🌻 Ukraine Special: 3. The threads that bind us from Syria to Ukraine

This episode is a multilingual online encounter, part of the Post-Extractive Futures series, co-produced by War on Want, Tipping Point UK, JunteGente, and The Fire These Times project. I was the moderator.

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Guests: Yassin al Haj Saleh, who will be speaking in English, is a Syrian writer and former political prisoner. He is author of several books on Syria, prison, contemporary Islam, intellectual responsibility, and experiences of the atrocious. He is the husband of Samira al Khalil, who was abducted by an armed Islamist group in Douma in December 2013. He now lives in Berlin.

Wafa Mustafa, who will also be speaking in English, is a Syrian activist, a journalist, a survivor of detention. Mustafa comes from Masyaf, a city in the Hama governorate in western Syria. She left the country on 9 July 2013, exactly a week after her father was forcibly disappeared by the regime in Damascus. In her advocacy, Mustafa covers the impact of detention on young girls, women, and families.

Yuliya Yurchenko, who will also be speaking in English, is a senior lecturer in political economy at the department of economics and international business and a researcher at the political economy, governance, finance, and accountability institute at the University of Greenwich, UK. She is the author of Ukraine and the Empire of Capital, which was published by Pluto Press in 2017. She researches state, capital, and society relations as well as public services as a commons with a regional focus on Europe and Ukraine.

Taras Bilous, who will be speaking in Ukrainian, is a Ukrainian historian and an activist of the Social Movement Organization. As an editor of for Commons, a journal of social critique, he covers the topics of war and nationalism. He has recently written quite a lot of articles, including “A Letter to the Western Left from Kiev” as well as “The Left in the West Must Rethink.”

Transcription and YouTube video available on the website: https://thefirethisti.me/2022/04/21/podcast-the-threads-that-bind-us-from-syria-to-ukraine/