Radio Intifada by SWANA (South and West Asia and North Africa) Region Radio

Regular listeners will know that SWANA Region Radio, which began life as Radio Intifada, maintains its regular coverage of the reality of life for Palestinians across historic Palestine, from the river to the sea, a life lived in persistence and resistance “under and against” Israeli apartheid and settler colonialism, to borrow a phrase from our guests today. Over the past year, and no less under...

In this episode, SWANA collective explores the continuation of the demonstrations that erupted in Iran last September, sparked by the death of a woman held by Iran's morality police, in custody: Jina Amini, a 22 year old Kurdish woman who was arrested for wearing her hijab wrong. After months of protests, the escalating crackdown on Iranian protesters may be pacifying the demonstrators, but so...

In this episode, we look at the blockade of the Lachin Corridor, the only road that connects the Armenian-majority breakaway region of  Nagorno-Karabagh to Armenia.  The blockade is limiting food, medicine and other essential supplies and trapping 120,000 people. What is the importance of this blockade to the  Armenia-Azerbaijan peace process, and also to the region? To help us understand the huma...

Join SWANA Region Radio collective members as they explore efforts to end US support for the Saudi led war on Yemen with Kevin Martin, President of Peace Action and the Peace Action Education fund. Originating in campaigns against nuclear armaments in the 1950s, Peace Action was formed in 1993 and among its many campaigns, it pressured the Obama administration to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanist...

SWANA Region Radio is honored to be in conversation with Loubna and Amanda from the Palestinian Feminist Collective (PFC) , a Turtle Island-based body of Palestinian & Arab women & feminists committed to Palestinian liberation & beyond. SWANA Collective members Ankine Antaram, Rana Sharif, and Soraya Zarook speak with Loubna and Amanda to discuss the PFC's Love Letter to the Palest...

On the weekend after the so-called Thanksgiving holiday, which celebrates the nineteenth-century myth of Native American generosity towards the Pilgrim settlers in the 17th-century, and is immediately followed by the annual orgy of consumerism, we are hosting a conversation about the meaning and political force of the notion of Indigeneity in the United States and the SWANA Region that we regularl...

SWANA Region Radio collective members speak with Archana Ravichandradeva , Executive Director of People for Equality and Relief in Lanka , or PEARL.  In recent global news, much attention has been paid to the recent and ongoing protests in the city of Colombo in Sri Lanka, but mainstream news consistently ignores the much longer continuous protests that have taken place in Sri Lanka’s north-east,...

Join a SWANA collective member as she hosts multidisciplinary artist Imaad Majeed to discuss their various projects and to call attention to some of the failures of the recent GotaGoGama protests in Sri Lanka.  To help ongoing relief efforts in Sri Lanka , please visit this Google doc to donate to various organizations providing cooked food and dry rations to the most vulnerable communities, and t...

A SWANA Region Radio collective member interviews Palestinian environmental scientist and human rights activist, Professor Mazin Qumsiyeh from Bethlehem University. As we go on air, COP-27, the annual meeting of heads of state and their climate specialists, NGOs, and, of course, representatives of the major oil and gas corporations, gathers in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt. Most observers anticipate yet...

SWANA Region Radio is joined by a collective of Iranian feminists to continue our discussion about this moment of urgency. Over the last several weeks, the world has witnessed the continued bravery and steadfastness of the Iranian people. Mobilized by women, Iranians across all sectors of society have taken to the streets in protest of state-sanctioned violence and authoritarianism. On September 1...

Join SWANA collective member Nyma Ardalan for a show focused on the protests that have begun in Iran as well as other parts of the world following the death of Jina Amini, a young Kurdish women taken into custody. Her tragic death has become a catalyst for a panacea of Iran's youth and opposition to take to the streets; there are Kurdish towns where Iranian security forces have been kicked out. He...

We discuss the humanitarian catastrophe in the wake of the devastating floods in Pakistan. We are honored to have as guest co-host, Sana Balagamwala , and to be joined by our guests, Sobia Kapadia and Insiya Syed .  Sana Balagamwala is an author and educator based in Los Angeles. Her novel, House Number 12, Block Number 3 explores class, gender roles, and cultural taboos in Pakistan against the ba...

Join SWANA collective members as we take a look at the environmental and human cost of trash heaps in South Asia. Joining us to discuss these issues are journalists Aaron Clark and Archana Chaudhary. If you miss our live show on  kpfk.org , you can listen to it as a podcast on Spotify , Anchor , Google Podcasts , Breaker , and Radio Public . Aaron Clark covers global climate and energy issues for...

Ever since humans started painting hunting scenes on the walls of paleolithic caves, through the Renaissance down to today, art has played a social and political role, as well as a purely aesthetic one. Art curators, tasked with putting together shows that deliver a cohesive message, often organize exhibitions along even more socially conscious themes, highlighting a particular social injustice or...

SWANA Region Radio are joined by Afghan scholar Aiman Saed to reflect on the anniversary and the consequences of President Biden’s decision to withdraw from Afghanistan. It is now one year since the US’s hurried and chaotic withdrawal of forces from Afghanistan and the Taliban’s rapid takeover of the country. Neither the US withdrawal nor Taliban rule have brought security or peace to that nation,...

Join SWANA collective members as we focus on the worsening humanitarian crisis in Yemen that began in 2015. In the past nearly eight years, Saudi Arabia has imposed a land, air, and sea blockade on Yemen with the intent to prevent the flow of weapons to Houthi rebels. In fact, the result of these blockades, that are supported by the U.S., is the devastation of the civilian population through a lac...

It has been a year now since the U.S. withdrew from Afghanistan and the Taliban’s takeover. Join SWANA collective we hosts our guest, Dr. Zaman Stanizai, Professor of Political Science at California  State University Dominguez Hills. Dr. Stanizai assesses for us the current situation on the ground. We address the issue of the Taliban’s legitimacy as a governing institution. Is the current governme...

Join SWANA Region Radio in conversation with Pakistani-American journalist Umar Farooq about the global proliferation of drones as a weapon of war. Last week Umar published an essay on  Turkey’s TB2 drone   which has been used both in Ethiopia against the Tigray region and in Ukraine as an important weapon against Russia’s invasion. We discuss with him today the expanding use of drones as weapons...

On July 9th, thousands of protesters stormed the Presidential Secretariat and the official residences of the President and Prime Minister, demanding that President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, and Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe, resign their posts. Rajapaksa, who fled to Singapore, has since appointed Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe as Acting President and officially resigned from his position as...

SWANA Region Radio is joined by the Algerian-French novelist, Anouar Benmalek . Anouar Benmalek is an esteemed novelist, journalist, mathematician, and poet and a dual Algerian and French citizen. He has won several of France’s prestigious literary prizes and has been nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature. His historical novels examine the lives of ordinary people living in violent times, th...

We are joined by Mosab Abu Toha, the author of a wonderful new book of poetry, Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear , that came out this year from City Lights Books. Toha’s poems render some of the most moving and telling accounts of how it is to live under blockade and the constant threat and reality of Israeli bombardment. But these are not only “poems that have bombs and corpses, / destroyed ho...

Today, as California yet again faces prolonged drought conditions, severe water shortages, and imminent restrictions on water consumption, we devote the show to a conversation with water protectors in Palestine and in the US Southwest. Both regions are subject to settler colonial regimes that bring with them sustained resource extraction, including the over-consumption of water resources that are...

Collective members discuss the recent people-led anti-government protests in Sri Lanka. May is Tamil Genocide Month in Sri Lanka, commemorating the Tamils killed in the vicious government repression of the Tamil Tiger uprising. However, current events have obscured that fact: In recent months, people have gathered to protest as Sri Lanka faces its worst economic crisis in post-independence history...

Collective members discuss the terrible industry of baby farms in Sri Lanka,  and its connection to transnational adoption industries. To help us  understand the history and present conditions around Sri Lanka's baby  farms, we are joined by our guest, Priyangika Samanthie , a  writer, philanthropist and activist in the field of adoption. She has  assisted in nearly 300 family reunions over 17...

SWANA Region Radio collective members discuss You Have Not Yet Been Defeated , the recently published collection of writings by Alaa Abd el-Fattah, the Egyptian revolutionary activist, blogger, and essayist, who has spent the last ten years, since the Egyptian Revolution of 2011, in prison or in the near-carceral conditions of supervised probation. We speak with Alaa’s sister, Sanaa Seif, also a p...