On today’s program we have another installment of our MERIP Roundtable, where MERIP’s executive director, James Ryan is joined by past and present members of our editorial committee, along with recent contributors, to discuss current events. This edition focuses on the 2026 World Cup, now in its final stages. Like most iterations of the tournament, this year’s has provided a drama-filled month both on and off the pitch. Thanks to the expanded field of participation, ten nations from the Middle East and North Africa were represented, with Morocco following its exciting 2022 performance in Qatar with another deep run. Our guests discuss what participation has meant for several countries in the region, and what their prospects might be going forward. They also touch on the colonial and diasporic dynamics that have been central to the dominance of the traditional powerhouses–including the final four teams of France, Spain, Argentina and England. And of course, there are the implications of this World Cup being hosted by the United States, along with Mexico and Canada, at a time when the United States and Israel are engaged in a disastrous war on Iran that has entangled its allies in the region as well as Lebanon and Yemen.

Joining James Ryan for this conversation were Sabiha Allouche, a member of MERIP’s editorial committee and a senior lecturer in politics at the University of Exeter’s Institute for Arab and Islamic Studies, Paul Silverstein, the chair of MERIP’s board of directors and professor of anthropology at Reed College, and Nabil al-Tikriti, a former member of MERIP’s editorial committee, long-time contributor and professor of history at the University of Mary Washington.

Further Reading:

Middle East Report Issue 304, Football–Politics and Passion, Fall 2022

Clive Chijioke Nwonka and Matthew Harle eds., Black Arsenal: Club, Culture, Identity (London, W&N 2025)

John McManus, Welcome to Hell? In Search of the Real Turkish Football (London, W&N 2019)

Fatou Diome, In the Belly of the Atlantic (London, Serpent’s Tail 2008)

Mickaël Correia, A People’s History of Football (London, Pluto Press 2023)

Simon Kuper, World Cup Fever: A Soccer Journey in Nine Tournaments (New York, Simon and Schuster 2026)

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.

On today’s program, we have a special release of the audio from the second installment of our summer event series “Iran in Context,” featuring conversations with scholars in the field about the deeper dynamics behind the political and military convulsions in Iran over the last year. The latest installment, available here, is on the “Politics and Counter Politics in Contemporary Iran” and includes three recent MERIP contributors, Naghmeh Sohrabi, the Charles (Corky) Goodman chair of Middle East History and Director of the Crown Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis University, Mohammad Ali Kadivar, associate professor of sociology and international studies at Boston College and Paniz Musawi Natanzi, a research associate at the University of Bern and affiliate scholar of the South Asia Center at the University of Pennsylvania. The discussion was co-moderated by James Ryan, MERIP’s executive director and Rosanna Tufaro, a Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at La Sapienza University in Rome and a member of the precarity working group at SeSaMO. Their conversation explores the ways Iranian politics have been misunderstood and misrepresented outside of Iran, the major factors that have driven political change in the country over the last few decades and some thoughts on what lies ahead for a country that is clearly being reshaped in important ways. The series, which takes place on zoom, is co-produced by BRISMES (the British Society for Middle East Studies) and SeSaMO (the Italian Society for Middle East Studies).

Further Reading:

Mohammad Ali Kadivar, “Rethinking Political Change in Iran From Protest to War” Current Analysis, MERIP June 3, 2026

Paniz Musawi Natanzi, “Courts of Exclusion–Working Class Masculinity and Anti-Afghan Racism in Iran” Middle East Report Issue 314, June 17, 2025 https://www.merip.org/2025/06/banned-from-the-game-working-class-masculinity-and-anti-afghan-racism-in-iran/

Daniel Tavana, Kevin Harris, Gary Fong and Amir Farmanesh, “Who Overreports? Regime Support and Preference Falsification in Iran” (article preprint) June 15, 2026

Naghmeh Sohrabi, Toby Craig Jones, Kaveh Ehsani and James Ryan, “The MERIP Podcast: The MERIP Roundtable–On the Iran War Part II” Episode 19, March 19, 2026

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.

Today’s episode of the MERIP Podcast is an audio recording from the first event in our Iran in Context series. This series is co-produced by MERIP, BRISMES, the British Society for Middle East Studies, and SeSaMO, the Italian Society for Middle East Studies. Each event features conversations with scholars about the deeper context behind the political and military convulsions in Iran over the last year.

For the first installment, we took up the topic of gender and revolution in conversation with Manijeh Moradian, assistant professor of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College and author of the book, This Flame Within: Iranian Revolutionaries in the United States (Duke University Press, 2022), and Nazanin Shahrokni, associate professor of International Studies at Simon Fraser University and author of the book, Women in Place: The Politics of Gender Segregation in Iran (University of California Press, 2020).

This conversation was recorded on June 18, 2026.

Further Reading:

Manijeh Moradian, This Flame Within Iranian Revolutionaries in the United States (Duke University Press, 2022)

Manijeh Moradian, "Feminist Uprising in Iran and the Politics of Solidarity," Meridians (April 2026)

Manijeh Moradian "Decolonial Diasporas: Iranian Feminist Solidarity in Global Context" Iranian Studies. (October 2025)

Manijeh Moradian, "Embodying Revolution: Situating Iran within Transnational Feminist Solidarities," Radical History Review (January 2024)

Feminists for Jina

Nazanin Shahrokni, Women in Place: The Politics of Gender Segregation in Iran (University of California Press 2020)

Nazanin Shahrokni, “Who Speaks for Iran?–and From Where? Geopolitics, Representation and Solidarity,” SPECTRE: A Marxist Journal, March 2, 2026

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.