The Gateway - A Podcast from the Middle East Al Bawaba News

This week we hear from Volodymyr Ishchenko, a research associate at the Institute of East European Studies, Freie Universität Berlin.


Volodymyr has recently published an article in the New Left Review called ‘Ukrainian Voices’. He argues that decolonization in Ukraine has focused on culture at the expense of a broader liberatory movement that could connect Ukraine’s struggle against Russia with wider battles for justice around the world, notably in the Global South.

In this episode, we are joined by Patrick O’Hare, UKRI Future Leaders Fellow and Senior Research Fellow at the University of St Andrews. Patrick’s new book, Rubbish Belongs to the Poor: Hygienic Enclosure and the Waste Commons, was published by Pluto Press in 2022.

In the book, Patrick journeys to the heart of Uruguay's waste disposal system in order to reconceptualize rubbish as a 21st-century commons at risk of enclosure.

I began by asking for a quick rundown of contemporary politics in Uruguay.

This week we hear from Kaveh Abbasian, a filmmaker and Lecturer in Film and Media Practice at the University of Kent.

Kaveh talks about his new documentary, Triumph, which is about the state-sanctioned narratives of Iran's 1979 Revolution and the Iran-Iraq War. Triumph was released in 2022 and will soon be available to view online.

In this episode, we hear from Yasmin El-Rifae, writer and author of Radius: A Story of Feminist Revolution (Verso, 2022).

Radius is the story of the women and men who formed Opantish—Operation Anti-Sexual Harassment—who deployed hundreds of volunteers, scouts rescue teams, and getaway drivers to intervene in the spiralling cases of sexual violence against women protesters in Tahrir Square during the uprising in Egypt.

In this episode, we hear from Chris Armstrong, Professor of Political Theory at the University of Southampton and author of A Blue New Deal: Why We Need a New Politics for the Ocean.

Chris reveals how existing governing institutions are failing to respond to the most pressing problems of our time, arguing that we must do better. He examines these crises—from the fate of people whose lands will be submerged by sea level rise to the exploitation of people working in fishing to the rights of marine animals—and makes the case for a powerful World Ocean Authority capable of tackling them. A Blue New Deal presents a radical manifesto for putting equality, democracy, and sustainability at the heart of ocean politics.

In this episode, we are joined by C. Brad Faught, Professor of History and Global Studies at Tyndale University. We hear about the importance of the 1921 conference in Cairo in determining the course of 20th and 21st-century politics.