RADIKAAL

My guest is the US singer-songwriterDavid Lowery. David has a decades-long history in music and is probably best known as frontman of bands like Camper van Beethoven and Cracker. Less know, he has been teaching courses on the music business in the Terry College of Business at the University of Georgia, where I also work. In recent years, David has also been a tireless activist for the right of musicians and a fighter against streaming companies. He is currently involved in a court case...

My guest is Poyâ Pâkzâd, economic policy advisor with the Red-Green Alliance, or Unity List, a left-wing party that supports the current minority government of the Social Democrats in Denmark. He is also the editor of the left-wing magazine Eftertryck, which translates as Emphasis, if I’m not mistaken, and a parliamentary candidate for the Red-Green Alliance. Poya and I got into a discussion on Twitter on the challenges of immigration policy for left parties, which is a key topic of our...

My guest today is Laurien Schreuder, the artistic director of Snowapple, a multidisciplinary, international ensemble that combines theater with a wide range of different music genres, from pop to opera and avant-garde cumbia. Snowapple has spoken out on political issues, most notably violence against women in Mexico. This year, on International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, Snowapple and Mexican singer Vivir Quintana released the beautiful song “Alerta” and an incredible...

My guest today is Sam Jackson. Sam is an assistant professor in the College of Emergency Preparedness, Homeland Security & Security at the University at Albany in Upstate New York. He primarily studies the far right in the US, focusing most notably on the militia movement and on online extremism. He is the author ofOath Keepers: Patriotism and the Edge of Violence in a Right-Wing Antigovernment Group, published by Columbia University Press in 2020. We will talk about the US militia movement...

My guest today is Dilara Hekimci-Adak. Dilara is a graduate student in Political Science at Florida International University in Miami, where she works on a PhD on populists in power and the role of the opposition in Hungary and Turkey. Before coming to the US, she had already done a PhD at Bahcesehir University, in her native Turkey, on clientelism and democracy in Latin America. She also wrote an MA thesis on nationalism and football in Turkey. Dilara and I talk about football and politics...

My guest is Nadia Marzouki. Nadia is a Research Fellow in Political Science at the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) in Paris, France. Her work examines public controversies about Islam and religious freedom in Europe and the United States. She has written and co-edited several books, including Islam, an American Religion, published by Columbia University Press in 2017, and with Olivier Roy and Duncan McDonnell of Saving the People, How Populists Hijack Religion, published by...

This is the first of a new special series of RADIKAAL, the Special Election Series (SES), in which we discuss a very recent election with an expert. My guest today is my colleague and friend, Sarah de Lange. Sarah holds the Dr. J.M. Den Uyl Chair at the Department of Political Science of the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands. She has published widely on far right and populist politics in Western Europe and is also involved in research on social democratic parties. A much-consulted...

My guest today is Gooyong Kim, Assistant Professor in the Department of Humanities at the Cheney University of Pennsylvania. He has published extensively on various aspects of K-Pop, the topic of today’s podcast, including his book “From Factory Girls to K-Pop Idol Girls: Cultural Politics of Developmentalism, Patriarchy, and Neoliberalism in South Korea's Popular Music Industry”, published by Rowman & Littlefield in 2018. We talk about the economics, gender, and soft power of K-Pop.

My guest today is my colleague and friend Cynthia Miller-Idriss. Cynthia is Professor in the School of Public Affairs and in the School of Education at American University and runs the new Polarization and Extremism Research & Innovation Lab in the Center for University Excellence. She is also Director of Strategy and Partnerships at the UK-based Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right (CARR) and serves on the international advisory board of the Center for Research on Extremism (C-REX) in...

My guest today is David Miliband. David is CEO of the International Rescue Committee (IRC), a global humanitarian aid, relief, and development NGO, founded in 1931 by Albert Einstein. Before joining the IRC, David held several cabinet positions in various Labour governments, including that of British Foreign Secretary. In 2017 he published the TED book “Rescue: Refugees and the Political Crisis of Our Time” and in 2019 he gave a Fulbright Lecture entitled “The New Arrogance of Power: Global...

My guest today is Lisa Zanotti. Lisa is an Associate Researcher at the Research Institute for Social Sciences of the Diego Portales University in Santiago de Chile. Lisa finished her PhD on “Populist Polarization in Italian Politics: An Assessment from a Latin American Analytical Perspective” in 2019, shared between Leiden University and Diego Portales. She has written articles on the Great Recession and populism and is co-author, with José Rama, Stuart J. Thurnbull-Dugarte and Andrés...

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...