🎧 In this episode, I review Terrence G. Peterson’s Revolutionary Warfare: How the Algerian War Made Modern Counterinsurgency, a sharp and unsettling account of how the French army’s defeat in Algeria produced a doctrine that outlived empire itself. Peterson shows how Pacification fused violence, social reform, and surveillance into a coherent model of warfare, one that treated society as the battlefield and civilians as the primary objective. Far from disappearing with Algerian independence, these techniques traveled globally, shaping US counterinsurgency from Vietnam to Iraq.

This is not just a book about Algeria, but about why counterinsurgency keeps failing while remaining stubbornly influential, and what that legacy still means today.

🎧 In this episode, I explore Ray Acheson’s Abolishing State Violence and the radical clarity it brings to our present moment. From policing to prisons, surveillance to borders, war to capitalism, the book exposes how violence is embedded in the structures we are taught to trust. I walk through its core arguments, the melancholy that runs through them, and the hope found in the everyday work of abolition already taking shape around us. This episode is an invitation to imagine a world where safety is built through care, not coercion.

🎧 This episode explores the world revealed by Hyper-Zionism: Germany, the Nazi Past, and Israel, moving through the tension, fear, and quiet pressure shaping public life in Germany today. I delve into how Staatsräson, introduced as a state-defining obligation, has expanded into an atmosphere that influences speech, culture, and belonging. Through a mix of reflection and witness, I examine how remembrance narrowed into one sanctioned direction, how institutions act from dread rather than principle, and how entire communities navigate invisible lines. This conversation is ultimately about reclaiming breathing space, defending the universal meaning of “Never again,” and refusing to let the lessons of the past be used to restrict voices in the present.

🎧 This episode dives into Workers on the Road to January, a fierce, moving account of the strikes that shook Mahalla and set the stage for Egypt’s 2011 uprising. Through the voices of Wedad, Amal, Wael, Kamal, and thousands of workers who refused humiliation, the book reveals the true architects of dissent: people fighting on factory floors, chanting in cold dawn air, demanding dignity in a system designed to starve them. It’s a story of courage, weariness, betrayal, and unbreakable resolve—a reminder that revolutions don’t begin in headlines, but in the hands of those who keep a nation alive.

🎧 A close look at Gangs and Counter-Gangs, Frank Kitson’s 1960 account of Britain’s war against the Mau Mau and the origins of the “pseudo-gang” doctrine. The episode traces how tactics first tested in Kenya—and shaped by Kitson’s years on British Army training grounds in postwar Germany—became a template for modern counterinsurgency and the way states, including Egypt, confront dissent today.

🎧 This episode takes a close, unguarded look at Phoebe Greenwood’s Vulture, a novel that dismantles the myths surrounding war reporting with a precision only an insider could wield. Rather than glorifying the correspondent’s life, Greenwood lingers in its moral fog: the fixers who risk everything for someone else’s byline, the reporters who drift between cynicism and self-deception, and the heavy, unspoken complicity that hangs over every “objective” dispatch. What emerges is a story not about Gaza alone, but about the people who come to witness it, the industry built on their gaze, and the quiet wreckage left behind when the cameras are off. Greenwood reveals these truths with restraint, melancholy, and an honesty that cuts deeper than most nonfiction ever allows.