SEASON 8: Horrors & Hope

This week, in partnership with Global Integrity, we are joined by Dr. Jackie Harvey of Northumbria University and Dr. Pallavi Roy of SOAS University of London to discuss the structures of political power in Nigeria and the underlying systems of corruption that culminated in the protests of the #EndSARS movement. This episode is the first in a two-part series focusing on human rights abuses in Nigeria and the protests fighting to #EndSARS and end police brutality.

In the second episode of Season 5, we are joined by Dan Sullivan, the senior advocate for human rights at Refugees International, and Tun Khin, President of the Burmese Rohingya Organisation UK to discuss the situation of the persecuted Rohingya minority in the context of Myanmar’s second general election, an event overshadowed by electoral events in the United States.

In the first episode of Season 5, our new team of panellists sets the stage for a broader discussion of human rights under threat. Through their experience with human rights issues in NGO work, academia as well as their personal lives, they problematise some aspects of human rights while highlighting its immense potential for positive change. This season, the theme of the podcast is “In the Firing Line”, where we will invite all of those at the forefront of change within the human rights movement to share their experiences and provide a dialogue around the very principles of human rights itself.

In this episode, we focus on giving you the history of the continuous injustices faced by black individuals at the hands of the police, from the ending of slavery, to the Jim Crow laws and segregation, to the war on drugs and today’s for-profit prisons and the disproportionate number of black people in them. There’s a lot to cover in this episode and we will try to give you as concise and clear of an explanation as possible, but the learning does not stop and should not stop here. We highly encourage you to please check out the resources that we have listed on our website, we include books as well as documentaries and social media accounts you can follow for more information.

This episode discusses the Unist’ot’en campaign to protect their land and preserve it for future generations. In 2010, the Unist’ot’en began constructing a cabin within their territory in the exact place where three companies, TC Energy, Enbridge, and Pacific Trails, intended to build pipelines. Their campaign has faced hostility and violence, including from the government of Canada, and its national police force, the RCMP. Most recently, TC Energy’s Coastal GasLink project was backed by the RCMP in an attempt to gain access to the Unist’ot’en camp. To the dismay of Coastal GasLink and Canada’s colonial government, the camp has also received immense support both locally and internationally, with solidarity blockades of Canada’s railroad threatening to shut Canada down. 

In December, a six year old British girl buys cheap Christmas cards from Tesco for her friends. Suddenly, she turns to her dad and says: “Daddy, someone has already written in this one”. What he finds is a cry for help from a Chinese prisoner forced to manufacture the cards. In this episode we talk to Peter Humphrey, who was himself wrongly incarnated in the Shanghai prison where the Christmas card was manufactured. This episode touches on the conditions of forced labour in Chinese prisons, corporate social responsibility and the steps consumers can take to stop such grave human rights violations from happening. 

In this episode we are joined by Jacinta Gonzales, a Senior Campaign Organizer with Mijente, to discuss her current activism against hostile environments in the US. After bringing to the forefront the racial processes underpinning the Ellis Island legacy, our panellists and guest discuss the intersection of technology and state infrastructure in targeting and detaining immigrants at the US border. 

In this episode we interview Maya Goodfellow, author of ‘Hostile Environments: How Immigrants became Scapegoats’ for the first part of our series on about the racialization of immigration. In this enlightening and extremely topical episode, we discuss security security discourses of the ‘scary’ migrant, racial capitalism and the racialization of citizenship.