🎧 In this episode, I lay out the core argument of my upcoming book Counter-Revolution in Egypt: Sisi’s New Republic, out soon with Verso. This is not a story about a failed revolution or cultural fatalism. It is about how repression was rebuilt after 2011 as a coordinated, bureaucratic system, where security agencies stopped competing and started operating as a cartel.

I explain how Egypt’s so-called New Republic represents a shift in governing logic: no social contract, no persuasion, just permanent mobilization against ever-changing internal enemies. Drawing on years of research, the episode walks through how repression became structural rather than reactive, why violence today is so procedural and banal, and how foreign allies helped normalize this model in the name of stability. Understanding how this system actually works is not an academic exercise. It is a political necessity.

🎧 This episode is a reading and reflection on Abolish Criminology, edited by Viviane Saleh-Hanna, Jason M. Williams, and Michael J. Coyle, through the lens of a police case that never left me.

In 1996, a father was tortured into confessing to killing his missing daughter, only for the child to later reappear alive. The case collapsed, but the system did not. Using that experience as a point of entry, I argue that criminology is not a neutral discipline studying crime, but an intellectual machinery that helps produce it, launder coercion into expertise, and render truth optional.

This is not a conversation about reform, better training, or oversight. It is about why the categories of crime and justice themselves do political work, and why abolishing criminology is necessary if we are serious about ending carceral violence.

🎧 This episode reflects on Avi Shlaim’s Genocide in Gaza, a book written in the midst of ongoing devastation rather than after its dust has settled. It examines Shlaim’s argument that Gaza should be understood not as a recurring humanitarian emergency but as the product of a long-standing political logic rooted in siege, domination, and settler colonial control. Drawing on history, international law, and the lived realities of occupation, the episode explores how violence is normalised, how legal language is used to manufacture impunity, and why naming what is happening matters before denial hardens into record.