Earlylands in Conversation

Russia is now building around a thousand ballistic missiles a year by Fabian Hoffmann’s estimate, up from 500 or 600 a year ago, even as its wider war economy stagnates. Western interceptor production can’t keep pace, and Europe has few answers if Moscow decides to test NATO.Dr. Fabian Hoffmann is a senior researcher at the Norwegian Institute for Defence Studies in Oslo and the author of the Missile Matters Substack. His commentary regularly appears in major global news outlets like the Financial Times, CNN, Reuters, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal.Ballistic missile defense is the hardest problem in missile technology, and the war with Iran has shown that even the United States can’t sustain it for long against an adversary building missiles at industrial scale. Europe, still years behind the Patriot missile, has been slow to accept that interceptors alone won’t save it. The graver danger lies in a direct confrontation between Russia and NATO, a war Moscow knows it couldn’t win over the long term. Fabian warns that a Baltic land grab, backed by nuclear threats and mass missile strikes on Western European cities, could look to the Kremlin like a route to quick victory, and that the risk of Russia actually using a nuclear weapon would rise sharply.If you enjoy this and our other episodes, please follow us on Spotify and Apple Podcasts, and like and subscribe on YouTube.Fabian’s Substack, 'Missile Matters':https://missilematters.substack.comBooks mentioned:Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology, by Chris MillerInventing Accuracy: A Historical Sociology of Nuclear Missile Guidance, by Donald MacKenzie

Tom Burgis, author of Kleptopia, has called Angola’s government a “fiendishly opaque regime,” and credits our guest, Paula Cristina Roque, with revealing Angola’s true face in her book, Governing in the Shadows. The country rarely gets the attention given to Nigeria, South Africa or Kenya, yet it should. It’s among the continent’s largest oil producers, and its port of Lobito anchors an export corridor from Zambia and the DRC that’s become a central component of the West’s critical minerals supply strategy. Angola is governed by the MPLA, a liberation movement in power since 1975 and now facing a young, underemployed population that is losing patience as elections loom in August 2027.Paula has studied Angola for decades. She is a board member and former executive director of Intelwatch, a South African organisation that monitors intelligence and security services, and she’s also a research associate at Oxford, where she earned her doctorate. Her second book, Insurgent Nations, examines rebel rule in Angola and South Sudan.Paula provides a template for how to understand Angola under the ruling MPLA and also the dynamics at play in the months leading up to an election that is likely to be contentious.If you enjoy this and our other episodes, please follow us on Spotify and Apple Podcasts, and like and subscribe on YouTube.Paula’s books:Governing in the Shadows: Angola’s Securitised Statehttps://hurstpublishers.com/book/governing-in-the-shadows/Insurgent Nations: Rebel Rule in Angola and South Sudanhttps://www.hurstpublishers.com/book/insurgent-nations/Books mentioned:Angola: The Weight of History, edited by Patrick Chabal and Nuno Vidalhttps://www.hurstpublishers.com/book/angola/Magnificent and Beggar Land: Angola Since the Civil War, by Ricardo Soares de Oliveirahttps://www.politics.ox.ac.uk/publication/magnificent-and-beggar-land-angola-civil-war

(This conversation was recorded on September 16, 2026)When Russia launched its full-scale invasion in 2022, most analysts expected its air force to take control of Ukraine’s skies quickly. More than four years later, neither side has managed it. The Russian Air Force has nonetheless stayed in the fight by learning to work around its many weaknesses, and it remains a serious threat to Ukraine’s soldiers and cities.Dr. Justin Bronk is Senior Research Fellow for Airpower and Technology in the Military Sciences team at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) in London, and editor of the RUSI Defence Systems online journal. He is also an associate professor at the Royal Norwegian Air Force Academy. His PhD at King’s College London examined British combat aircraft development, and he has flown in the back seat of fast jets with twelve different air forces.In this conversation: why the air war over Ukraine defied almost everyone’s expectations; how Russia’s air force adapted to its weaknesses; where Russia and Ukraine have used their airpower well and where they have wasted it; why European air forces are more capable than many observers and political leaders assume; and the munitions and personnel shortages that are their real vulnerabilities.Justin’s profile and research at RUSI: https://www.rusi.org/people/bronkIf you enjoy this and our other episodes, please follow us on Spotify and Apple Podcasts, and like and subscribe on YouTube.Books mentioned:Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed, by Ben R. Rich and Leo Janoshttps://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/leo-janos/skunk-works/9780316246934/The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy, by Adam Toozehttps://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/295490/the-wages-of-destruction-by-adam-tooze/Britain’s War Machine: Weapons, Resources and Experts in the Second World War, by David Edgertonhttps://www.penguin.co.uk/books/187624/britains-war-machine-by-edgerton-david/9780141026107

For this episode, we are joined by South African defense industrialist and philanthropist Ivor Ichikowitz. In 1994, as apartheid ended and most observers wrote off South Africa's defense industry, Ivor founded Paramount Group and built it into Africa's largest privately owned defense and aerospace company. He stepped back from daily leadership of Paramount in 2022 and has since put his energy into the Ichikowitz Family Foundation.Much of our conversation focuses on two of the foundation's projects. The African Oral History Archive holds thousands of hours of testimony from every side of South Africa's transition from apartheid, and it produced the recent seven-part Netflix docuseries The Trials of Winnie Mandela. The African Youth Survey, now in its fourth edition, interviewed nearly 5,000 young Africans aged 18 to 24 across 16 countries earlier this year. Its findings show a generation more optimistic about its future than at any point since the pandemic, though, in Ivor's words, "optimism doesn't equal satisfaction."We close on Ukraine, and on Ivor's view that Africa's ongoing experience of insurgency, coupled with Ukraine's war with Russia, makes the two geographies the laboratories for the next generation of warfare.A note on audio: there are some minor issues with my audio levels during the conversation, but Ivor's audio is unaffected.If you enjoy this and our other episodes, please follow us on Spotify and Apple Podcasts, and like and subscribe on YouTube.Links mentioned:The Trials of Winnie Mandela (Netflix), official trailer – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZydib--qw4African Youth Survey 2026 – https://africanyouthsurvey.org/Books mentioned:Africa Is Not a Country: Notes on a Bright Continent by Dipo Faloyin – https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393881530

At the Russia-Africa summit in St Petersburg in the summer of 2023, Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova told an audience of African dignitaries that Russian soldiers were dying in Ukraine so that Africa could be free. Dr. Hanna Notte, in her new book We Shall Outlast Them: Putin's Global Campaign to Defeat the West (W. W. Norton, 2026), explains why a line like that gets a hearing. Once it became clear the Ukraine war would not be short, Moscow largely retired 'denazification' as a justification for its invasion and instead replaced it with a story about a West practising a new colonialism through a Ukrainian proxy, pitched directly at memories of the real thing in the Global South. Notte's argument is that the war is a contest over global order, and Africa is one of the places where Russia is contesting it most aggressively.Dr. Hanna Notte is director of the Eurasia Nonproliferation Program at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies and has written on Russian foreign policy for the New York Times, the Financial Times and Foreign Affairs. She lives in Berlin. Her book is built on reporting from more than a dozen countries, including field work in South Africa with ANC veterans and interviews with Russian officials, businessmen, and propagandists. Former White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan calls the book a 'master class in modern statecraft'. Our conversation cover the channels Moscow uses on the continent, from reopened embassies and Russian Houses to RT and the Africa Corps that replaced Wagner, why Soviet-era gratitude in the Global South has accrued to Russia rather than Ukraine, and what the West and Kyiv should do differently when trying to counter Russia's narrative.If you enjoy this episode, please follow Earlylands in Conversation wherever you listen.Books Mentioned on the Podcast-We Shall Outlast Them: Putin's Global Campaign to Defeat the West by Hanna Notte-From Sovereigns to Servants: How the War Against Ukraine Reshaped Russia's Elite by Alexandra Prokopenko

In 1914 the heads of state of Germany, Russia, and Britain were cousins. They knew each other intimately and they corresponded constantly. What they could not do was understand what the others were actually trying to achieve, and historian Arne Westad thinks that failure is the lesson from 1914 that we have the most to learn from today.Westad's new book is The Coming Storm: Power, Conflict,and Warnings from History, published in March by Henry Holt in the United States and Penguin in the United Kingdom. The book argues that the present arrangement of global power resembles the decades before 1914, when a widening field of countries competed for regional dominance and nationalism and populism rose together. In our conversation we cover how Westad's thesis applies to the myriad conflicts and disputes playing out in the world of 2026. The Financial Times called The Coming Storm fluently written and wide-ranging. Writing in Foreign Affairs, Elizabeth Samet said Westad performs an urgent and inestimable service. Westad is the Elihu Professor of History and Global Affairs at Yale University and a fellow of the British Academy and the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. His earlierbook The Global Cold War won the Bancroft Prize and reset how the Cold War is written by telling it through the interventions in the Global South, Africa most prominently. Restless Empire, his history of Chinese foreign relations since the eighteenth century, won the Asia Society Book Award.Recorded in June 2026. If you enjoy this and our other episodes, please follow Earlylands in Conversation wherever you listen.Books Mentioned on the Podcast:-The Coming Storm: Power, Conflict, and Warnings from History by Odd Arne Westad-The Curse of Empire: Ukraine, Poland, and the Fatal Paths in Russian History by Martin Schulze Wessel-The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 by Christopher Clark-Haunted by Chaos: China's Grand Strategy from Mao Zedong to Xi Jinping by Sulmaan Wasif Khan

It can be argued that each generation of Western development expert arrives in Africa convinced the previous generation got it wrong, and leaves having made a version of the same mistake. Trade, then agricultural productivity, then trade again, then structural adjustment, followed by microcredit. Historian Bronwen Everill, in her book Africonomics: A History of Western Ignorance (The New Press, 2025; William Collins, 2024), traces that cycle from the abolition of the slave trade to the current competition over critical minerals, and finds one premise sitting underneath every iteration: that African economies would work if only they looked more like Western ones.Africonomics was shortlisted for the 2025 British Academy Book Prize, took second place for the BCA African Business Book of the Year, and drew a starred review from Publishers Weekly. Browen is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the former director of the Centre of African Studies at the University of Cambridge. She teaches in the Princeton Writing Program and is a research affiliate at the Laboratory for the Economics of Africa's Past at Stellenbosch University. This is our last episode before a short summer break. Wewill be back with a new conversation in September. If you enjoy this episode, please follow Earlylands in Conversation wherever you listen.Books Mentioned on the Podcast -Africonomics: A History of Western Ignorance by Bronwen Everill-Anansi's Gold: The Man Who Looted the West, Outfoxed Washington, and Swindled the World by YepokaYeebo-The Moon Is Dead! Give Us Our Money! by Keletso E. Atkins-The Migrant Cocoa-Farmers of Southern Ghana: A Study in Rural Capitalism by Polly Hill

Russia's military is materially weaker today than it was a year ago, and Ukraine has established an asymmetric approach that drives up the cost of every Russian advance. Yet those facts still do not guarantee Kyiv the ending it wants.Dr. Jack Watling is Senior Research Fellow for Applied Military Sciences at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) in London and one of the world's leading experts on the war in Ukraine. He is also the author of Statecraft: The New Rules of Power in a Divided World (Pan Macmillan, 2026) and has spent the past four and a half years moving between London and Kyiv. His method rests on primary research: time with Ukrainian units at the front rather than reassessment of other people's data points.In this conversation: what the Ukrainians solved between 2024 and the beginning of 2026 and what the Russians did not; Russian force quality and replacement rates; why Jack believes the war has reached a turning point and why that is not the same as a happy ending; and the signposts he is watching over the next six to twelve months.We recorded as the news was breaking out of Kyiv about the replacement of Ukraine's defense minister and the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, so we do not address those changes directly.If you enjoy this episode, please follow Earlylands in Conversation wherever you listen.Books Mentioned on the Podcast-Statecraft: The New Rules of Power in a Divided World by Jack Watling-Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott-Ashenden by W. Somerset Maugham

Rail rarely makes headlines, but it may be doing more to shape Africa's economic trajectory than any single mine or trade deal. James ('Jamie') Holley is CEO of Traxtion, the largest privately owned rail operator on the continent, with a deployed fleet of over 55 locomotives across ten countries, from South Africa's core network to the Tazara line linking Zambia to the Tanzanian coast. Earlylands Advisory's Todd Johnson sits down with Jamie to unpack what it actually takes to revive neglected rail corridors, why private capital is willing to take on infrastructure risk that governments have struggled to manage, and what a serious Transnet turnaround could mean for South Africa and the wider region.The numbers do the arguing. The Johannesburg-Durban line still runs on 1970s signalling, moving freight over 710 kilometers in roughly three days when it was designed to run trains every 20 minutes on an 18-hour transit. Modern positive train control could cut that to under ten hours and let Traxtion invoice the same train six times more often in a month. That gap between what the infrastructure could do and what it currently does is the essence of the conversation.If you enjoy this and our other episodes, please like and follow.Books Mentioned on the Podcast-Railroader: The Unfiltered Genius and Controversy of Four-Time CEO Hunter Harrison by Howard Green-SwitchPoints: Culture Change on the Fast Track to Business Success by Judy Johnson, Les Dakens, Peter Edwards, and Ned Morse

Critical minerals have become the connective tissue of modern geopolitics, linking energy security, manufacturing, and great power competition in ways that didn't exist a decade ago. Christopher Vandome leads the Critical Minerals Initiative at Chatham House, the London-based foreign policy think tank, where he's also a senior research fellow with both the Global Economy and Finance Programme and the Africa Programme.Earlylands Advisory's Todd Johnson sits down with Chris to unpack the African critical minerals story: the geopolitics, the financing gaps, and the question of who actually captures the value when resource wealth meets global demand. The conversation goes deep on Zambia and the broader southern Africa region, where mining policy, industrial strategy, and great power competition are converging in real time.A sharp, on-the-ground look at one of the defining economic and security stories on the African continent.Books Mentioned on the PodcastMining Is Dead, Long Live Geopolitical Mining by Marta Rivera & Eduardo ZamanilloDigging Deep: A History of Mining in South Africa by Jade Davenport