Monde Diplomatique Podcasts

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…

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 com…

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 L…

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 C…

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 …

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 …

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 facilita…

China's President Xi has vowed to ‘utterly defeat' any bid for Taiwanese independence, and provocative sorties by Chinese military aircraft near the island are now common. As Taipei-based journalist Alice Hérait writes in the October issue of Le Monde diplomatique, the US is meanwhile strengthening its ties with Taiwan. In this month's podcast, Ali…

Our guest in this month's podcast is Jérôme Doyon, a China specialist at the Harvard Kennedy School's Ash Center. In the September edition of the paper Jérôme assesses the Chinese Communist Party in its centenary year and asks, ‘What's left of communism in China?' In the podcast, George Miller asks Doyon how the CCP will retain control in a China w…

In this month's podcast, George Miller talks to Evgeny Morozov, writer on technology and politics, and founder of The Syllabus, a knowledge curation initiative. In the August edition of the paper Evgeny has written an article entitled ‘Chips with everything: the technological arms race that will shape our future'. As he explains in the podcast, the…