World Peace Foundation

Welcome to Disrupting Peace, a show about why peace hasn't worked and how it still could.

I'm Bridget Conley, Research Director at the World Peace Foundation.

In 2026, there are more active conflicts than at any other time since World War II.

Globally, defense spending is reaching new heights.

Actually, countries known for human rights abuses and political repression as well.

And so that's kind of things that the U.S., as self-described land of the free, you know, should surely be opposed to, you know.

Disrupting Peace is a production of the World Peace Foundation.

Find out more at worldpeacefoundation.org. Our handles on Instagram and TikTok are worldpeacefdtn.

Well, earlier I spoke to Alex de Waal.

He's Executive, uh, Director of the World Peace Foundation at Tufts University in Massachusetts in the US, and he's an expert on Tigray.

I asked him first what's his understanding of what's actually happening on the ground.

Over the last couple of months, there's been something of a creeping war, an undeclared conflict with low level skirmishes and a few clashes and drone strikes between the Tigray Defense Forces under the TPLF and the federal government of Addis Ababa.

The developments threatened to unravel a fragile 2022 peace agreement that ended two years of war in a region already beset by conflict.

For the latest, we called up Alex de Waal, the executive director of the World Peace Foundation.

Well, this has been a sort of creeping war for the last six months.

There was, as you mentioned, a peace agreement at the end of 2022 that ended in an extremely devastating war between the central government and the state government in Tigray.

It's very, very difficult to get everyone to go in the same direction.

And the institutions, the United Nations, the African Union, the U.S. State Department, they are all far too weak, too understaffed, too distracted by other things really to pay proper attention to this.

Alex DeWall is the executive director of the World Peace Foundation.

sudden deaths are suddenly spiking in parts of Europe.

Welcome to Disrupting Peace, a show about why peace hasn't worked and how it still could.

I'm Bridget Conley, Research Director at the World Peace Foundation.

In this episode, we examine why Western countries keep fueling atrocities in Yemen and what it would take to turn things around.

To help me, I'm speaking with Ruth Rode and Radia El-Mutawakkil.

And because markets are pricing in future arms sales, this creates a perverse structural incentive where stakeholders and executives at these companies literally profit from prolonged or expanded conflict.

And it's not that individual executives maybe are rooting for war, but it is that their entire business model is structured so that peace is bad for quarterly earnings and war is good for them.

Disrupting Peace is a production of the World Peace Foundation.

Find out more at worldpeacefoundation.org. Our handles on Instagram and TikTok are worldpeacefdtn.

[instrumental music] Welcome to Disrupting Peace, a show about why peace hasn't worked and how it still could.

I'm Bridgit Conley, research director at the World Peace Foundation.

Today, we turn our attention to the genocide in Gaza, where weapons supplied by the United States and Europe are enabling mass killing.

This episode continues our conversations inspired by the soon-to-be-published book, Making a Killing: How the West Profits from Slaughter in Gaza and Yemen, by Ruth Rhoad, Jack Cinnamon, and Andrew Feinstein, who's with us today.

Next week on Disrupting Peace, we focus on why Western countries keep fueling atrocities in Yemen.

To continue supporting these countries with weapons while you know that they have committed war crimes, it means just like you are giving them, like, a green light to continue, and this is what happened.

Disrupting Peace is a production of the World Peace Foundation.

Find out more at worldpeacefoundation.org. Our handles on Instagram and TikTok are worldpeacefdtn.

Welcome to Season 5 of Disrupting Peace, a show about why peace hasn't worked and how it still could.

I'm Bridget Conley, Research Director at the World Peace Foundation.

This season, we're going deep into the arms trade and giving you a sneak preview of the new book, Making a Killing, How the West Profits from Slaughter in Gaza and Yemen, which comes out this November.

I've read the book and can tell you that it's outrageously well researched.

know that book.

I was a contributor as well.

Yeah, so this is a book that we developed in collaboration with the World Peace Foundation.

And it takes those exact myths, because they are myths, you know, so let's take them one at a time very quickly.