Le Monde diplomatique - English edition

From the outside, it's easy to think that all Chinese intellectuals fall neatly into the category of dissidents or propagandists. In fact, there's a host of public intellectuals that the West largely ignores who are actively engaged in debating their country's future. In this month's podcast, David Ownby of the University of Montreal explains how these thinkers see China's role in a multipolar world and why they (...) - 2023/01 / Podcast, 2023/01 china

A long list of scandals brought down Boris Johnson this summer. His successor Liz Truss's premiership looks likely to be even briefer; within weeks of entering No 10 in September, support for her had all but vanished, after her disastrous mishandling of the economy and repeated U-turns. In this month's podcast, journalist Jamie Maxwell discusses these recent upheavals and puts them in the wider context of British politics, including the question mark over the survival of the union (...) - 2022/10 / Podcast, 2022/10 UK

On 2 August Nancy Pelosi touched down in Taipei, prompting anger from the Chinese government. Six weeks later, President Biden confirmed that US troops would defend Taiwan if China attacked. In this month's podcast, Michael Klare, professor emeritus of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College, discusses some of the critical questions around this volatile situation. Why, after decades, has the US abandoned its policy of ‘strategic ambiguity' over Taiwan? And could the Biden (...) - 2022/08 / Podcast

Diablo Canyon, California's last-remaining nuclear power plant, provoked the US's biggest ever anti-nuclear demonstration in the early 1980s. The plant was built in an earthquake zone, where memories of the Three Mile Island accident were still fresh. The message was clear: environmentalists saw no role for nuclear energy. Our guest in this month's podcast, journalist Maxime Robin, visited California recently to see how the debate around nuclear power has moved on. As the state grapples with (...) - 2022/08 / Podcast, 2022/08 america nuclear

Our guest this month, journalist Anne-Dominique Correa, considers the presidency of Andrés Manuel López Obrador (widely known as AMLO) now that his term has passed its midway point. The former mayor of Mexico City won the presidential election in late 2018 with a slogan of ‘First the Poor' and a promise to transform Mexico, but he's had to make compromises along the way so as not to completely alienate the country's powerful economic elite. Some of his supporters are disillusioned: is AMLO (...) - 2022/07 / Podcast, 2022/07 Mexico

It's almost two years since a huge explosion devastated Beirut's port. Since then, as journalist Emmanuel Haddad explains in this month's podcast, Lebanon's economic situation has got much worse, a political reckoning has failed to occur and many Lebanese have emigrated. In his article in the May edition of the paper (‘The urgent need to preserve Lebanon's past') Haddad writes about the efforts of people dedicated to excavating and processing their country recent past amid its present economic (...) - 2022/05 / Podcast, 2022/05 Lebanon

Our guest this month, Juliette Faure from Sciences Po, Paris, is a specialist in Russian political elites. In our April edition, she writes on ‘The deep ideological roots of Russia's war' and in this month's podcast she discusses how the doctrine of ‘national patriotism' gained influence in Russia, especially through the activities of the Izborsk Club, an elite rightwing think tank that has aggressively pushed the concept of ‘Novorossia' (New Russia) to justify Russia's claims on Ukrainian (...) - 2022/04 / Podcast, 2022/04 Russia/Ukraine, 2022/04 Izborsk

With Russia now under some of the severest sanctions ever imposed as part of an effort to halt its war on Ukraine, we discuss international sanctions with our guest, Anne-Cécile Robert, director of Le Monde diplomatique's international editions. Anne-Cécile and her colleague Hélène Richard have an article in this month's paper entitled ‘Russia and the West: between sanctions and war', which shows that, as sanctions have proliferated in the last 30 years, there's a risk they come to be seen as a (...) - 2022/03 / Podcast, 2022/03 Russia-Ukraine

How has the US withdrawal from Afghanistan affected the power balance in the wider region? In this month's podcast, Jean-Luc Racine, emeritus director of research at the CNRS, discusses his article ‘Taliban victory sparks regional reset', which appears in the December issue. As he explains, new alliances are forming and old fears resurfacing – not least that extremist violence will spill over Afghanistan's (...) - 2021/12 / Podcast, 2021/12 Afghanistan

In recent years, China has made it clear that it welcomes foreign investment. Big western companies have been only too happy to oblige, as our podcast guest Philip S Golub explains (see ‘Wall's Street's unlikely new romance with China' in this month's paper). But how does China square President Xi's policy of ‘investment liberalisation and facilitation' with its increasingly aggressive ‘wolf warrior diplomacy' in the geopolitical (...) - 2021/11 / Podcast, 2021/11 China-wallstreet