Podcasts – Middle East and North Africa

Europe Listens is a podcast series that features interviews with thought leaders from outside of Europe. It explores how they think about the global challenges we face and how they view Europe’s role and responsibilities as well as opportunities and obstacles for multilateral cooperation. Europe Listens is hosted by Rafael Loss and Jana Puglierin, with support from Stiftung Mercator.

China is becoming ever more important to global affairs. But political and geopolitical challenges, as well as the covid-19 pandemic, have diminished Europeans’ ability to engage with Chinese thinkers and understand their views and ideas about the world. In this mini-series, Mark Leonard and Janka Oertel try to change that by engaging in conversations with some of the best Chinese academics, researchers, writers, and journalists on the topics in Chinese internal debates that matter most to Europeans.

In the first big multilateral test for prime minister Giorgia Meloni, this mini-series will explore the four main priorities of Italy’s 2024 G7 presidency: AI, infrastructure, Ukraine, and Africa.

Countries such as China and Russia, but also India, Brazil, Indonesia, South Africa and Nigeria, have their own ideas about what the international order should look like. However, apart from their ambition to overcome Western dominance, their respective visions for a new order do not always coincide. Consequently, catch-all terms such as “Global South” do not do justice to the actual diversity of views. In “The World after the West”, Mark Leonard discusses China, Brazil, Russia, India, Southeast Asia and the USA with his guests. What visions of order and power are there in the world and how do they relate to the European one? What potential do new regional and ideological clubs and institutions have and what effects can be expected for Europe?

ECFR’s podcast series “Under the Overcoat” explores the deeper trends beneath the surface of Russian daily politics. It reveals how fundamental changes in Russia enabled its war of aggression against Ukraine and how the conflict is sparking further transformations. The podcast series delves into various aspects of Russian society and politics to provide a comprehensive understanding of the country’s evolution.