foundation
• Lily Hindy, Policy Associate, The Century Foundation
• Sima Ghaddar, Contributor, The Century Foundation