The desire to be free from the limits of the human experience is as old as our first stories. We exist in an endless universe, only bound by the laws of physics and yet, our consciousness is trapped in mortal machines made of meat. With the breathtaking explosion of innovation and progress, for the first time the concept of leaving our flesh piles behind and uploading our minds into a digital utopia seems possible. Even like the logical next step on our evolutionary ladder.
17 December 2020
16 December 2020
Nautilus Magazine: What Did the Past Smell Like?
That’s a question with which the minds behind “Odeuropa” will have to grapple. Launching this January, it is a $3.3 million, three-year, multinational project on the collection and recreation of smells in 16th- to early 20th-century Europe that will marry historical and literary analysis with machine learning and chemistry. The project is pioneering and also, in a year of COVID-19 induced anosmia with sensory-deprived lockdowns, timely.2 We became aware of our need for environmental stimulation—and the undervalued power of smell. [...]
Descriptions of odor also are culturally mediated. A 2016 study showed that even French and Franco-Canadians today may not agree in their experience and evaluation of the same odor3: For the French, for example, wintergreen was rated much less pleasantly than for French-Canadians. “In France, wintergreen is used more in medicinal products than in Canada, where it is found more in candy,” a press release for the study stated. “Anise was rated similarly in two cultures but was described more often as ‘licorice’ in Quebec and as ‘anise’ in France.” Intricate cross-cultural differences make for intriguing anecdotes. But they are hard to document. [...]
Odeuropa opens up a new sensory experience of history. The researchers will create a catalog of past scents by digging through 250,000 images and thousands of texts (in seven languages), ranging from medical descriptions of smells in textbooks to labels of fragrances in novels or magazines. Machine learning will help to cross-analyze the plethora of descriptions, contexts, and occurrence of odor names (such as tobacco, lavender, and probably horse manure). This catalog serves as the conceptual basis for perfumers and chemists to create fragrant molecules fitting 120 of these descriptors. [...]
Part of the Odeuropa team is a research project called Smell of Heritage, carried out by Cecilia Bembibre, a doctoral student in heritage science at University College London. Heritage scientists look to come up with new ways to study materials and collections that make up cultural heritage, as well as how the environment interacts with it. Bembibre, for example, analyzes and archives culturally essential aromas. “In the heritage context,” the Smell of Heritage website states, “experiencing what the world smelled like in the past enriches our knowledge of it, and, because of the unique relation between odors and memories, allows us to engage with our history in a more emotional way.” [...]
The historical conservation of smell visualizes (for lack of a better term) our need to directly experience and engage with the changes in our history’s materiality. In a world accelerating the digitization of knowledge and the virtual documentation of other people’s lives, we should not forget about our desire to sensually experience. It’s vital, for me at least. Things like virtual reality, which can persuasively simulate visual, auditory, and even tactile sensations, won’t feel convincing enough without also incorporating smell, the next and perhaps ultimate frontier, given how difficult it is to substitute. A fan of the outdoors like me wants to get a whiff of the horse poop.
Foreign Policy: Pentagon Says UAE Possibly Funding Russia’s Shadowy Mercenaries in Libya
Experts have long suspected that the UAE may be using Russian private military contractors to help obfuscate its role in the conflict—a charge that Abu Dhabi denies—but the report is the first public, official assessment of the arrangement. [...]
But the revelation that those Russian mercenaries may have been bankrolled by one of America’s closest military allies in the Middle East further complicates the calculus for Washington, and comes as Democrats in Congress have been mounting a campaign to oppose the Trump administration’s proposed $23 billion sale of F-35 fighter jets to Abu Dhabi. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee is set to hold a closed hearing on the arms sale early Monday evening. [...]
While private military contractors are outlawed within Russia, a network of companies collectively known as the Wagner group has been at the forefront of Russian interference efforts abroad from Ukraine to Libya and Sudan. The Kremlin’s increasing reliance on the group has lent its overseas operations a veneer of plausible deniability, but Wagner is deeply entwined with Russian military and intelligence structures and the Department of State has characterized it as a “surrogate for the Russian ministry of defense.”
Social Europe: Brexit and the misunderstanding of sovereignty
From the start, Brexit was a quixotic project. Take the symbolic centrality of fishing—which makes up less than 0.1 per cent of the UK’s economy—to the negotiations over the future relations between the UK and the EU. There are many substantive issues at stake, but understanding Brexit requires a grasp of the strange, profoundly anachronistic, English understanding of sovereignty upon from which it is derived. [...]
Even within global politics sovereignty no longer refers exclusively to the capacity of the state to make arbitrary decisions, but rather to its international obligation ‘to preserve life-sustaining standards for its citizens’, while more widely observing the rule of law and postwar conventions on human rights. Sovereignty is thus about the responsibility to protect the rights and interests of the population, not control.
The key feature of the ‘Westminster model’ is that it does not differentiate between constitutional and normal law. Not only can any piece of legislation be undone by simple-majority vote; Parliament is also omnicompetent, as its legislative powers can override all claims to fundamental rights. For example, John Selden famously argued that Parliament could even make staying in bed after 8 o’clock a capital offence.[...]
Given all this, the European public can only hope that leaders in the UK and elsewhere—especially in those central- and eastern-European states whose obstinacy about the rule of law is based on a similar misreading of sovereignty—learn this lesson without doing too much harm to their peoples. If they do not, the result will be a less co-operative, less prosperous, more divisive and more dangerous environment, in Europe and around the world.
Vox: Why the US waits so long to swear in the new president
American law specifies that the US presidential election happens in early November. It also specifies that the winner of that election isn’t actually sworn in until January 20th. That leaves about two and a half months in between, where, in situations where the incumbent has been voted out, the winner of the election still isn’t president. This is the “transition” period, during which the old administration trades places with the new one.
But does that period really need to be so long? In 2020, we found out what happens when an incumbent president loses reelection, but refuses to concede: Among other things, it pushes the start of the transition several weeks later, shortening that handover period. So does that matter? What actually happens in those two and a half months, and why do we let the loser continue to wield power for so long?
SciShow Psych: The Dark Side of Disgust
We’re all super familiar with the feeling we get when we smell rotten food or see gross bodily fluids. But this visceral emotion does a lot more than that, and it’s important understand to how the darker side of disgust can influence us.
15 December 2020
Slate: An Armenian Tragedy
COVID-19, unsurprisingly, is rampant in Karabakh and new arrivals at the center get their temperature checked and a face mask if they don’t have one. Many of these people had spent days or weeks in crowded underground bomb shelters in Karabakh before fleeing to Armenia. I couldn’t help but notice that the mask-wearing rate was maybe 60 percent, but who can worry about an invisible threat like the coronavirus when a very tangible one is landing and exploding around you? Besides, it’s pretty much impossible to socially distance when you’re a refugee. [...]
Armenia had won control of Karabakh in a previous war with Azerbaijan, in the 1990s, as the Soviet Union was collapsing. That war had ended in a cease-fire but not a peace treaty, and Karabakh is still internationally recognized as Azerbaijani territory. Armenians didn’t see it that way, though. “There is no Armenia without Karabakh,” Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said in one wartime address to the nation. [...]
Losing Karabakh would be not only a national defeat but also a blow, possibly fatal, to the hopes engendered by Armenia’s 2018 Velvet Revolution, in which the man-of-the-people ex-journalist Pashinyan improbably toppled the corrupt, strongman regime that had ruled the country for two decades. For Pashinyan to be the one to lose to Azerbaijan would threaten the country’s prospects for democracy.[...]
The Armenian media had, however, uncritically picked up the official line. This was partly due to a censorship regime: Shortly after fighting started, the government instituted martial law, one of the provisions of which was that it was illegal “to call into question the military capabilities” of the armed forces. But it also seemed to be partly a self-censorship in response to popular demand: There was no appetite for news about how Armenia was losing. [...]
This war had been coming for a long time. In the late 1980s, Armenians demanded that Karabakh—which was inside the borders of Soviet Azerbaijan—be transferred to Soviet Armenia. Interethnic violence broke out and then, when the Soviet Union collapsed, all-out war. By the time a cease-fire was signed in 1994, Armenia controlled a substantial part of Azerbaijani territory. That included Nagorno-Karabakh, as well as large swaths of other territory surrounding it, which Armenian forces captured during the fighting. Those territories had been almost entirely populated by ethnic Azerbaijanis, who all fled. In total, more than 600,000 Azerbaijanis were displaced from this area, according to United Nations figures.
The Conversation: Why so many Syrian women get divorced when they move to western countries
But many of the refugee women in question have taken advantage of their new lives in western, secular societies to ask for divorce – often from abusive husbands they had to marry as young girls. They had not been forced to marry the men for religious reasons but often because they came from rural backgrounds where patriarchy (and patriarchal interpretations of Islam) were predominant. The personal status laws in most Arab countries also often deprive women of basic rights such as alimony or custody of their children after divorce.
But patriarchal laws are not the main reason for Syrian women’s silence and acceptance of the status quo when in their homeland. The concept of ‛ayb (shame) rather than the concept of haram (religiously forbidden), has often governed these women’s behaviour. For example, while ‛isma (an additional clause in the marriage contract allowing women to initiate divorce) is permissible in Islam, it is socially frowned upon in most Muslim communities. Women who have such a clause in their marriage contract are often seen as morally and sexually suspect. [...]
This phenomenon is not unique to Syrian refugees in Germany. It can also be observed in Sweden, where Syrian women have been increasingly empowered by the feminist policies of the Swedish government. They also started demanding separation from abusive husbands they had to marry as young girls. [...]
The Syrian government itself has seemingly recently realised its laws are problematic and amended the Syrian Personal Status laws in February 2019. The amendments included more than 60 legal articles. They not only raised the age of marriage, and granted women custody of their children after divorce, but also gave all Syrian women ‛isma – the right to petition for divorce without anyone’s permission.
Psyche: When does a human embryo have the moral status of a person?
As these arguments rage on, technological breakthroughs in embryo culture that make it easier to keep embryos alive in the lab for longer are putting greater pressure on the 14-day rule. For decades, the rule was relatively academic. In reality, sustaining an embryo outside of the human body beyond seven days was long considered a near-impossible feat. But this has begun to change. In 2016, scientists in both New York and Cambridge grew human embryos for 13 days, pushing against the limit of the regulations. Then in November 2019, a group of scientists at the Yunnan Key Laboratory of Primate Biomedical Research in the Chinese city of Kunming published a study that sent reverberations throughout the world of reproductive medicine – they’d successfully cultivated monkey embryos for 20 days. [...]
So, the benefits to human health of extending the 14-day rule could be sizeable, but those who oppose the change fear that it will be a slippery slope towards an ever-increasing time window for human embryo research, and also lead to the approval of other reproductive technologies that remain highly contentious. For instance, concerns were raised at a discussion held by the Nuffield Council on Bioethics in 2017 that extending the 14-day rule could help pave the way for the legalisation of human germline engineering, which would allow clinics to create genetically modified babies via the editing of embryo genomes. Giulia Cavaliere, a bioethicist at Lancaster University, is among those warning that extending the limit for embryo research could risk undermining public trust in scientists and regulators. [...]
In this debate, the ultimate dilemma has to do with the moral status that we attribute to embryos. Some people feel that any embryo, from the point of fertilisation, has the same right to protection as a newborn baby, and so cultivating it purely for research would be wrong. Others maintain that embryos are simply a ball of cells, and so don’t warrant any special rules. Somewhere in the middle lies the gradualist viewpoint whereby an embryo is seen as growing in moral value as it develops, eventually acquiring, at some point before birth, the status of a person.
Vox: Why government agencies should move from DC to the Midwest
Detroit, Cleveland, Cincinnati, and other former industrial powerhouses in the Midwest are struggling. The industries that have supported those cities have gone away, leaving them overbuilt and underpopulated. Meanwhile, coastal cities like New York and Washington, DC are overcrowded and absurdly expensive. So, why not relocate some well-paying federal jobs from the capitol area to the Midwest? Vox's Matt Yglesias explains how such a plan might work.
Deutsche Welle: Moroccan-Israeli peace rapprochement: An (un)expected surprise?
Morocco's reconnection with Israel marks the return to their previous low-level diplomatic relations which had developed in the context of the Oslo accords in the 1990s and had ended with the Second Intifada in 2000. However, cultural ties date back to the pre-Roman Jewish colonies of Mauretania Tingitana around 2,000 years ago.
Despite major waves of migration from Morocco to Israel in the 1950s and 1960s, Morocco is still home to the largest remaining Jewish community in North Africa, while Jews with Moroccan heritage make up the largest minority group of Jewish immigrants in Israel, totaling around 900,000. [...]
In Israel, however, the destiny of the Sahrawi nation does not appear to be a priority. On Thursday, the first day of the Jewish holiday Hanukkah, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu focused on celebrating the new ties with Morocco.
Social Europe: The rule of law: a simple phrase with exacting demands
How is it then that two EU governments venture to prolong the anguish of some half a billion Europeans, harming their own populations, by refusing to subject themselves to rule-of-law requirements? This cannot be dismissed as the position of two unhinged autocrats, since their veto has significant popular support in these countries, including 57 per cent approval in Poland. [...]
This has been evident in several instances—from lack of concern with the Silvio Berlusconi media monopoly in Italy to France’s semi-permanent state of emergency, Malta’s and Slovakia’s complacency with political murder and the Spanish government’s response to the 2017 independence referendum in Catalonia. Often, the EU is content with narrowly reducing the remit of the rule of law to a simple matter of legality—ignoring routine violations of core values, such as the right to peaceful assembly, freedom of speech or even the right to liberty and life itself.
Has the EU not thereby set itself up for the current crisis, supplying the ammunition for autocrats to try to absolve themselves from compliance with the rule of law? In turning a blind eye, the European Commission has harmed the union’s very normative foundation, endorsing the blatant abuse of power by the leaders of several of its member states.
14 December 2020
Social Europe: Not part of Europe anyway?
The comparative study of welfare states has long stressed British distinctiveness. While the continued collective provision of goods, especially health (the NHS), certainly differentiates the United Kingdom from the United States, the UK (sometimes with the addition of Ireland) stands alone within Europe as representing a liberal world of welfare, distinct from both social-democratic and conservative worlds. Today, in terms of the extent of income inequality and poverty, the UK is mostly an outlier within western Europe, while the movement from passive to active labour-market policies has taken a particularly punitive form. [...]
While the self-image of the US is that it is classless compared to Europe, in fact no country of old Europe matches its class divide—not even Britain. Yet in many ways the British social structure is now less European than before. This is not only a question of poverty and inequality. The degradation (and denigration) of its traditional working class has gone furthest and its management has become the most Americanised.
In the past Italy, with its north-south divide, was the European country with the greatest regional differences. Now the growing gap between London and the south on the one hand and the northern cities on the other means that Britain resembles a US slash-and-burn pattern of economic growth. [...]
As some social historians have noticed, the origins of this divergence lie in the de-industrialisation of the 1980s. While deindustrialisation was a common process across the democratic welfare states of western Europe, in the UK it was interwoven with the Thatcherite political onslaught on the trade union movement. Far more so than elsewhere, in the UK deindustrialisation constituted an explicit undermining of social citizenship.
Salon: Conservative women often don't perceive sexism as a social problem. Here's why
"Women who have experienced gender discrimination report higher levels of political participation and a higher chance of voting in the general election," writes Dr. Alexa Bankert of the University of Georgia in a paper published in American Politics Research. "However, among conservative women, personal experience with sexism is not associated with this participatory impetus." In other words, the experience of being discriminated against seems to activate liberal women and encourage them to vote and be involved in politics. Peculiarly, that wasn't the same for conservative women.
Bankert told PsyPost that the difference related to how one perceives sexism, as a one-off thing or systemic. "Among conservative women, the perception dominates that sexist behavior consists of isolated incidents while liberal women view sexism as a more systemic problem," she said. That interpretation fits with a fundamental truth about the right-left divide, namely, the tendency of the right to deny the existence of the social sphere and view social problems rather as individual ones — whereas the left understands social issues as structural, related to large-scale cultural and social factors that must be changed at a political level. "This might explain why experienced sexism amplifies liberal women's political engagement but there is not a similar participatory impetus among conservative women," Bankert mused.[...]
"As liberal women experience sexism firsthand, further bolstering the belief in widespread gender discrimination, they are likely to turn to the political domain for solutions," Bankers writes in her paper. "This expectation is grounded in liberals' convictions that it is the government's responsibility to address intergroup inequalities and protect the rights of disadvantaged members of society. From this perspective, liberal women's personal experience with sexism should boost their political engagement." [...]
"Since many conservative women reject the feminist label and its associated battle against sexism, it is possible that conservative women either dismiss or rationalize their own personal experience with sexism," Bankert explains. "In fact, past research has demonstrated that women who endorse traditional gender stereotypes are also more likely to blame themselves for experiencing sexual harassment."
UnHerd: Must we always demolish the past?
One Westminster politician in particular may have relished the banging, smashing news from Wrexham. In October, Robert Jenrick, Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, said that the Government’s new planning reforms will create a “big opportunity to demolish some of the mistakes of the recent past . . . empty derelict buildings in town and city centres that were put, often poorly constructed, not within the character of those places, particularly in market towns in the Sixties and Seventies.” [...]
There is though an irredeemable arrogance at play when it comes to the fate of buildings when a new generation takes against previous architectural styles it feels it has the cultural competence and a kind of divine right to dismiss and destroy. In 1961, Harold Macmillan, Conservative prime minister and arch moderniser, ensured the demolition of the Euston Arch. This monumental Greek Revival propylaeon, or triumphal gateway, designed in a severe Doric style by Philip Hardwick, fronted what had been the London terminus of Britain’s first long distance passenger railway, the London and Birmingham. Opened in 1837, this was the 19th century equivalent of a Roman road, the scale of its engineering epic, its architecture noble. [...]
Sometimes, just sometimes, there are balanced outcomes. The 1960s Preston Bus Station — cinematic, sculptural, heroic — designed by Keith Ingham and Charles Wilson of the Building Design Partnership, survived prolonged attempts to have it demolished to make way for more shopping. Between 2016 and 2018 it was renovated by John Puttick Associates. Against Wrexham’s and Jenrick’s grain, local people truly like this Sixties adventure in concrete.
City Beautiful: Can we make cities car free?
Europe's cities could get there soon. The US? Maybe not.
TechCrunch: How four European cities are embracing micromobility to drive out cars
Every year, around 2,500 people die prematurely because of air pollution in Paris. Like most European cities, the number one cause of pollution is motorized traffic. [...]
There are two reasons why Paris is an interesting city for mobility experiments. First, the Paris area is the 29th metropolitan area in the world by population density. Georges-Eugène Haussmann initiated some radical urbanization changes in the second half of the 19th century leading to the city’s modern layout — mostly seven-story buildings circled by the ring road. [...]
And this is all due to political will. Vélib’ is a subsidized service. But it’s hard to understand the financial impact of Vélib’ as there are fewer cars on the road, which means that it’s less expensive to maintain roads. Additionally, the impact on pollution and physical activity means that people tend to be healthier, which reduces the pressure on the public health system. [...]
Second, the City of Paris wants to reclaim space. Cars in Paris remain parked 95% of the time. That’s why Paris is going to remove 50% of parking spots. Instead, the city of Paris wants to turn some streets into gardens. There are bigger plans for new parks as well in front of the city hall and between the Eiffel Tower and Trocadéro. [...]
The coronavirus pandemic has acted as a small-scale opportunity for accelerating pedestrian-focused urban remodeling — enabling city authorities to expand Barcelona’s network of bike lanes during the relative quiet of lockdowns, and install some emergency pedestrian zones to expand outdoor space as an anti-COVID-19 measure.
Wired: Oslo got pedestrian and cyclist deaths down to zero. Here’s how
Oslo’s achievement means that it is just one step away from “Vision Zero”, an undertaking to eliminate all deaths on public roads. The foundation for reaching Vision Zero is to significantly reduce the number of cars on the road. Oslo officials have removed more than a thousand street-side central parking spots, encouraging people to lean on an affordable and flexible public transport network, and added more bike lanes and footpaths. Significant areas are closed off to cars entirely, including “heart zones” around primary schools. “The wish to pedestrianise the city isn’t a new policy, but it has accelerated now,” Rune Gjøs, a director at Oslo’s Department of Mobility, says. “The car became the owner of our cities, but we’re resetting the order again.”
Despite its success, Oslo’s initiatives have faced opposition from some people who don’t know life without private cars. There’s also a misconception that pedestrianisation hurts local trade, because the data has always been “patchy,” says Harriet Tregoning, director of the New Urban Mobility Alliance, a global group helping cities to integrate more sustainable transportation. But Oslo’s success contributes to a growing body of evidence that pedestrianisation not only saves lives; it’s also good for business. After reducing cars, footfall in the centre increased by ten per cent. [...]
The disruption caused by Covid-19 has catalysed pedestrianisation projects elsewhere. Cologne in Germany and Calgary in Canada are among cities that have closed off large areas to through-traffic to allow more room for pedestrians to social distance. City officials in Bogota, Colombia have extended its car-free Sundays to the whole week, and Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo has banned private cars from the iconic Rue de Rivoli. Hidalgo has said that returning to a Paris dominated by cars after lockdown ends is “out of the question”. Milan will pedestrianise 35 km of roads indefinitely.
LGBTQ Nation: Bhutan votes to decriminalize homosexuality
The tiny Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan has voted to decriminalize homosexuality during a joint session of parliament. Sixty-three of the 69 members voted in favor of making gay sex legal; the other six were absent. [...]
Unlike many neighboring countries, Bhutan was never colonized by European powers. The sparsely populated Buddhist kingdom criminalized “unnatural sex” and “sodomy” in 2004. [...]
“My primary reason is that this section is there since 2004 but it has become so redundant and has never been enforced. It is also an eyesore for international human rights bodies,” he said.
LGBTQ people in Bhutan do not report many problems with authorities or persecution, but there are no laws protecting them from discrimination.
Notes from Poland: Polish cities switch off lights in protest against government’s EU budget veto
Almost 50 Polish cities this evening turned off the lights at famous landmarks in protest against the government’s blocking of the European Union’s budget and coronavirus recovery fund, as well as against a bill that would reduce the share of tax revenue going to local authorities. [...]
All of Poland’s ten largest cities joined the blackout, including Wrocław, Łódź and Poznań. Among the smaller cities taking part was Sosnowiec, which switched off part of its EU-funded street light grid. [...]
Cities, which are mostly under opposition control, have also expressed concern at a move by the central government to cut the share of tax revenue allocated to local budgets. A bill to that effect was passed by the lower house of parliament on 28 October.
13 December 2020
CityLab: Trump’s Defeat Didn’t Stop His ‘Ban’ on Modern Architecture
President Donald Trump never signed that executive order, which would have banned modernist designs for new federal buildings. After a spate of outrage — it was roundly condemned by the American Institute of Architects, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the dean of architecture at the famously traditional University of Notre Dame and at least 11,000 architects who wrote to the White House — the order faded from view amid the many other crises of 2020. Last week, Trump lost his reelection bid, making the executive order a dead letter.
But the forces that his White House set in motion could outlive his administration: The GSA appears to have adopted a modernism ban, without any authorization in place. What seemed to be a pipe dream for admirers of classical architecture back in February now looks like procurement policy at the federal agency that manages office space and needs for the U.S. government. Design is already underway in Alabama for what might be Trump’s first mandatory classical courthouse. [...]
A classical mandate is also potentially limiting in terms of selecting qualified candidates for federal projects, which are often complex briefs with unique security and logistics needs. One firm, Jenkins Peer, which has prior federal experience renovating a courthouse in Charlotte, was shortlisted for both the Fort Lauderdale and Huntsville courthouses. Payne Design Group, which won the GSA bid for the Huntsville project, is a three-person firm, according to the sales intelligence service Dun & Bradstreet. The federal contracting site GovTribe lists just one federal contract for Payne Design — the Huntsville courthouse, a choice $3.7 million award. Otherwise the firm has largely designed traditional churches and schools in Alabama and Georgia. [...]
The strictly left-versus-right, modern-versus-classical argument reflects an old-fashioned view of architecture, an artifact from design salons of yesteryear. It’s at odds with the conversation in Europe, where policymakers have turned to the Bauhaus school for inspiration for a new aesthetic movement focused on achieving the goal of decarbonizing the continent’s building stock. In the U.S., today’s forward-thinking debates about design and planning center on social and environmental justice. Even the notion that classicism is fundamentally conservative is mistaken.
The Red Line: Nagorno-Karabakh II (A Frozen Conflict Goes Hot)
Like many of the ex-soviet republics, Azerbaijan and Armenia have been part of the frozen conflict now since the early '90s, but Azerbaijan has spent the last few years building up a massive modern army. Baku has now used that army to engage in a full-scale war with Armenia in an attempt to recapture the land lost in 91. With the Armenians in full retreat and the Azeris moving into their old positions what will this mean for the region? Will Ankara or Moscow have the final say on the battlefield? We ask our expert panel. ALEX RAUFOGLU (Eurasia Journalist) NICK MUTCH (Byline Times) CAREY CAVANAUGH (Fmr US Ambassador) LAURENCE BROERS (Chatham House) More info on - www.theredlinepodcast.com Follow the show on @TheRedLinePod Follow Michael on @MikeHilliardAus Support the show at - www.patreon.com/theredlinepodcast
The Prospect Interview #158: Saudi Arabia’s reform and repression
When the young Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman ascended to power in 2017, he was hailed in the west as a liberal reformer, and was welcomed by Hollywood celebrities and world leaders alike. But what has happened to Saudi Arabia’s supposedly radical programme of reform? Saudi expert Madawi al-Rasheed joins the Prospect Interview and takes us behind the power struggles and social debates within the country—and why the west got it so wrong.
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