The MERIP Podcast

Today on the MERIP Podcast we’re sharing an interview with Nafiseh Sharifi about her recent article in Middle East Report, “Soundtrack of Dissent–Protest Music in Iran.” Sharifi is an Iranian anthropologist and an Honorary Research Fellow at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter. She has written extensively on gender and sexuality politics in Iran, including her 2018 book, Female Bodies and Sexuality in Iran and the Search for Defiance (Palgrave Macmillan). In “Soundtrack of Dissent” Sharifi provides a fascinating short history of protest music in Iran since the 1979 revolution drawn from her own experiences in student protests, the 2009 Green Movement and the more recent wave of protests that culminated in this January’s “Dey Protests.” In this interview with James Ryan, Sharifi discusses how protest music under the Islamic Republic connects to earlier protest movements under the regime of the Shah and how massive changes in media and technology have altered both the mood and the prevalence of Iranian protest music. Sharifi and Ryan also discussed her recent visit to Iran and how politics and music have been playing out on the streets and in homes there since the recent war began in February 2026. Further Reading: Nafiseh Sharifi, “Soundtrack of Dissent–Protest Music in Iran” Middle East Report Issue 319, August 2026“Taraneh: A Documentary” Pegah Ahangarani, dir. BBC Persian, December 25, 2025

Today on the MERIP Podcast we’re sharing a recording of a live event featuring Lisa Hajjar and John Ryan discussing their last two decades of reporting, researching and writing from Guantanamo Bay. This event, which took place in Washington, DC, at Busboys and Poets on September 13th, marked the 25th anniversary of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and the opening of the Guantanamo Bay facility that has housed those captured and imprisoned in the course of the so-called war on terror. Hajjar and Ryan discussed the continued injustice of the indefinite detention of prisoners at this US military compound, the obstacles to accountability put in place by the US Department of Defense and the present and future prospects of the facility and those who remain detained there. Lisa Hajjar is a longtime MERIP contributor and editor, as well as a professor of sociology at the University of California-Santa Barbara, and the author of The War in Court: Inside the Long Fight Against Torture, which chronicles her observations of trials at Guantanmo and was published in 2022 by the University of California Press. John Ryan is a co-founder of Lawdragon Inc. and has won numerous accolades as a legal affairs journalist over the past 25 years. Since 2015, John has been one of just two reporters to report regularly on the military tribunals from Guantanamo Bay, earning three New York Press Club Awards for his work. His book, America’s Trial: Torture and the 9/11 Case on Guantanmo Bay was published by Skyhorse in 2025. The event was moderated by Alka Pradhan, an expert on the application of human rights and humanitarian law to counterterrorism situations, and the impact of torture on fair trials. She is currently Human Rights Counsel at the Guantanamo Bay Military Commissions, representing one of the defendants in the capital case of United States v. Khalid Sheikh Mohammad (the “9/11 case”).Further Reading: Lisa Hajjar, The War in Court: Inside the Long Fight Against Torture (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2022)John Ryan, America’s Trial: Torture and the 9/11 Case on Guantanmo Bay (New York, Skyhorse, 2025)

Today on the MERIP Podcast James Ryan talks with Arran Walshe, a journalist and researcher based in Amman. Walshe is the author of “Alternative Amman–Making Counterculture in the Jordanian Capital,” which appeared in our summer issue of Middle East Report, Art at Work–People, Power and Cultural Production. This issue digs into the forces that shape art making across the region in a time of social and political upheaval. Walshe’s article explains how heavy metal and hip hop musicians, and other performance artists, have grappled with regional and domestic political shifts over the last several decades. Walshe interviewed musicians and participants in Amman’s countercultural scene about the changing pressures they face amid the ebbs and flows of support for the arts. He also investigates how they have struggled with Jordan’s unique place in recent regional catastrophes. In their discussion, Ryan and Walshe get into what “politics” has meant for Jordan’s countercultural music scene and how its artists have positioned themselves vis-a-vis the Jordanian state, geopolitics and the Arab diaspora. Further reading: Arran Walshe, “Alternative Amman–Making Counterculture in the Jordanian Capital” in Middle East Report Issue 319 “Art at Work–People, Power and Cultural Production” (Summer 2026)Rolling Stone MENAEbrazus (Instagram)

On today’s program we have another installment of our MERIP Roundtable, where MERIP’s executive director, James Ryan is joined by past and present members of our editorial committee, along with recent contributors, to discuss current events. This edition focuses on the 2026 World Cup, now in its final stages. Like most iterations of the tournament, this year’s has provided a drama-filled month both on and off the pitch. Thanks to the expanded field of participation, ten nations from the Middle East and North Africa were represented, with Morocco following its exciting 2022 performance in Qatar with another deep run. Our guests discuss what participation has meant for several countries in the region, and what their prospects might be going forward. They also touch on the colonial and diasporic dynamics that have been central to the dominance of the traditional powerhouses–including the final four teams of France, Spain, Argentina and England. And of course, there are the implications of this World Cup being hosted by the United States, along with Mexico and Canada, at a time when the United States and Israel are engaged in a disastrous war on Iran that has entangled its allies in the region as well as Lebanon and Yemen. Joining James Ryan for this conversation were Sabiha Allouche, a member of MERIP’s editorial committee and a senior lecturer in politics at the University of Exeter’s Institute for Arab and Islamic Studies, Paul Silverstein, the chair of MERIP’s board of directors and professor of anthropology at Reed College, and Nabil al-Tikriti, a former member of MERIP’s editorial committee, long-time contributor and professor of history at the University of Mary Washington.Further Reading: Middle East Report Issue 304, Football–Politics and Passion, Fall 2022Clive Chijioke Nwonka and Matthew Harle eds., Black Arsenal: Club, Culture, Identity (London, W&N 2025)John McManus, Welcome to Hell? In Search of the Real Turkish Football (London, W&N 2019)Fatou Diome, In the Belly of the Atlantic (London, Serpent’s Tail 2008)Mickaël Correia, A People’s History of Football (London, Pluto Press 2023)Simon Kuper, World Cup Fever: A Soccer Journey in Nine Tournaments (New York, Simon and Schuster 2026)

On today’s program, we have a special release of the audio from the second installment of our summer event series “Iran in Context,” featuring conversations with scholars in the field about the deeper dynamics behind the political and military convulsions in Iran over the last year. The latest installment, available here, is on the “Politics and Counter Politics in Contemporary Iran” and includes three recent MERIP contributors, Naghmeh Sohrabi, the Charles (Corky) Goodman chair of Middle East History and Director of the Crown Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis University, Mohammad Ali Kadivar, associate professor of sociology and international studies at Boston College and Paniz Musawi Natanzi, a research associate at the University of Bern and affiliate scholar of the South Asia Center at the University of Pennsylvania. The discussion was co-moderated by James Ryan, MERIP’s executive director and Rosanna Tufaro, a Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at La Sapienza University in Rome and a member of the precarity working group at SeSaMO. Their conversation explores the ways Iranian politics have been misunderstood and misrepresented outside of Iran, the major factors that have driven political change in the country over the last few decades and some thoughts on what lies ahead for a country that is clearly being reshaped in important ways. The series, which takes place on zoom, is co-produced by BRISMES (the British Society for Middle East Studies) and SeSaMO (the Italian Society for Middle East Studies). Further Reading: Mohammad Ali Kadivar, “Rethinking Political Change in Iran From Protest to War” Current Analysis, MERIP June 3, 2026Paniz Musawi Natanzi, “Courts of Exclusion–Working Class Masculinity and Anti-Afghan Racism in Iran” Middle East Report Issue 314, June 17, 2025 https://www.merip.org/2025/06/banned-from-the-game-working-class-masculinity-and-anti-afghan-racism-in-iran/Daniel Tavana, Kevin Harris, Gary Fong and Amir Farmanesh, “Who Overreports? Regime Support and Preference Falsification in Iran” (article preprint) June 15, 2026 Naghmeh Sohrabi, Toby Craig Jones, Kaveh Ehsani and James Ryan, “The MERIP Podcast: The MERIP Roundtable–On the Iran War Part II” Episode 19, March 19, 2026

Today’s episode of the MERIP Podcast is an audio recording from the first event in our Iran in Context series. This series is co-produced by MERIP, BRISMES, the British Society for Middle East Studies, and SeSaMO, the Italian Society for Middle East Studies. Each event features conversations with scholars about the deeper context behind the political and military convulsions in Iran over the last year. For the first installment, we took up the topic of gender and revolution in conversation with Manijeh Moradian, assistant professor of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College and author of the book, This Flame Within: Iranian Revolutionaries in the United States (Duke University Press, 2022), and Nazanin Shahrokni, associate professor of International Studies at Simon Fraser University and author of the book, Women in Place: The Politics of Gender Segregation in Iran (University of California Press, 2020).This conversation was recorded on June 18, 2026.Further Reading: Manijeh Moradian, This Flame Within Iranian Revolutionaries in the United States (Duke University Press, 2022)Manijeh Moradian, "Feminist Uprising in Iran and the Politics of Solidarity," Meridians (April 2026) Manijeh Moradian "Decolonial Diasporas: Iranian Feminist Solidarity in Global Context" Iranian Studies. (October 2025) Manijeh Moradian, "Embodying Revolution: Situating Iran within Transnational Feminist Solidarities," Radical History Review (January 2024) Feminists for Jina Nazanin Shahrokni, Women in Place: The Politics of Gender Segregation in Iran (University of California Press 2020)Nazanin Shahrokni, “Who Speaks for Iran?–and From Where? Geopolitics, Representation and Solidarity,” SPECTRE: A Marxist Journal, March 2, 2026

Today’s episode of the MERIP Podcast features an interview with Ayça Alemdaroğlu about her article, “The Capture of Turkey’s Universities Under the AKP,” in our Spring 2026 issue, “Campus Politics–Palestine and the New University Order.” MERIP executive director James Ryan spoke with Alemdaroğlu about the efforts of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party to co-opt university administrations and contain campus dissent over the last 25 years. While attempting to coerce and repress the strongest and most outspoken voices on prestigious campuses like Boğaziçi or Middle East Technical University the state has also invested heavily in constructing and opening new universities, often in more provincial settings, in order to build its own hegemonic institutions. As Alemdaroğlu explains in her piece, "Although access to institutions of higher education has expanded greatly, academic freedom has been steadily eroded through the combined force of ordinary administrative authority and extraordinary instruments such as emergency decrees, which together reoriented universities toward political compliance." The conversation also covered the abrupt closure and swift re-opening of Istanbul Bilgi University in May, one of Turkey’s leading private universities and an avant-garde institution for liberal and progressive academics. This conversation was recorded on June 8, 2026Further reading: Ayça Alemdaroğlu, “The Capture of Turkey’s Universities Under the AKP”, Middle East Report, Issue 318, Spring 2026Ayça Alemdaroğlu and Elif Babül, “Boğaziçi Resists Authoritarian Control of the Academy in Turkey” Middle East Report Online, February 23, 2021 Ayça Alemdaroğlu “The University in the Making of Authoritarian Turkey” European Journal of Turkish Studies Issue 34, 2022 Ayça Alemdaroğlu, “Tek İmza Cumhuriyetinde Üniversite: İstanbul Bilgi Üniversite” (“The University in the Single-Signature Republic: Istanbul Bilgi University”), Birikim Dergisi May 26, 2026“Yellow Letters” (Sarı Zarflar) [Film] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt32888226/ MESA Committee on Academic Freedom, Letters on Turkey 

Today's episode of the MERIP Podcast features an interview with two contributors to the spring issue of Middle East Report, “Campus Politics—Palestine and the New University Order.” Since the beginning of world-wide campus protests in the wake of October 7, 2023, there has been a tremendous upswell of organizing and support for Palestinian liberation and activism against US militarism. In response, a wave of repression against students, staff and faculty on campus began in 2023 and accelerated after Donald Trump took office. Our latest issue takes stock of these dynamics and the stakes of political action on campus in the United States, Europe and the Middle East. To discuss campus politics in our present moment, MERIP’s executive director, James Ryan, was joined by Aslı Bâli and Darryl Li. Aslı Bâli is the Howard M. Holtzmann Professor of Law at Yale Law School and the former president of the Middle East Studies Association. Her article in this issue, “Fighting the Campus Crackdown–Why the Middle East Studies Association Took the Trump Administration to Court,” is a reflection on MESA’s lawsuit, with the American Association of University Professors and the Knight First Amendment Institute, against Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the Trump Administration over the free speech rights of noncitizens, like Rümeysa Öztürk and others, who spoke up about Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Darryl Li is an associate professor of Anthropology and Social Sciences at the University of Chicago, and a contributor, along with Andrew Ross, Lara Deeb, Meera Shah and Lisa Hajjar to “The University is a Site of Struggle—A Roundtable with Faculty Organizers on Repression and Resistance on US Campuses.”Further Reading: Aslı Bâli, “Fighting the Campus Crackdown—Why the Middle East Studies Association Took the Trump Administration to Court” Middle East Report, no. 318 (Spring 2026). Lisa Hajjar, Lara Deeb, Darryl Li, Andrew Ross and Meera Shah, “‘The University is a Site of Struggle—A Roundtable with Faculty Organizers on Repression and Resistance on US Campuses”  Middle East Report, no. 318 (Spring 2026).The MESA Academic Freedom Initiative MESA and AAUP, “Discriminating Against Dissent: The Weaponization of Civil Rights Law to Repress Campus Speech on Palestine,” November 5, 2025.Palestine Legal 2025 Report The Knight First Amendment Institute PEN America, “Expanding the Web of Control–America’s Censored Campuses 2025,” January 15, 2025.