- 1 hour 6 minutesSlavery and Islam: The Whole Story
In this Conflicted Conversation, Justin Marozzi discusses his new book Captives and Companions: A History of Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Islamic World.
Justin traces the long, varied history of slavery in the Islamic world, arguing that slavery could sometimes offer remarkable paths to freedom and power, but that these exceptions never erased the violence of capture, ownership and exploitation—or the uneasy entanglement of abolition with Western imperialism.
Justin explains:
- The scale and longevity of slavery in the Islamic world
- The spiritual status of enslaved people in early Islam
- The Quran, manumission and the legal regulation of slavery
- The Islamic conquests and the expansion of slave-taking
- Anti-black racism and the Zanj Revolt in Abbasid Iraq
- Concubines, eunuchs, and sexual slavery
- Mamluks, Janissaries and elite forms of servitude
- Christian and Muslim slave-raiding across the Mediterranean
- Ottoman abolition and its entanglement with Western imperialism
- Modern slavery, Daesh and hereditary servitude in Mauritania
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Conflicted is a Message Heard production.
Executive Producers: Jake Warren & Max Warren.
Produced and edited by Thomas Small.
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6 August 2026, 4:00 am - 49 minutes 51 secondsWill America Cut and Run?
Donald Trump has once again stepped back from a threatened major attack on Iran. So has America lost the Iran War? Or is Trump’s apparent hesitation part of a longer strategy to exhaust the Iranian regime?
Aimen and Thomas discuss:
- Whether Iran has outmanoeuvred Trump despite America’s overwhelming military superiority
- Aimen’s three possible futures for the war: US withdrawal, prolonged attrition or extreme escalation
- Why an American retreat could unleash an even more destructive regional war
- Israel, the Gulf states and Pakistan in a Middle East without American restraint
- The revival of the US–Iran MoU and President Pezeshkian’s lack of authority over the IRGC
- America’s possible ‘death by a thousand cuts’ strategy against Iran’s military and economy
- Iran’s collapsing currency, soaring inflation and ability to withstand prolonged pressure
- Trump’s highly personal style of government and the absence of a stable American war strategy
- The limits of air power and America’s repeated failure to convert destruction into political victory
- The danger of nuclear escalation if Iran races towards a bomb or misreads Trump’s restraint as weakness
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Conflicted is a Message Heard production.
Executive Producers: Jake Warren & Max Warren.
Produced and edited by Thomas Small.
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4 August 2026, 4:00 am - 1 hour 23 minutesU Thant: The Diplomat Who Defined the 1960s
In this Conflicted Conversation, Thant Myint-U talks about his new book Peacemaker: U Thant, the United Nations and the Untold Story of the 1960s. It tells the story of his grandfather U Thant, the Burmese schoolteacher turned UN Secretary-General who guided the United Nations through some of the most dangerous crises of the 1960s, yet is now woefully forgotten or badly misremembered.
Thant explains:
- U Thant’s forgotten role as UN Secretary-General during the great crises of the 1960s
- His sociability, humour, directness, and moral imagination
- How Buddhism shaped U Thant’s approach to crisis
- How newly independent post-colonial states tried to remake the world order
- Burma/Myanmar after empire: colonial destruction, weak institutions, and postcolonial state-building
- The Non-Aligned Movement: Afro-Asian internationalism beyond the US–Soviet Cold War
- Congo, Katanga and sovereignty: U Thant’s defence of postcolonial borders against neo-imperial fragmentation
- The Cuban Missile Crisis: U Thant’s overlooked role in helping Kennedy, Khrushchev and Castro de-escalate
- Vietnam and the lost peace channel: U Thant’s ignored 1964 attempt to open talks with Ho Chi Minh
- The Six-Day War and the UN-Israel rupture: UNEF, Nasser, Israel, and the myth that the UN abandoned Israel
- U Thant’s late one-world vision, the decline of Bandung idealism, and the lost promise of postcolonial internationalism
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Visit Thant’s website: thantmyintu.com
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Conflicted is a Message Heard production.
Executive Producers: Jake Warren & Max Warren.
Produced and edited by Thomas Small.
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30 July 2026, 4:00 am - 1 hour 4 minutesWassim Nasr: My Inside Account of Macron’s Syria Visit
French war reporter and global jihadism expert Wassim Nasr was part of the presidential press party during Emmanuel Macron’s recent visit to Damascus. He shares his first-hand account not only of what happened between Macron and Syrian president Ahmad al-Sharaa during the visit, but also what he discovered afterwards, during a trip to Aleppo and to the northern town of Kobane.
Wassim and Thomas discuss:
- What it was like inside Macron’s presidential delegation to Syria
- France–Syria relations after the fall of Bashar al-Assad
- Macron and Ahmed al-Sharaa at the Umayyad Mosque and Mount Qasioun
- Islamic State bombings during Macron’s Damascus visit
- French investment in Syrian reconstruction, energy, ports and transport
- Aleppo’s security, political representation and slow post-war recovery
- Kobani, SDF integration, PKK influence and Arab–Kurdish tensions
- Ahmed al-Sharaa’s Islamist pragmatism and Syria’s dependence on his leadership
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Conflicted is a Message Heard production.
Executive Producers: Jake Warren & Max Warren.
Produced and edited by Thomas Small.
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28 July 2026, 4:00 am - 1 hour 14 minutesIndo-European: The Language Family That Went Global
In this Conflicted Conversation, Thomas meets Laura Spinney, author of Proto: How One Language Went Global, the story of the Proto-Indo-European language and its descendants, which are spoken today by half of humanity.
Laura explains:
- How, where, and among whom Proto-Indo-European emerged
- How Indo-European split into English, Hindi, Persian, Russian, Greek, Latin-derived Romance languages, Celtic, Germanic, Baltic and Slavic tongues
- How linguists reconstruct an unwritten prehistoric language through sound laws, comparative vocabulary and ancient texts
- Why ancient DNA has transformed the debate over Indo-European origins by restoring migration to the centre of the story
- Who the Yamnaya were, and how mobile pastoralists north of the Black Sea spread language through cattle, wagons, dairy and steppe mobility
- How a small number of steppe migrants may have transformed Europe’s languages through disease, prestige, violence, intermarriage and social networks
- Why Tocharian, Sanskrit and Persian reveal extraordinary Indo-European journeys from the Pontic-Caspian steppe to China, India and Iran
- How ‘Aryan’ began as a real Indo-Iranian self-description before being distorted by racial nationalism and Nazi pseudoscience
Join the Conflicted Community here: https://conflicted.supportingcast.fm/
Find Laura on X: https://x.com/lfspinney
And on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/laurainparis.bsky.social
And on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/laura.spinney
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Conflicted is a Message Heard production.
Executive Producers: Jake Warren & Max Warren.
Produced and edited by Thomas Small.
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23 July 2026, 4:00 am - 1 hour 6 minutesIran Will Never Give Up Hormuz
The MoU with Iran has broken down, war has returned to the Middle East, and so Aimen walks us through the events since the war re-ignited on 7th July.
More than anything, the fighting now focuses on the Strait of Hormuz. In Iran’s eyes, it has won control of the Strait as a spoil of war. In the rest of the world’s eyes, freedom of navigation through the Strait remains a cast-iron principle of international law.
Aimen and Thomas discuss:
- Why the US–Iran MoU collapsed over control of the Strait of Hormuz
- Iran’s attacks on Gulf shipping and the return of the US naval blockade
- US strikes on Bandar Abbas and Iran’s coastal military infrastructure
- GCC retaliation: Kuwait, Bahrain, UAE and Jordan confront Iran
- Trump assassination threats and divisions inside the US administration
- Saudi Arabia’s internal debate over Iran and renewed war with the Houthis
- Houthi threats to close Bab al-Mandab and attack Saudi infrastructure
- Oman, NATO and Israel’s roles in the widening Iran war
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Conflicted is a Message Heard production.
Executive Producers: Jake Warren & Max Warren.
Produced and edited by Thomas Small.
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21 July 2026, 4:00 am - 1 hour 1 minuteHow Netanyahu Failed to Prevent October 7
In this latest Conflicted Conversation, Thomas talks with Yaakov Katz, the former editor-in-chief of The Jerusalem Post and co-author of While Israel Slept: How Hamas Surprised the Most Powerful Military in the Middle East.
Yaakov explains:
- October 7 intelligence failure and Israel’s missed warnings
- Hamas’s ‘Jericho Walls’ plan and ignored Unit 8200 alerts
- The Israeli conceptzia: why leaders believed Hamas was deterred
- Netanyahu’s Gaza containment strategy and Qatari money policy
- Hamas as a political asset against Palestinian statehood
- Israel’s overreliance on technology, SIGINT and border barriers
- Unit 504, HUMINT failure and the absence of agents in Gaza
- Gaza’s tunnel network and Hamas’s hidden underground military city
- Operation Guardian of the Walls and Israel’s exaggerated ‘Metro’ success
- Netanyahu’s responsibility, Israeli division and the post–October 7 media war
**PLUS: Yaakov answers listener questions! FOR SUBSCRIBERS ONLY!**
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Find Yaakov on X: https://x.com/yaakovkatz
And on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/yaakov.katz
And on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yaakovkatz
Yaakov's website: www.yaakovkatz.com
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Conflicted is a Message Heard production.
Executive Producers: Jake Warren & Max Warren.
Produced and edited by Thomas Small.
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16 July 2026, 4:00 am - 50 minutes 56 secondsBen Hodges: Russia Can Be Defeated
In this latest Conflicted Conversation, Thomas talks with retired US lieutenant general Ben Hodges, former commanding general of US Army Europe. Drawing on his experience at the heart of NATO’s military leadership, Hodges explains:
- His proposed path to Ukrainian victory
- Ukraine’s deep strikes on Russian oil and gas infrastructure
- Ukraine’s campaign to isolate and recover Crimea
- Why Hodges overestimated the speed of Ukraine’s victory
- The risk of Russia using nuclear weapons in Ukraine
- America’s failure to define clear political objectives in war
- Ukraine’s emergence as a European defence-industrial centre
- Why Western armies have been slow to learn from Ukraine
- Pentagon procurement and the military-industrial complex
- The NATO summit in Ankara and support for Ukraine
- The damage Trump has done to trust between NATO allies
- The geopolitical importance of Ukraine to Europe and the United States
- Why the Kremlin fears a successful democratic Ukraine
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Conflicted is a Message Heard production.
Executive Producers: Jake Warren & Max Warren.
Produced and edited by Thomas Small.
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14 July 2026, 4:00 am - 50 minutes 21 secondsSyria Turns Another Corner (Conflicted Revisited)
As Aimen works hard to uncover the truth of what's going on in the region now that the MoU has been torn to shreds — or so it seems — and in recognition of Syria being taken off the State Sponsor of Terrorism list, we are rerunning this episode from last year where Aimen tells the story of his nephew who joined the jihad against the Assad regime.
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Conflicted is a Message Heard production.
Executive Producers: Jake Warren & Max Warren.
Produced and edited by Thomas Small.
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10 July 2026, 4:00 am - 58 minutes 59 secondsGuns, Greed and the Making of Modernity
In this Conflicted Conversation, Thomas discusses the true foundations of modernity with Clifton Crais, author of The Killing Age: How Violence Made the Modern World.
Clifton explains:
- The Mortecene as an alternative to the Anthropocene
- Why global violence accelerated after 1750
- How firearms destabilised traditional political orders
- The role of credit and debt in expanding slavery
- Global complicity beyond a simple West-versus-rest narrative
- The industrial destruction of whales, elephants and bison
- Vodun and other religious responses to predatory power
- What muskets can teach us about drones and AI
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Conflicted is a Message Heard production.
Executive Producers: Jake Warren & Max Warren.
Produced and edited by Thomas Small.
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7 July 2026, 4:00 am - 36 minutes 9 secondsUndiscovered: The Battle of Qala-i-Jangi
In this special episode, we bring you an exclusive audio episode of ‘Undiscovered’ the new YouTube-first documentary series from Conflicted’s executive producer and Message Heard founder, Jake Warren.
Jake sits down with the legendary journalist Robert Young Pelton to discuss the infamous battle of Qala-i-Jangi, which he experienced first hand, and how it changed the war on terror forever.
In this episode they discuss:
- How Robert became a journalist and documentarian
- Robert’s documentary ‘Heavy D and The Boys’
- Meeting and spending time with General Dostum
- The rumours and myths about General Dostum
- Being an eyewitness to the battle of Qala-i-Jangi
- Finding John Walker Lindh, the American Taliban
- The death of CIA officer Johnny Micheal "Mike" Spann
- Where the US went wrong in Afghanistan
Find Robert on X: https://x.com/RYP__
And on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/_robert_young_pelton_
And on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmfzgtljwtgY1IgXt2YGiFg
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Conflicted is a Message Heard production.
Executive Producers: Jake Warren & Max Warren.
Produced and edited by Ross Field.
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