This episode explores how colonial states and nation-states have been mutually constructed through the deliberate politicization of religious or ethnic majorities at the expense of manufactured minorities. The discussion traces this destructive pattern from its American origins—where genocide and reservation systems created permanent native minorities—to its adoption by both Nazi Germany and Allied forces in Europe, and its contemporary manifestations from Israel to Sudan. The conversation challenges conventional approaches to addressing political violence, arguing that legal frameworks like those attempted at Nuremberg have inherent limitations and that true resolution requires political rather than criminal solutions.

Join host Sahar Aziz in conversation with Dr. Mahmood Mamdani, about his provocative new book “Neither Settler Nor Native—Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities” argues for delinking the nation from the state to ensure equal political rights for all residents, moving beyond permanent political identities of settler and native.

Biography

Mahmood Mamdani is the Herbert Lehman Professor of Government at Columbia University and former Executive Director of Makerere Institute of Social Research in Uganda. With a PhD from Harvard and an expertise spanning histories of Western imperialist projects, anti-colonialist movements, and decolonization, Dr. Mamdani has spent decades examining the intersection of politics and culture through comparative colonial studies, civil war and genocide in Africa, and the politics of knowledge production.

Recommended Reading

Mahmood Mamdani,Neither Settler Nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities(Harvard 2022)

Mahmood Mamdani,Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror(Bantam 2005)

#Israel #Palestine #HumanRights #Colonialism #Anticolonialism #SouthAfrica #Mamdani #Settler

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In this episode, Professor Sahar Aziz is in conversation with award winning journalist Isma’il Kuskush about the complex origins, multiple domestic and foreign actors, and human rights crisis of Sudan’s war. The ongoing power struggle between rival military elites is rooted in decades of militarization, failed democratic transition, and unresolved ethnic conflict. Its humanitarian consequences—mass displacement, famine risk, and widespread atrocities—have elevated it into one of the most severe human rights crises globally.

The current war in Sudan began in April 2023, when fighting erupted between two factions of the country’s security forces: the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF). The immediate trigger was a dispute over integrating the RSF into the national army as part of a planned transition to civilian rule after years of military dominance. A critical turning point occurred in 2019, when longtime dictator Omar al-Bashir was overthrown. A fragile civilian–military transition followed, but in October 2021, the SAF and RSF jointly staged a coup that derailed democratic reforms. Tensions between the two leaders then escalated into open conflict as both sought control over the state, economic resources (especially gold), and the future political system.

The devastating war in Sudan has produced what many international organizations describe as the world’s largest humanitarian crisis. Millions of civilians have been displaced, and basic infrastructure—healthcare, food distribution, and education—has collapsed in many regions.

Biography

Isma’il Kushkush is a Sudanese-American journalist who was based in Khartoum, Sudan, for eight years, where he contributed to The New York Times, CNN, Voice of America and Al Jazeera English. For two three-month periods in 2014 and again in 2015, he was acting bureau chief for The New York Times in East Africa based in Nairobi. He has covered political, economic, social and cultural stories from Sudan, South Sudan, Kenya, Ethiopia, Somalia, Burundi, Sweden and the United States. He has also worked as a fixer, translator and interpreter. Kushkush grew up in the United States, Sudan, Syria and Kuwait. He received a master of arts degree in journalism from Columbia Journalism School in New York with a focus on politics and global affairs. He is a fluent Arabic-speaker.

Recommended Readings

Isma’il Kushkush,Leaving Khartoum(The New York Review 2025)

Isma’il Kuskkush,Sudan’s Journalists Risk Everything to Cover a War the World Ignores(Neiman Reports 2026)

Isma’il Kushkush,Sudan’s Uprising, Bashir’s Fall, and My Father’s Passing(The New Yorker 2019)

#Sudan #HumanRights #Khartoum #CivilWar #UAE #Egypt

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African Islamic modernity is a complex and ongoing historical project—our guest’s scholarship illuminates the intricate entanglements between African racial identities, Islamic ways of living, and modernity as the dominant global framework for social, economic, and political organization. Using Senegal as a focal point, Professor Wendell Marsh explores how a society with a millennium of Islamic presence and over five centuries of integration into the global economy—shaped sequentially by the trans-Atlantic slave trade, colonization, and neoliberal structural adjustment—has consistently escaped both Africanist and Orientalist scholarly constructions.

Wendell Marsh's expertise in African-Arabic textuality and the intellectual history of Islam in Africa provides essential insight into how Islamic scholarly traditions in places like Senegal have produced sophisticated theological and political responses to colonial domination and global economic integration. His research on figures like Shaykh Musa Kamara demonstrates how African Muslim intellectuals developed complex theoretical frameworks that simultaneously engaged with global Islamic thought, resisted colonial epistemologies, and articulated distinctly African forms of Islamic modernity.

This scholarly approach reveals how African Islamic modernity represents not simply a reaction to Western modernity, but rather an alternative genealogy of modern thought that emerges from the intersection of Islamic intellectual traditions, African social structures, and the historical experience of slavery, colonialism, and contemporary global capitalism.

The episode draws on cutting-edge scholarship in Africana Studies that challenges conventional academic boundaries between African Studies, Islamic Studies, and colonial history to reveal how African Islamic societies have created unique pathways to modernity.

Biography

Wendell Marsh is an Associate Professor of African Humanities at Mohammed VI Polytechnic University in Ben Guérir, Morocco. He researches and teaches at the intersections of African and diasporic intellectual history, comparative literature, religious studies, and the politics of knowledge production. Professor Marsh’s scholarship foregrounds African contributions to global intellectual traditions—especially through Arabic-language sources—and examines how race, religion, and language shape the humanities and public discourse.

Recommended Readings

Wendell Marsh, Textual Life: Islam, Africa, and the Fate of the Humanities (Columbia University Press, 2025)

#Islam #Africa #IslamicModernity #Muslims #Humanities #Slavery #Colonialism

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