If You Were In Charge

A special episode to mark the deaths of two feminist icons three weeks apart: Dolly Parton on 25 August, aged 80, and Gloria Steinem on 2 September, aged 92. One the soundtrack of a generation, the other the face of a movement. Both, in their way, women who gave the money back.

Kavita knew Gloria, most recently over dinner at her townhouse on the Lower East Side just before Christmas.

Sanam and Kavita take this opportunity in remembering these two icons to asses where feminism is at the it's role to play in this time of great global change.

In all the tributes Kavita sees something uncomfortable about how we grieve now: that the wall of photographs of ourselves with the famous dead has become as much about us as about them, and she is trying consciously not to do it. She also notices who was largely missing from the tributes, and what that absence says about whose feminism got told as the story.

Kavita teaching a course this autumn called Feminism Remains Foreign, and the title works in two directions. Foreign to the West, which still cannot see feminism outside its own frame: abortion is still illegal in Germany, women could not hold their own bank accounts in parts of Switzerland within living memory. And foreign in the other sense, the way women's organising everywhere else gets dismissed as a Western import the moment it asks for anything.

Sanam grew up with the other version. In 1970s Iran, public sector workers had equal pay and abortion was legal, and the word feminism was barely needed. When she looks at the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the headline says Eleanor Roosevelt. Read below the headline and it was Latin American, Indian, Pakistani and Arab women who insisted the word "women" appear at all.

The heart of the conversation is culture. Both hosts argue against ceding it. Sanam on the lawyers who told her culture was the enemy and only law could deliver rights, and why that is exactly the logic that lost Roe. Kavita on Sakena Yacoobi, who asked an imam's wife and daughter to come and teach what the Quran says about women's dignity, and on Leymah Gbowee beginning to untie her turban in Ghana. Sanam on the church elders in Sierra Leone who bared themselves to the RUF, and on the women's societies in Cameroon that the British never thought to dismantle because they only ever looked at the men's.

They disagree with Gloria too, openly, on sex work. And they end on bodies: on Gloria who never stopped feeling like the too-tall girl from the Midwest, and Dolly who was entirely, joyfully at home in hers.

Standing on the shoulders of giants, Sanam says, and often they are invisible giants. As June Jordan put it, we are the ones we have been waiting for.

Chapters

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Sanam and Kavita close Season 3 the way they opened it, in conversation with each other, just the two of them, freewheeling before the summer break.

They begin with the best news of the season. Kavita is a grandmother. Parker arrived during the World Cup final, and the joy of it opens onto something harder: that every woman who brings a new life into the world puts her own life at risk.

From there the conversation turns to India, where a generation of medical students has mobilised after being called cockroaches by a figure at the top of the establishment. A Dalit student studying abroad posted a meme in reply, "if we are the cockroaches, may we be millions of cockroaches together", and it went viral. The education minister has been forced to resign, something Kavita points out has not happened once in ten years of Narendra Modi's government, not even during the farmers' protests.

Sanam and Kavita trace the same current through the students who protested over Gaza, through Iran's Women Life Freedom movement, and through American public opinion, where two contradictory bills now move through Congress at the same time. They talk about Iran with real grief: a people who were nonviolently trying to change their own country, then bombed by the powers claiming to help them.

The hardest section is on how war is now fought. Sanam explains that a thousand targets a day for thirty days is only possible when the assessment is automated, and returns to a 2021 strike in Afghanistan where the algorithm identified white cars but was never programmed to identify children. When engineers offered to fix it, the Pentagon said there was no need.

They end on power and who holds it. Sanam on Resolution 1325, on the League of Nations women who first asked for a seat, and on how the table keeps moving to another room. Kavita on Julia Ward Howe, whose original Mother's Day proclamation was a call to disarm.

They sign off on gratitude: for a season of guests, for a friendship that began at the Robert Bosch Academy, and for the reminder that in a world constantly besieged by news of what is going wrong, most people are decent and most people are trying. As June Jordan put it, we are the ones we have been waiting for.

Back in September with a new line up!

Chapters

00:00 Cold open

Mentioned in this episode

If You Were In Charge is a radical leadership podcast about people, power & possibilities, hosted by Sanam Naraghi Anderlini and Kavita Nandini Ramdas. From ICAN and ADA Productions.
ifyouwereincharge.com

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What if the most radical idea in the world is simply that everyone belongs?

Sanam sits down with john a. powell (he spells his name in lower case): Professor of Law at UC Berkeley, holder of the Robert D. Haas Chancellor's Chair in Equity and Inclusion, Director of the Othering & Belonging Institute, and author of The Power of Bridging.

john grew up in Detroit, one of nine children of a Christian minister. At eleven he left the church and his father stopped speaking to him for five years. That early experience of being othered inside a loving family became a life's work: understanding why every new "we" seems to need a "them", and how we build belonging without othering.

He talks to Sanam about the fear driving voters to the far right, and why fact-checking that fear into silence is itself a form of othering. About the Minnesotans who reframed "immigrants" as "neighbours" and stared down the military. About front porches, subways and public spaces as the quiet infrastructure of belonging, and the 90 seconds of being truly seen that measurably improves a patient's health.

And when Sanam asks what he would do if he were in charge, he gives the best answer yet: he would give the power away. "We is always smarter than I."

"I'm not an optimist, I'm not a pessimist, I'm what I call a possibilist."

At the top of the show, Sanam and Kavita on a grandchild due any day, the World Cup as a masterclass in belonging, Wimbledon as a model for diplomacy, and why the UN might only hand a woman the top job now that the power has moved elsewhere.

Chapters:

00:00 "Can we have a world where we all win?"

Find out more about john's work:

Othering & Belonging Institute: https://belonging.berkeley.edu/

If You Were In Charge is a radical leadership podcast about people, power & possibilities, hosted by Sanam Naraghi Anderlini and Kavita Nandini Ramdas. From ICAN and ADA Productions.

Website: https://ifyouwereincharge.com

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In this episode of the leadership podcast If You Were In Charge, Sanam Naraghi Anderlini and Kavita Nandini Ramdas sit down with Robinah Rubimbwa, the feminist peacebuilder, poet and mediator who founded the Coalition for Action on Resolution 1325 (CoACT), an alliance of 64 peacebuilding organisations in Uganda.

A leadership podcast about people, power and possibilities.

Robinah does not hold back. The way international aid is structured today, she says, is colonialism, and it is time to decolonise it. No outsider can empower anyone, she argues. Empowerment grows from within, built on local knowledge, trust and the structures that already hold a community together. Drawing on decades of training women mediators and young peacebuilders across Uganda, she makes the case that funders should talk less about their appetite for risk and more about their appetite for trust.

This is women's leadership seen from the ground up. Robinah shares how a single 60,000 dollar grant from ICAN seeded a youth movement that is still going years later, how networks of community women mediators now resolve land disputes and domestic violence cases for free, and what it really costs to prevent violence at the local level. And when Sanam and Kavita ask the question at the heart of the show, she answers without hesitation: if she were in charge, she would build a global Council on Women, Peace and Security, compel governments to fund peace the way they fund weapons, and make care and joy human rights.

It is a conversation about money, power and trust, told through a feminist perspective on leadership, and a reminder, in Robinah's words, of "the stubborn insistence that liberation is inevitable."

More about Robinah Rubimbwa and her work: Coalition for Action on 1325 (CoACT): https://www.coact1325.org/ Robinah and CoACT at ICAN: 

https://icanpeacework.org/map_directory/coalition-for-action-on-1325-coact/ Robinah at Conciliation Resources: https://www.c-r.org/who-we-are/people/robinah-rubimbwa Women Mediators across the Commonwealth: 

https://www.womenmediators.org/find-a-mediator/robinah-rubimbwa/

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If You Were In Charge is brought to you by ICAN, the International Civil Society Action Network. An ADA Production.

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London will host Climate Action Week from 20 to 28 June 2026, under the theme "Climate Cooperation in a Fractured World". As the world is beset by anxiety and upheaval fuelled by wars and the societal changes brought on by artificial intelligence, conversations around the climate crisis have receded into the background. But it continues to pose an existential threat to humanity. In this episode, we find hope on the front lines.

On this episode of the leadership podcast If You Were In Charge, we ask what would change if the people on the front lines of the climate crisis were actually in charge. Sanam Naraghi Anderlini and Kavita Nandini Ramdas are joined by Laura Garcia, President and CEO of the Global Greengrants Fund, which has moved more than 135 million dollars to over 17,000 grassroots groups across 168 countries since 1993.

A leadership podcast about people, power and possibilities.

Laura argues that environmental destruction always happens in "somebody else's backyard", and that when communities control their own resources and decisions, the logic of extraction starts to break down. She tells the story of how small, flexible grants of 5,000 to 10,000 dollars to communities in South Africa's coal belt helped seed a 20-year movement, anchored by the environmental justice group groundWork, that pressured the government to commit to phasing out coal. She asks who development is really for, explains why less than 1% of philanthropic funding reaches grassroots communities in the Global South, and makes the case for participatory, trust-based giving.

She also connects climate, peace and militarisation. War, she says, is total destruction of the environment, and in much of Latin America militarisation directly protects the extractive industries that environmental defenders risk their lives to resist. It is a hopeful, clear-eyed conversation about who gets to decide, and why nature, given half a chance, does the homework.

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If You Were In Charge is brought to you by ICAN, the International Civil Society Action Network. An ADA Production.

00:00 Development in the name of who?

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In this short mid-season episode of the leadership podcast If You Were In Charge, Sanam Naraghi Anderlini puts on her peace negotiation hat and asks a simple question: if she were in charge, how would she end the conflict with Iran?

A leadership podcast about people, power and possibilities.

Drawing on thirty years in peacebuilding, Sanam argues that war is not working and economic sanctions are not working, which leaves only one real option on the table: negotiations. But not the adversarial, who-won-who-lost kind we are seeing now. She makes the case for a more inclusive peace process, one built on two pillars, political will and inclusivity, where Iranians from the health, education, housing and environmental sectors have a seat at the table alongside UN agencies to decide how reparations and rebuilding are handled.

She also tackles the question everyone is asking: who is actually in charge in Iran right now? And she closes with a reminder, in the words of the poet June Jordan, that "we are the ones we have been waiting for", and a reflection on what she calls advanced citizenship.

A full episode returns in a couple of weeks to mark London Climate Week with Laura Garcia, CEO of the Global Greengrants Fund.

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Feminist economist Naila Kabeer joins Sanam and Kavita on the leadership podcast If You Were In Charge to ask why we still measure success in GDP and what we could build if we counted care, peace and the planet. A clear-eyed, hopeful conversation about Beyond GDP, the absurd cost of the war in Iran for future generations, and the everyday agency that changes the world.

A leadership podcast about people, power and possibilities.

On this episode before we get to the interview, Sanam and Kavita pick up the threads Naila weaves through the conversation. They look at the $20 trillion annual cost of war, the way the care economy quietly runs on immigrant women, and the Iranian paradox where 65% of university professors are women inside a theocracy. A vivid reminder of why we need new ways to measure what's actually working in our societies.

We then welcome in Naila who explains how GDP was invented in wartime to count what could be sold, and what it has always quietly excluded: the unpaid work that holds families together, the rivers and forests that hold up the planet, and a system now monopolised by a handful of oligarchs. She unpacks the staggering price tag of war nearly $20 trillion a year, around 11.6% of global GDP and asks what we could build instead if we counted care, peace, human capabilities, and the rights of the living world.

We also hear about her new book “Renegotiating Patriarchy: Gender, Agency and the Bangladesh Paradox” — a study of how ordinary women, in some of the most oppressive circumstances, have changed their societies not through revolution but through everyday persistence.

“Despair is a luxury for the well-off. I do not think we can afford to despair.”

Enjoyed this episode? Follow If You Were In Charge wherever you listen and leave a rating to help more people find the show.

Get in touch and stay connected:

Email ICAN: [email protected]

Sign up to the ICAN newsletter: https://icanpeacework.org/2025/03/sign-up-to-icans-newsletter/

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If You Were In Charge is brought to you by ICAN, the International Civil Society Action Network. An ADA Production.

Naila Kabeer Links.

LSE faculty page: https://www.lse.ac.uk/international-development/people/naila-kabeer

Naila's personal site (books, articles, talks): https://nailakabeer.net/

Renegotiating Patriarchy — free open-access download (LSE Press, 2024): https://press.lse.ac.uk/books/m/10.31389/lsepress.rpg

UN High-Level Expert Group on Beyond GDP — members: https://www.un.org/en/beyondGDP/members

IAFFE Feminist Economics Podcast (Kavita mentions this at the end): https://www.iaffe.org/feminist-economics-podcast

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On the leadership podcast If You Were In Charge, Italian peace activist Raffaella Bolini was on the streets of the 80s peace movement against the Euromissiles. Forty years later, she's back, pushing back on a Europe planning to spend €6.8 trillion on armaments over the next decade. In conversation with Sanam Naraghi Anderlini and Kavita Nandini Ramdas, she makes the case for common security, the politics of care, and a multipolar Europe of intersectional regions. The only winning move, she argues, is not to play.

A leadership podcast about people, power and possibilities.

Sanam and Kavita open the episode with the latest flotilla to be intercepted on the way to Gaza, the unfolding war in Iran, and the absurdity of trillions being spent on defence at the expense of future generations, while everything from healthcare to social services goes without.

But not without hope. They also remember the remarkable legacy of Cora and Peter Weiss, whose memorial was held this month, two activists at the forefront of the peace and justice movement for their entire lifetimes.

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Email ICAN: [email protected]

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If You Were In Charge is brought to you by ICAN, the International Civil Society Action Network. An ADA Production.

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A leadership podcast about people, power and possibilities.

What beliefs make people willing to commit violence, and what could change their minds? In this episode, we explore what makes individuals vulnerable to white supremacist beliefs, what it means when extremism becomes mainstream, the surprising permeability of these groups, and how to talk to people in your life who express racist ideology.

Peter Simi is a professor of Sociology at Chapman University, and an expert on extremist groups and violence in the US. Among his many publications, he is co-author of American Swastika: Inside the White Power Movement's Hidden Spaces of Hate, and Out of Hiding: Extremist White Supremacy and How It Can be Stopped. Find out more about Peter at: https://www.chapman.edu/our-faculty/pete-simi.aspx.

Sara Winegar Budge holds a doctorate in Psychology and is a licensed psychologist in Oregon. She is the Director of US Programs at Moonshot, which builds technology to identify and disrupt organized crime, child sexual exploitation, and trafficking, among other forms of abuse and violence. Her clinical work focuses on individuals who are or have been involved in violent extremism. Find out more at https://moonshotteam.com/

In this episode, we talk about Stephen Tyrone Johns, Bridget's former colleague from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum who was killed by a white supremacist. You can learn more about him, and contribute to a fund in his name, here: https://www.ushmm.org/information/press/in-memoriam/stephen-tyrone-johns-1969-2009.

Disrupting Peace is a production of The World Peace Foundation. The show is produced by Bridget Conley and Emily Shaw. Engineering by Jacob Winik and Aja Simpson. Marketing and Social media by Kaelen Song. Show artwork by Simon Fung. This season was partially funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

Special thanks to Lisa Avery and Alex de Waal, and the Tufts Digital Design Studio team.

Find out more about the World Peace Foundation at worldpeacefoundation.org. Follow us on Instagram and TikTok at @worldpeacefdtn.

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The internet is a monocrop. A plantation of knowledge in English, owned by a handful of mega corporations, built on the bones of colonial infrastructure. And we are no longer just the consumers and as ever we are the product, the training set, the data points. So who gets to imagine the future?

A leadership podcast about people, power and possibilities.

This week on If You Were In Charge, Sanam and Kavita sit down with Anasuya Sengupta, co-founder of Whose Knowledge?, a global multilingual campaign to centre the knowledges of marginalised communities (the minoritised majority of the world) online. Anasuya traces a direct line from the telegraph networks of the British Empire to today’s Big Tech monopolies.

But this is not just a story of extraction. Anasuya shares what it looks like when voices from the margins reimagine technology. From building sovereign language models in Bangla, Urdu and Hindi, to transforming Wikipedia so that women are no longer invisible.

The episode opens with Sanam and Kavita reflecting on the Iran ceasefire, the extraordinary Lego memes coming out of Iran, and what it means when the world is surprised that Iranians have both sophisticated technology and a sense of humour.

Anasuya Sengupta — Co-founder of Whose Knowledge?

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If You Were In Charge is brought to you by ICAN, the International Civil Society Action Network. An ADA Production.

Original Music, Little Monster Media

Executive Producer: Pearse Lynch

This is an ADA Production

Timeline

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