A discussion series with leading thinkers focused on issues at the intersection of business, politics, and culture. Whether it be trends in corporate deal-making, shifts in geopolitics, or notable new writing, our aim is to focus on the ideas and themes that drive headlines, inform boardroom conversations, and motivate policymakers.
Ep. 39 - "Optimism Doesn't Equal Satisfaction": Defense Industrialist Ivor Ichikowitz on Life After Paramount, from African Youth and Oral History to the Battlefield Labs of Africa and Ukraine
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.
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Links mentioned:
The Trials of Winnie Mandela (Netflix), official trailer – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZydib--qw4 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZydib--qw4)
African Youth Survey 2026 – https://africanyouthsurvey.org/ (https://africanyouthsurvey.org/report/african-youth-survey-2026-part-1)
Books mentioned:
Africa Is Not a Country: Notes on a Bright Continent by Dipo Faloyin – https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393881530 (https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393881530)
15 Sept 2026
Ep. 38 - "A Struggle Over Global Order": Russia Expert Dr. Hanna Notte on Why Moscow's Campaign for Global Legitimacy Runs Through Africa
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
1 Sept 2026
Ep. 37 - "It Wasn't Lack of Conversation, It Was a Lack of Understanding": Bancroft Prize-Winning Historian Odd Arne Westad on What 1914 Teaches Us About 2026
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
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