In this episode, MWI's Capt. Jake Miraldi talks to best selling author and award winning filmmaker Sebastian Junger about his newest film, "Hell on Earth: The Fall of Syria and the Rise of ISIS."
How did ISIS manage to take control of so much territory, imposing its will politically and inflicting an immense amount of damage? How should we make sense of its origins and evolution as an organization? And does a better understanding of the group enable us to anticipate what form it might take in its next evolutionary stage? This episode features a conversation about these and other questions with Craig Whiteside and Haroro Ingram, two of the authors of a recent book, The ISIS Reader. ...
This episode of the MWI Podcast features a discussion with Dr. Bear Braumoeller, a political science professor at the Ohio State University and author of a book called Only the Dead: The Persistence of War in the Modern Age. In writing it, he set out to understand if wars are happening less frequently than they used to. His data-driven examination produced two conclusions: not only is war not on the decline, but it is also not becoming less deadly. ...
In this episode, we talk to Joseph Young and Jason Fritz of American University's School of Public Affairs about a phenomenon they've been studying: private Americans who traveled to the Middle East to fight ISIS. They interviewed many of these individuals, and they share what they learned about them and why they chose to go and fight in Iraq and Syria. ...