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The MERIP Podcast

The MERIP Podcast

De: James Ryan
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The MERIP Podcast features exclusive interviews with contributors to the Middle East Research and Information Project from the present and past about their work for MERIP, as well as audio from events we've conducted online and in-person that examine contemporary issues in the politics, economy, society and culture of the Middle East. Hosted by James Ryan, MERIP's Executive Director. Visit our website, www.merip.org, to read all of our work without paywalls.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

James Ryan Ciencia Política Mundial Política y Gobierno
Episodios
  • Episode 17: Niema Alhessen

    Episode 17: Niema Alhessen
    Mar 9 2026

    Today’s episode of the MERIP Podcast features an interview with Niema Alhessen, a Sudanese researcher based in Cairo who is focused on urban conflict and displacement. She is the author of “Burri Under Siege—How War Remade Everyday Life in a Sudanese Neighborhood” in our Winter 2025 issue of Middle East Report, “Reconstruction and Ruin.” Burri, a neighborhood in central Khartoum that houses key political and military institutions, was under siege by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) from the beginning of its war with the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) in April 2023 until the SAF regained control of the city in March 2025. Alhessen spoke with residents of Burri about living in their neighborhood during the siege, how they sustained life through makeshift institutions and mutual aid and negotiated with both the RSF and SAF in order to procure aid. Alhessen’s article also delves into the deeper colonial history of Khartoum’s urban fabric, detailing how the militarization of Khartoum’s streets has its roots in the colonization of Sudan under the Anglo-Egyptian condominium in the late nineteenth century.


    For this episode, MERIP’s Executive Director James Ryan was joined by co-host Deen Sharp, an LSE Fellow in Human Geography in the department of geography and environment at the London School of Economics, a member of MERIP’s editorial committee and an editor on the issue “Reconstruction and Ruin.”


    This interview was recorded on March 4, 2026


    Niema Alhessen, “Burri Under Siege–How War Remade Everyday Life in a Sudanese Neighborhood” Middle East Report 317 (Winter 2025). https://www.merip.org/2026/02/burri-under-siege-how-war-remade-everyday-life-in-a-sudanese-neighborhood/



    Further reading:


    Ali Al-Arash, “Bread, Books, and Bombs: Burri’s Spirit of Resistance, Knowledge, and Solidarity,” ATAR Network 28 (May 19, 2025). https://atarnetwork.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/ATAR-English-Issue-28-Bread-books-and-bombs-Burri-s-spirit-of-resistance-knowledge-and-solidarity.pdf


    Marina D’Errico, “The Urban Fabric Between Tradition and Modernity (1885–1956): Omdurman, Khartoum, and the British Master Plan of 1910” in Vezzadini, Seri-Hersch, Revilla, Poussier & Abdul Jalil (Eds.), Ordinary Sudan, 1504–2019: From Social History to Politics from Below (Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 2023). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110719611-011


    Khartoum podcast by Studio Urban.


    Khalid Mustafa Medani, “The Struggle for Sudan” Middle East Report 310 (Spring 2024). https://www.merip.org/the-struggle-for-sudan/

    The MERIP Podcast features exclusive interviews with contributors to the Middle East Research and Information Project from the present and past about their work for MERIP, as well as audio from events we've conducted online and in-person that examine contemporary issues in the politics, economy, society and culture of the Middle East. Hosted by James Ryan, MERIP's Executive Director. Visit our website, www.merip.org, to read all of our work without paywalls.

    Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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    39 m
  • Episode 16: Iman Ali

    Episode 16: Iman Ali
    Feb 26 2026
    In today’s episode Iman Ali talks about her recently published article, “Repair and Ongoing Ruination—Rebuilding the Dahiyeh Once More,” which appeared in our Winter 2025 issue, “Reconstruction and Ruin.” Iman Ali, a doctoral candidate in anthropology at Cornell University, has been conducting fieldwork in Lebanon to investigate the impacts of Israel’s war in the fall of 2024 and the ongoing,almost daily, Israeli drone and missile attacks since the November 2024 ceasefire agreement. Her article closely examines the immense material and political challenges faced by Lebanon’s Shi’i community in the last year and a half. She also compares the current struggles to rebuild Beirut’s southern district of Dahiyeh with the vastly different political, funding and leadership landscape following the 2006 war between Hizballah and Israel. After that 2006 campaign, Hizballah was successful in rebuilding the neighborhoods of the Dahiyeh with the aid of funding from several regional and global partners, and under the leadership of Hizballah’s secretary general Hassan Nasrallah. Today, the challenge of rebuilding could not be more different – the financing is not forthcoming, Hizballah’s leadership is decimated and the spectre of continued or renewed Israeli aggression is pervasive. For this conversation, MERIP’s executive director James Ryan was joined by Najib Hourani, a member of the editorial team for “Reconstruction and Ruin,” as cohost. Hourani is an associate professor of anthropology and global urban studies at Michigan State University and now an emeritus member of MERIP’s editorial committee. We spoke with Iman Ali about her piece, the longer history of the Dahiyeh and the intense burden that resistance to Israeli aggression has placed on Lebanon’s Shi’i communities. This episode was recorded on February 25, 2026.Support MERIP by making a donation: www.merip.org/donate Read Iman Ali’s piece here: Iman Ali, “Repair and Ongoing Ruination – Rebuilding the Dahiyeh Once More” Middle East Report 317, Reconstruction and Ruin Winter 2025 https://www.merip.org/2026/02/repair-amid-ongoing-ruination-rebuilding-dahiyeh-once-more/ Further Reading:Hiba Bou Akar, “Urban Interventions for the Wars Yet to Come” https://www.merip.org/2019/07/urban-interventions-for-the-wars-yet-to-come/ Tamara Chalabi, The Shi ‘is of Jabal ‘Amil and the New Lebanon: Community and Nation-State, 1918–1943 Springer, 2006 https://link.springer.com/book/10.1057/9781403982940 Lara Deeb, An enchanted modern: Gender and public piety in Shi'i Lebanon Princeton University Press, 2006 https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691124216/an-enchanted-modern?srsltid=AfmBOoqcTpqKMA4-KFqziKFdTLlEygTlQrSB8axSVs0hrFN0MaUORMZi Mona Fawaz "Hezbollah as urban planner? Questions to and from planning theory" Planning Theory 8.4 (2009): 323-334 https://www.jstor.org/stable/26165922 Mona Harb and Lara Deeb. "Culture as history and landscape: Hizballah’s efforts to shape an Islamic milieu in Lebanon" Arab Studies Journal 19.1 (2011): 12-45 https://www.jstor.org/stable/23265810 Najib B. Hourani "People or profit? Two post-conflict reconstructions in Beirut" Human Organization 74.2 (2015): 174-184 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.17730/0018-7259-74.2.174 Munira Khayyat "Dispatch from South Lebanon—Life as Resistance at the End of the World." Middle East Report 313 (Winter 2024) https://www.merip.org/2025/01/dispatch-from-south-lebanon/ Salim Nasr, “The Roots of the Shi’i Movement” June 24, 1985 https://www.merip.org/1985/06/roots-of-the-shii-movement/Salim Nasr, “Backdrop to Civil War: The Crisis of Lebanese Capitalism” Middle East Report No. 73 Winter 1978 https://www.jstor.org/stable/3012262 The MERIP Podcast features exclusive interviews with contributors to the Middle East Research and Information Project from the present and past about their work for MERIP, as well as audio from events we've conducted online and in-person that examine contemporary issues in the politics, economy, society and culture of the Middle East. Hosted by James Ryan, MERIP's Executive Director. Visit our website, www.merip.org, to read all of our work without paywalls. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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    59 m
  • Episode 15: In the Archive with Brahim El Guabli

    Episode 15: In the Archive with Brahim El Guabli
    Feb 19 2026
    On this episode of our In the Archive series, MERIP’s Executive Director, James Ryan, speaks with Brahim El Guabli about his essay, “The Sub-Saharan Turn in Moroccan Literature,” which appeared in the Spring 2021 issue of Middle East Report, “Maghreb from the Margins.” El Guabli speaks about how migration from sub-Saharan Africa reshaped Moroccan politics and identity over the course of the last 30 years and how he read those changes through recent Moroccan novels. We discussed how the piece has been received and how its ideas contributed to El Guabli’s development of the concept “saharanism”—the subject of his newly published book, Desert Imaginations: A History of Saharanism and Its Radical Consequences. You can check out our earlier In the Archive segment, with Beshara Doumani here: https://www.merip.org/2025/11/the-merip-podcast-episode-11-in-the-archive-with-beshara-doumani/ MERIP is accepting pitches for our summer issue on visual art and cultural production in the Middle East and North Africa until February 23rd for more information click here: https://www.merip.org/2026/02/call-for-pitches-visual-art-cultural-production-in-the-middle-east-and-north-africa/ Brahim El Guabli is an associate professor of comparative thought and literature at Johns Hopkins University. Further Reading: Abdel Rahman Munif, Cities of Salt ( New York: Vintage, 1989) https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/118591/cities-of-salt-by-abdelrahman-munif/ Brahim El Guabli, “The Sub-Saharan Turn in Moroccan Literature” Middle East Report Issue 298 Spring 2021 https://www.merip.org/2021/04/the-sub-saharan-african-turn-in-moroccan-literature-2/Brahim El Guabli, Desert Imaginations: A History of Saharanism and Its Radical Consequences (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2025) https://www.ucpress.edu/books/desert-imaginations/paper Brahim El Guabli, “Forgettable Black and Amazigh Bodies: Boujemâa Hebaz and the Moroccan Racial Politics of Amnesia” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 44(2) 2024: 303-316 https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201X-11233072 Brahim El Guabli, “The Idea of Tamazgha: Current Articulations and Scholarly Potential” Tamazgha Studies Journal Vol 1. Issue 1. Fall 2023, 7-22 https://www.tamazghastudiesjournal.org/articles-fall2023-issue-01-article02 Ghislaine Lydon On Trans-Saharan Trails: Islamic Law, Trade Networks and Cross-Cultural Exchange in Nineteenth Century Western Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009) https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/on-transsaharan-trails/B6AB08C0940DBAF3370045EA702E84D1 Shamil Jeppie, Writing Timbuktu: The Book in West African History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2026) https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691273853/writing-timbuktu?srsltid=AfmBOorqYdHD-ksEASj0rR-5TBFwqVQPM-Rj-sV-o5pO2dHeMGaTdRaDThe MERIP Podcast features exclusive interviews with contributors to the Middle East Research and Information Project from the present and past about their work for MERIP, as well as audio from events we've conducted online and in-person that examine contemporary issues in the politics, economy, society and culture of the Middle East. Hosted by James Ryan, MERIP's Executive Director. Visit our website, www.merip.org, to read all of our work without paywalls. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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    42 m
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