The decline of the Ottoman Empire was not a single event but a slow, agonizing process of attrition. Throughout the 19th century, the "Sick Man of Europe" lost territory piece by piece—Algeria to France, Egypt to Britain. But the final act began in 1911, not in the Balkans or the Caucasus, but on the sands of North Africa. In this week’s podcast, I explored the Italian invasion of Libya, a conflict that is often overlooked but was pivotal in setting the stage for the First World War.

The British withdrawal in 1947-48 triggered simultaneous national traumas, laying the foundation for massive displacement and identity crises.

The BBC Empire Service emerged as Britain's audacious attempt to unify its vast empire via radio waves. This technological marvel aimed to create an imperial consciousness, but reality was far more complex.

Explore the transformative power of refugee testimonies. From the Armenian Genocide to the Syrian Civil War, witness how personal stories preserve memory and forge empathy in a fractured world

In today's world, propaganda is more than just chaotic noise; it's a strategic masterpiece engineered to shape public perception. From WWI's aftermath to today's media landscapes, states have mastered the art of influencing minds. Discover how modern propaganda builds consensus and reshapes reality.

Discover how the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) built a complex de facto state in Sri Lanka's Northern Vanni region, transforming from guerrillas to territorial rulers. Explore their governance model that offered efficient administration while enforcing authoritarian control.

Unravel the financial backbone of Sri Lanka's civil war: the diaspora's role in sustaining a modern insurgency. Delve into how global networks fueled LTTE's resilience and isolation.

The Black Tigers of the LTTE epitomized hybrid warfare by turning individual sacrifice into a powerful psychological tool, redefining asymmetric conflict on global stages.

The emergence of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) as the preeminent and, ultimately, sole belligerent force of Tamil secessionism was never inevitable. In the late 1970s, the landscape of Tamil militancy in Sri Lanka was fragmented, populated by competing groups with varying ideologies and strategies. The LTTE’s ascent from obscurity to hegemony was the result of a deliberate, ruthless, and brilliantly executed strategy by its founder, Velupillai Prabhakaran.

The Sri Lankan Civil War (1983-2009) was one of the longest-running and most brutal intra-state conflicts of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. It was a war of staggering human cost, profound geopolitical complexity, and devastating finality. At its heart was a violent struggle between the Sri Lankan state, dominated by the Sinhalese majority, and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), a separatist insurgent group that fought for an independent Tamil homeland in the island’s north and east. To reduce the conflict to a simple binary, however, is to misunderstand its essence.

In the summer of 1938, the Spanish Republic launched a desperate attack across the Ebro River. The goal was not just military—it was diplomatic. Prime Minister Juan Negrín hoped that by proving the Republic still had fight in it, he could convince Britain and France to lift their arms embargo and stand up to the fascist powers backing Franco. For the soldiers on the ground, particularly the volunteers of the International Brigades, this meant enduring hell. As Adam Hochschild describes in Spain in Our Hearts, men fought for weeks without sleep, under a sun that reached 134°F, while German and Italian aircraft strafed their positions. They were fighting for time, hoping that the democracies would finally wake up.

Brian Wilson was not just a songwriter; he was a seismograph for the tremors of the American Century. His passing marks the end of an era, and in this special episode of the podcast, I sat down with Toby Manning to discuss why Wilson belongs in the pantheon alongside Lennon, McCartney, and Dylan. Photo credit: by Ithaka Darin Pappas…

In 1928, the Soviet Union faced a choice. It could continue with the New Economic Policy (NEP), using market mechanisms to encourage peasants to grow grain, or it could return to the methods of the Civil War: force, requisitioning, and terror. Stalin chose the latter. In this week’s podcast, I continued my exploration of Robert Conquest’s The Harvest of Sorrow, focusing on the pivotal moment when the Soviet leadership decided to declare war on the countryside.

Revolutions rarely end with the fall of the old regime. Often, that is merely the prelude to a deeper, bloodier struggle over what comes next. In the Ottoman Empire, the Young Turk Revolution of 1908 was greeted with jubilation. Turks, Arabs, and Armenians celebrated in the streets, believing that the restoration of the constitution would save the empire.

Donald Trump’s recent threat to launch a criminal inquiry into Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell—allegedly over the refurbishment of federal buildings—is unprecedented. It is a thinly veiled attempt to intimidate the central bank into lowering interest rates, a move designed to juice the economy before the midterm elections

This case study examines the implementation and consequences of the White Revolution’s agrarian reforms in Gilan, the verdant Caspian province with a distinct history of peasant activism and political radicalism. As detailed in the main overview, the Pahlavi land reform program was a nationwide policy of social engineering. In Gilan, however, it encountered a rural society uniquely shaped by its ecology of rice and tea cultivation, its legacy of the Jangal (Forest) Movement and the Soviet Republic of Gilan (1920-21), and a peasantry with a demonstrated capacity for organization.

This examination focuses on a critical infrastructural pillar of the White Revolution (Enqelāb-e Sefid): the massive campaign to extend electricity to Iran’s villages. While land reform was the political centrepiece, rural electrification was its functional counterpart, representing the regime’s promise to deliver tangible modernity to the countryside. As explored in the main overview of the White Revolution, the Pahlavi state sought legitimacy not merely through redistribution but through a spectacle of development. Electrification was the most visible symbol of this promise—the literal bringing of “light” to what was portrayed as a backward, dark realm

This analysis explores the distinct regional impact of the Shah’s White Revolution (Enqelāb-e Sefid) on Mazandaran, the fertile Caspian province whose lush, rain-fed villages presented a stark contrast to the arid agrarian landscapes of central and eastern Iran. As detailed in the main overview of the White Revolution, the land reform program was a nationwide policy, but its effects were profoundly mediated by local ecology, existing social structures, and economic patterns. In Mazandaran, the reforms interacted with a unique context of small-scale rice cultivation, complex horticulture, and historically stronger peasant agency, leading to outcomes that differed significantly from those in provinces like Khorasan or Kerman.

This regional case study examines the implementation and impact of the land reform program—the centrepiece of the Shah’s White Revolution (Enqelāb-e Sefid)—in Iran’s vast and historically significant province of Khorasan. It expands upon the national overview of the White Revolution, detailing how this top-down modernization policy played out in a crucial agrarian region, revealing the tensions between central planning and local realities that ultimately limited the program's success.

The narrative of foreign participation in the Spanish Civil War has been overwhelmingly shaped by the story of the International Brigades—the leftist volunteers who fought for the Republic. This focus, while substantively justified by their numbers and symbolic weight, has often obscured a parallel phenomenon: the thousands of foreigners who took up arms for Francisco Franco’s Nationalist faction. These volunteers, ranging from ideologically driven fascists and devout Catholics to mercenaries and political exiles, constituted a significant, though less centralized, dimension of the conflict’s internationalization. Their presence was instrumental to Nationalist propaganda, which leveraged them to portray the war as a transcendent “Crusade” supported by a global community of believers, rather than a rebellion reliant on German and Italian regulars.

The Spanish Civil War is frequently analyzed through a binary lens: a struggle between a fascist-aligned Nationalist coalition and a Republican alliance defending parliamentary democracy. This framework, however, obscures a transformative third force that fundamentally shaped the conflict’s initial phase and its international reception. In the summer of 1936, the military rebellion triggered not only military resistance but a profound social revolution, spearheaded by the anarcho-syndicalist Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) and the Iberian Anarchist Federation (FAI). This revolution, characterized by the large-scale collectivization of industry and agriculture, the formation of popular militias, and the de facto implementation of libertarian communist principles in much of Republican territory, presented a unique historical phenomenon. It was a radical, indigenous social upheaval that existed in tense, often contradictory, coexistence with the project of defending the Republican state.

The military history of the Spanish Civil War is a complex story of campaigns, battles, and foreign interventions. Yet, underlying this violent surface was a decisive, less-visible struggle waged over a single, indispensable resource: petroleum. In an era where military mobility, air power, and industrial logistics were increasingly mechanized, oil was the lifeblood of modern warfare. The conflict’s outcome was thus shaped not only by the flow of men and arms across borders but by the clandestine and politicized flow of hydrocarbon fuels. The Spanish Civil War starkly revealed how economic warfare, conducted through the control of strategic resources, could function as a decisive form of proxy intervention.

During the Spanish Civil War one of the most decisive forms of intervention was, paradoxically, an act of collective non-intervention. The policy of Non-Intervention, formally adopted by twenty-seven European nations in August 1936 and administered by a London-based committee until the war’s end, stands as a landmark of diplomatic failure and moral abdication. It was a policy designed not to prevent foreign interference, but to license it selectively; not to uphold international law, but to subvert it for reasons of political expediency.

Of the various foreign interventions in the Spanish Civil War, that of Fascist Italy under Benito Mussolini occupies a singular and paradoxical position. It was, by any objective measure, an invasion: a massive, state-directed deployment of military personnel and matériel exceeding in sheer numbers the contribution of Nazi Germany, yet it has often been relegated to a secondary status in historical memory, overshadowed by the more technologically formative German intervention and the ideologically potent Soviet one.

The Spanish Civil War was not only fought with rifles, artillery, and aircraft across the Iberian Peninsula; it was waged simultaneously on a global battlefield of public perception through an unprecedented and sophisticated campaign of propaganda. This conflict is frequently cited as the first “media war” of the modern age, a characterization that acknowledges the conscious, industrialized use of mass communication technologies—newsreels, radio, photojournalism, and the illustrated press—to shape narratives, mobilize international opinion, and legitimize intervention.