Special episode: The Syrian conflict, explained by a UN diplomat who saw it start

The Gray Area with Sean Illing

Vox Media Podcast Network

Politics, News, Society & Culture, News Commentary, Philosophy

4.5 • 11.1K Ratings

🗓️ 20 April 2018

⏱️ 58 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Many of you will remember the interview I did with Grant Gordon, who works on humanitarian policy innovation at the International Rescue Committee. That conversation received a huge response — some of you even wrote in to say it had changed your career path and you were now reorienting towards humanitarian work and crisis response. Now, Vox Media, in partnership with the IRC, is launching Displaced, a podcast about the world’s most pressing humanitarian crises and the people whose lives they upend. Each week, Grant, alongside his co-host, IRC chief innovation officer Ravi Gurumurthy, bring on a guest to dig into the world’s toughest problems — both to understand them and to think through how to solve them. Today, the world’s most destabilizing crisis is the civil war in Syria — it’s led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people and the displacement of millions more, a refugee crisis that has undermined the European Union and brought America and Russia perilously close to armed conflict. In this episode, Grant and Ravi interview Stephen Hickey, who served as UK deputy ambassador to Damascus in 2010, and was ejected by the Assad regime as its response to the protests became more vicious. So he was in Syria as this began, and his perspective is crucial to understanding where it’s gone and why it’s been so hard to solve. If you like this episode, you can subscribe to Displaced wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, welcome to the Asura Clanchion on the Vox Media Podcast Network. This is a special episode,
0:04.4	an episode I'm proud to present, but it is not of my podcast. It is of a new Vox Media podcast
0:10.0	called Displaced. Displaced is a podcast. It is a partnership between Vox Media, Vox's parent
0:15.5	company and the International Rescue Committee, which is the world's largest organization focusing
0:21.1	on refugee and humanitarian issues. Some of you may remember, a year ago, I did an interview with
0:26.8	Grant Gordon. Grant works at the IRC where he focuses on humanitarian policy innovation.
0:31.6	The response you all had to that interview was huge. A lot of you actually were
0:35.0	didn't say that hearing from Grant had changed what you wanted to do in life. That you were now
0:39.5	going to work in humanitarian rescue too. In part because we got such a great reply to that
0:44.3	discussion, we are launching this podcast, Displaced, which is about the refugee crisis that is,
0:51.7	I think one of the central issues of our time. It is upending the European Union. It has
0:58.0	arguably upended American politics. I think there's a good argument to be made that the refugee crisis
1:02.5	and some of what sprang from it is part of why Donald Trump is president. It is clearly,
1:07.7	clearly stressing and straining the Middle East. At the core of it are a series of crises and
1:13.2	conflicts that are devilishly hard to resolve and very, very, very important to understand.
1:19.8	Probably the most pressing one at the moment is the ongoing Civil War in Syria,
1:25.3	a war that we are now, once again, dropping bombs on to punish the use of chemical weapons in.
1:30.8	In this discussion, Grant and his co-host, Ravi, they talked to Stephen Hickey. Stephen Hickey was
1:36.0	the UN's deputy ambassador to Damascus in 2010. He was there when this began and he was kicked out
1:42.0	by the Assad government as a violence intensified. He has seen this crisis from the very beginning.
1:47.1	If you want to understand why it is gone, the way it is gone, he is worth listening to.
1:52.6	If you enjoy listening to this podcast, you should subscribe to Displaced,
	...

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