Featuring Rahmane Idrissa on Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso. The region has been beset by jihadist insurgencies and, in the case of Mali and Burkina Faso, recent military coups. This is a comprehensive interview that puts the present conflict—which has drawn in French military and then Russian mercenary intervention—into deep historical and political-economic context from struggles over the slave trade, through French colonialism, to the neocolonial imposition of neoliberalism.

Idrissa’s work:
newleftreview.org/issues/ii132/articles/rahmane-idrissa-the-sahel-a-cognitive-mapping
newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/kabores-defeat
nybooks.com/daily/2022/05/25/potent-policies-of-empire

lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n04/rahmane-idrissa/coup-contrecouplrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n23/rahmane-idrissa/countries-without-currency

Special outro music from Ali Farka Touré.

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The Sahel w/ Rahmane Idrissa

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Featuring Abdel Razzaq Takriti, this is the TENTH episode of Thawra (Revolution), our rolling mini-series on Arab radicalism in the 20th century. Today’s installment tells the story of Iraq’s 1958 July Revolution: a Free Officers’ coup overthrew the imperialist-aligned Hashemite monarchy and brought nationalist Abdul-Karim Qasim to power alongside a surging Communist Party. Revolutionary currents soon turned against one another, however, as did Qasim and Nasser. Conflict stemmed from serious political and strategic differences, but also petty rivalries and bitter feuds. And in Iraq, class conflict often appeared dressed up in the sectarian and ethnic modalities through which class was lived. 

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Thawra Ep. 10 – Iraqi Revolution, Communist Power

Featuring Abdel Razzaq Takriti, this is the NINTH episode of Thawra (Revolution), our rolling mini-series on Arab radicalism in the 20th century. Today’s installment covers the creation of a Palestinian national liberation movement throughout the 1950s by a people dispersed by the Nakba: organizations, alliances, and theories of change assembled in  the universities, cities, and refugee camps surrounding Palestine. We end with the 1959 foundation of Fatah, the first organization for Palestinians led by Palestinians focused first and foremost on Palestinian liberation. This is the story of the beginning of the Palestinian national liberation movement as we have come to know it today. 

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Thawra Ep. 9 – Palestine on the Road to Revolution

Featuring Abdel Razzaq Takriti, this is the EIGHTH episode of Thawra (Revolution), our rolling mini-series on Arab radicalism in the 20th century. A compact introduction to the Movement of Arab Nationalists, which in the 1950s built a presence that stretched across the region, from Beirut and Jordan to Cairo and the Gulf—becoming a truly powerful force in Kuwait. Led in significant part by Palestinians, its early history offers a ground-level look at the organizational and theoretical currents shaping radical Arab politics. It is also the backstory for key Marxist groups that later grew out of the Movement: the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, South Yemen’s National Liberation Front, and the Dhofar Liberation Front.

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Thawra Ep. 8 – Origins of the Arab New Left

Featuring Noura Erakat, Avi Shlaim, Ussama Makdisi, Ilan Pappé, Ghada Ageel Hamdan, and Abdel Razzaq Takriti on the ongoing Israeli genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. Recorded at the World Academic Forum for Palestine in Houston. We’ll be back next week with episode eight of Thawra, our rolling series on 20th century Arab radicalisms.

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Scholars Against Genocide

Featuring Abdel Razzaq Takriti, this is the SEVENTH episode of Thawra (Revolution), our rolling mini-series on Arab radicalism in the 20th century. Today’s installment lays out the the US’s Eisenhower Doctrine, which in 1957 inaugurated a new era of imperialism in the Middle East; the Ba’ath Party driving Syria and Egypt into the United Arab Republic, a superstate under Nasser’s rule, in 1958; and, later that year, Eisenhower landing US Marines in Lebanon, the first American combat operation in the region.

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The Sahel w/ Rahmane Idrissa

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