On October 1st, Iraqis took to the streets in Baghdad to mark the second anniversary of the massive protest movement which began in October 2019. They were met with violence by state security forces and militias backed by the Iraqi regime. Almost 600 demonstrators were killed and more than 30,000 were injured.

Shahram Aghamir spoke to Nabil Salih, an Iraqi journalist, photographer, and writer, about the October 1st protest which happened just 9 days before Iraq's parliamentary elections.

Courtesy of Voices of the Middle East & North Africa (VOMENA).

In this special episode, Huma Gupta and China Sajadian discuss abolition geographies and environmental movements with renowned geographer and activist Ruth Wilson Gilmore.

She is the author of the award-winning Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California and several forthcoming books, including Change Everything, Abolition Geography: Essays Toward Liberation, and Stuart Hall: Selected Writings on Race and Difference, co-edited with Paul Gilroy. In this interview, Gilmore explains her research on carcerality through a global, comparative lens, from the long traditions of emancipation within Black Marxism, to popular struggles against TIAA-CREF land grabs in Brazil, to the contemporary challenges of giant monopsonies like Amazon.

If abolition must be green, Gilmore insists, it must also be anti-capitalist and internationalist. Such an approach to abolition not only underscores how different parts of the world are, in Gilmore’s words, partitioned and re-partitioned by capitalism -- but also the ways that dispossessed, criminalized, and vulnerable people across seemingly disparate contexts come to recognize their fundamental connections to each other.

محادثة مبهجة مع مخرج الأفلام والمعلق الصوتي يامن عبد النور. اللقاء هو غوص في فيلميه الوثائقيين بالإضافة إلى أعماله كمدبلج ومعلق صوتي.

---

Host Raghad Makhlouf has a delightful conversation with the Syrian film director and voice over actor, Yamen Abd Alnour. This interview is a deep dive into his two documentaries about Syria in addition to his work as a voice over actor.

In the inaugural episode of Connections, Jadaliyya co-editor Mouin Rabbani interviewed Noam Chomsky on March 17th, 2021 to discuss U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East under Biden. The interview examines the Biden administration’s Middle East policies, explores elements of continuity and change in US policy towards the region after the Trump years, and discusses what recent developments regarding Iran, Yemen, Palestine, and Saudi Arabia portend for the coming years.

In this episode, host Anita Fuentes investigates the implications of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan from different angles with the help of guests Rafia Zakaria and Professor Michael Klare. Rafia Zakaria talks about her new book, Against White Feminism (2021), and how it ties into Western media coverage of Afghan women. Fuentes also speaks to Professor Michael Klare, defense correspondent at The Nation magazine, about his take on the US withdrawal from Afghanistan; a very different one to those being portrayed in mainstream media. The episode ends with a September media roundup, a brief section in which news articles, reports, and other materials focusing on (in)security issues are discussed.

Security in Context is a podcast project from the research network of the same name, aimed at promoting new thinking on security from a global perspective. It features discussions about key questions on peace and conflict, the political economy of security and insecurity, militarism, and geopolitics, as they intersect with the processes of climate change, population movement, and the reorganization of global powers. In order to delve into these topics, we interview writers, researchers, activists and professionals from inside and outside the Security in Context network.

Khalil Bendib speaks with Samia Errazzouki about the rising tension between Spain and Morocco after thousands of migrants crossed from Morocco into the North African enclave of Ceuta, considered Spanish territory. It is believed that Moroccan border guards eased the crossing of the migrants in response to Spain's hosting of Brahim Ghali, the leader of the Polisario Front, which campaigns for the independence of Western Sahara.

مقدم البرنامج يتحدث إلى الشاعر السوري أكرم قطريب من مدينة سلمية السورية عن مجموعاته الشعرية والحياة في الولايات المتحدة الأمريكية.

VOMENA's Khalil Bendib speaks with London-based Algerian activist and researcher Hamza Hamouchene about the way these multiple catastrophes are affecting Algeria and how people are coping.

Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley, Cihan Tugal, examines this topic with VOMENA host Shahram Aghamir.