RADIKAAL

My guest today is Manisha Tailor, the CEO of Swaggarlicious, an organization that uses football to create social cohesion and help with mental health problems. She is also a coach at the academy of Queens Park Rangers (QPR), a London football club that plays in The Championship. Manisha is a celebrated activist and speaker on issues related to football, and was awarded a prestigious MBE for services to football and diversity in sport in 2017. She tweets at @swaggarlicious_Manisha and I talk...

My guest today is Karim Zidan. Born and raised in Cairo, Egypt, Karim is an investigative reporter who works on the intersection of sports and politics. He has written for many different publications, from mainstream newspapers like The Guardian to specialized blogs like Right-Wing Watch. Karim writes about many sports, from basketball to boxing, but much of his recent work is on Mixed Martial Arts, and he is one of the managers of Bloody Elbow, the MMA and UFC blog of SB Nation. He tweets...

My guest today is Stanislav Vysotsky, who is an associate professor in Criminology at the University of Fraser Valley in British Columbia, Canada. He is the author of the book, American Antifa: The Tactics, Culture, and Practice of Militant Antifascism, which came out with Routledge earlier this year. His current research is focused on analyzing the dynamics between protesters, counter-protesters, and police at fascist rallies as well as looking at the dynamics of targeted harassment of...

My guest today is Nicole Hemmer, an associate research scholar with the Obama Presidency Oral History project at Columbia University. She specializes in the history of conservative media in the United States from the 1940s to the present, and the role of right-wing media in American electoral politics. In 2016 she published Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of US Politics, one of the key texts on the topic, with the University of Pennsylvania Press. Nicole is...

My guest is Amarnath Amarasingam, an assistant professor in the School of Religion at Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada. Amar is also a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue and an Associate Fellow at the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation, both in London, England. His research interests are in radicalization, terrorism, diaspora politics, post-war reconstruction, and the sociology of religion. He is the author of Pain, Pride, and Politics: Sri...

This week RADIKAAL has a premiere, as I will be interviewing two guests, at the same time. Carles Viñas is a researcher in the Department of History of the University of Barcelona, who has published extensively on the far right, skinheads, and ultras, mostly in Catalan and Spanish. Natxo Parra is a labor lawyer and cooperative partner at Col.lectiu Ronda. Together they wrote the excellent new book St. Pauli: Another Football Is Possible, which just came out with Pluto Press. We will talk...

My guest is Louis Wierenga, a former US Marine who went to study in Canada befoire moving East. He is currently a junior Research Fellow at the Johan Skytte Institute of Political Studies of the University of Tartu, where he works on a PhD on the far right in contemporary Estonia and Latvia. You can follow him on Twitter at @louis_wierenga. Louis and I talk about far right politics in Estonia, in particular the Conservative People's Party of Estonia (EKRE), currently a member of the...

My guest is Lisa Nandy. Lisa has been a Member of Parliament for Wigan since 2010. Earlier this year she came third in the election to succeed Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the Labour Party. She is currently the Shadow Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs and, given the state of Britain and the world, extremely busy. Lisa and I talk about post-Brexit Britain, about post-Corbyn Labour Party, about populism and progressive patriotism, and about the importance of saving Wigan...

My guest is Sophia Solomon, a PhD student in political science at Ben Gurion University of the Negev in Beer-Sheva, Israel. Her current research focuses on civil-military relations in Britain, Canada and Israel, with a particular focus on so-called “shooting soldiers”, i.e. soldiers who killed suspected terrorists after they were captured. However, Sophia and I talk about her previous research, for her MA thesis, which focuses on the Israeli football club Beitar Jerusalem, its infamous...

My guest is Tara Martin Lopez. Tara is an Associate Professor of Sociology and the Chair of Humanities and Social Sciences of at Northern New Mexico College. Her work focuses on the intersection between gender, race, and social movements with a particular focus on the US punk movement. She also wrote a book on one of the most tumultuous period in postwar British history, entitled “The Winter of Discontent: Myth, Memory and History”, which was published by Liverpool University Press in...

My guest today is activist and author Gabriel Kuhn. As an activist and author of books on both music and politics and sports and politics, Gabriel is the personification of RADIKAAL. Gabriel has written on pirates and Straight Edge music, a topic I hope to tackle another time with him, as in this episode we focus primarily on sports and politics. Gabriel is not on social media, but you should really buy his books, in particular “Soccer vs the State: Tackling Football and Radical Politics”...

My guest today is Daphne Halikiopoulou. Daphne is Professor in the Department of Political Science and International Relations at the University of Reading in England. She has published extensively on nationalism and far right politics in Europe and her latest book, co-authored with Sofia Vasilopoulou of York University, is “The Golden Dawn’s ‘National Solution’: Explaining the Rise of the Far Right in Greece”, which was published by Palgrave in 2015. If you want to know more about Daphne...

My guest today is Mona Lena Krook. Mona is Professor of Political Science and Chair of the Women and Politics PhD Program at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. She is one of the foremost scholars on gender and politics and has published many articles and books on the topic. In this episode, we will talk in particular about her newest book, Violence Against Women in Politics, which was published by Oxford University Press earlier this year. If you want to know more about Mona...

My guest today is Shannon Reid, an Associate Professor in the Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology at the University of North Carolina in Charlotte. She has published extensively on youth culture and gangs in the US and her latest book, co-authored with Matthew Valasik of Louisiana State University, is “Alt-Right Gangs: A Hazy Shade of White”, which has been published by the University of California Press. She tweets at at @MourningShannon.

My guest today is Guilherme Casarões, a Professor of Public Administration, Political Science and International Relations at the Getulio Vargas Foundation. He has mostly published on Brazilian foreign policy, but his more recent interest is in the far right in Brazil, most notably Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro. Together with two colleagues he runs the Twitter account Observatório da Extrema Direita (Observatorium of the Extreme Right) at @oedbrasil.His personal Twitter account is...

My guest today is Sithembile Mbete, a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Political Science at the University of Pretoria in South Africa, where she teaches on International Relations and South African politics. She has published several articles on the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) and is at the start of a book project on populism in South Africa. You can follow her on Twitter at @sthembete.

My next guest will be Kacper Rekawek. Kacper is an affiliated researcher at the Counter Extremism Project and a GLOBSEC associate fellow. Between 2016 and 2019 he led the latter’s national security program and has published on a broad range of extremist and terrorism groups. Since 2014 he has been monitoring the topic of foreign fighters in Ukraine and earlier this year published a report titled “Career Break or New Career? Extremist Foreign Fighters in Ukraine” for the Counter Extremism...

My guest today is Evan Smith. Evan is a Research Fellow in History in the College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences at Flinders University in Australia. His academic work focuses on Australian, British and South African politics and history. He has published on a broad variety of topics relevant to RADIKAAL, including British Communism, counter-terrorism, as well as fascism and anti-fascism. His latest book is the very timely “No Platform: A History of Anti-Fascism, Universities and...

My guest is Winnie Wong. Winnie has been at the forefront of almost every major progressive campaign in the US in this century. She was a leading organizer for Occupy Wall Street, Occupy Sandy, and the Women’s March on Washington. She co-founded People for Bernie, and helped develop the viral hashtag “Feel the Bern”. After serving as a Senior Political Advisor to Bernie Sanders’ 2020 campaign, she is now an Advisor of the Once Again PAC, which strives for “the continuation of everything...

My guest is the singer songwriter and activist Billy Bragg. Billy started his music career in the late 1970s in the band Riff Raff, had a short flirt with the British Army, before embarking on a solo career that has led to twelve albums so far. He is also a tireless political activist for a broad range of progressive causes and groups, including my friends at the anti-racist group Hope not Hate. Finally, he has written several books, including his latest booklet “The Three Dimensions of...