Race and Rights Podcast

How has international law been strategically deployed to shape the Palestinian struggle for freedom across a century-long arc, from the Balfour Declaration in 1917 to present-day wars in Gaza.  Join host Sahar Aziz in conversation with Noura Erakat about the promise and risk of international law in the pursuit of Palestinian freedom and the broader relationship between law and liberation. 

Our discussion examines the concept of "legal work"—the deliberate efforts by powerful actors to bend legal doctrine to their objectives—and how this has transformed international law to advance certain interests over others. We delve into the "sovere...

In this episode, Professor Vernellia Randall presents a groundbreaking analysis of how centuries of systemic racism have created and perpetuated devastating health disparities within African American communities. Drawing from extensive research, she traces the direct lineage from the "slave health deficit" established during slavery through Jim Crow segregation to today's persistent health inequalities, revealing how African Americans continue to experience disproportionately higher rates of disease, infant mortality, and premature death. Her work demonstrates that these disparities are not coincidental but represent the ongoing legacy of institutionalized racism that has never been adequately addressed through legal or policy interventions. 

The complex history of slavery within Islamic legal traditions spans from pre-Islamic times through the nineteenth century, revealing how religious law intersected with economic and social systems that perpetuated human bondage across centuries and cultures. This comprehensive examination of Islamic jurisprudence demonstrates how Western abolitionist efforts, while well-intentioned, ultimately failed to address the theological and legal foundations that allowed slavery to persist within Muslim societies, rendering the notion of abolition nothing more than a cruel illusion. 

Join host Sahar Aziz and Professor Bernard Freamon as they explore the groundbreaking legal history detailed in his book "Possessed by t...

Opportunity hoarding occurs when advantaged groups secure and monopolize valuable resources—such as high-quality education, exclusive networks, or prime housing—to benefit their own members while restricting access for others. This behavior creates and sustains categorical inequality, often manifesting through exclusionary zoning, preferential hiring, or hoarding educational opportunities. 

Advantage groups create exclusive networks, secure resources, and develop practices (like exclusionary zoning or elite school networks) that protect their advantages.  Such opportunity hoarding contributes significantly to the widening gap between high- and low-opportunity neighborhoods and schools.

Join host Professor Sahar Aziz in conversation with Professor Sheryll Cashin...

On February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel coordinated an unprovoked military attack on the sovereign state of Iran without any credible evidence of an imminent threat posed by Iran or a United Nations Security Council Resolution. On that first day of the war, the Israelis killed Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and other senior Iranian officials, immediately transforming their attacks into a regional war.  Iran invoked its right to self-defense under international law by launching missiles, drones and proxy attacks against U.S. and Israeli targets in the Persian Gulf and in Israel.  

On March 2, 2026, Hezb...

Join host Professor Sahar Aziz in her conversation with Professor Maryam Jamshidi about the political and legal implications of Israel and the United States' unprovoked military attacks against Iran on February 28, 2026.

As Israeli Benjamin Netanyahu publicly admitted, the Israeli government has been preparing for a war to topple the Iranian regime for over 30 years. Knowing they do not possess sufficient military capacity to do it alone, Israel unsuccessfully attempted to persuade the United States to start a war of aggression against Iran under the Bush, Obama and Biden administrations. 

The reasons for restraint by past U...

There is a dire need for an interdisciplinary examination of the human cost of occupation through the lens of daily Palestinian experience in the West Bank. This episode explores the critically acclaimed work of Nathan Thrall, whose immersive narrative provides rare insight into the lived reality of Palestinians navigating Israeli systems of control that define life under occupation. There are prefixed structural inequalities embedded in the segregated apartheid landscape of Jerusalem and the West Bank that Palestinians including those within the diaspora must face daily—displacement from ancestral lands, violence from settlers, and systematic discrimination. Thrall's Pulitzer Prize-winning book ex...

A central paradox has plagued and continues to plague the American right to vote: the American republic has always conditioned participation in the democratic process on an antidemocratic ideology of worthiness needed to exercise the rights of citizenship. This reality has shaped debates around the right to vote in the past and in the present and has made it more difficult for the law to embrace the rhetoric of a universal right to vote—that is, a right for all citizens to participate freely and fairly. 

This is the defining dilemma of voting rights in American history. Ind...

In today’s episode, guest host Nermin Allam, director of Women’s and Gender Studies and associate professor of political science at Rutgers University – Newark, speaks with Rusha Latif, author of Tahrir’s Youth: Leaders of a Leaderless Revolution, to reflect on remembering and commemorating the January 25th uprising.

The January 25th uprising, which led to the ousting of former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in 2011, remains one of the most consequential moments in Egypt’s modern political history. The uprising restructured political imagination, reordered lives, and briefly redefined what felt possible.

Every year, January 25th asks somet...

The true test of a democracy is the extent to which civil rights in law are enforced in practice for the most vulnerable groups in society. As members of Congress demanded mass arrest and expulsion of college students exercising their free speech right to dissent against U.S. foreign policy in Gaza and the West Bank, the racial fault lines in American democracy were yet again laid bare.

Similarly, university presidents are buckling to external political pressure to violate academic freedom of Muslim and Arab faculty targeted by external anti-Muslim and pro-Israeli groups and politicians. In...

In Part II of this two-part series, guest host Esaa Mohammad Sabti Samarah, PhD, LMSW reunites with Dr. Siham Elkassem, Dr. Bryn King, Dr. Nuha Dwaikat-Shaer, and doctoral candidate Amilah Baksh to move beyond naming harm and toward a deeper examination of responsibility. This episode turns a critical lens on how the social work profession responds, or fails to respond, to anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab, and anti-Muslim racisms, with particular attention to the ways calls for “neutrality” shape research, teaching, and professional practice.

The conversation interrogates neutrality as it appears in social work academia, especially in relation to empiricism and...

In this first episode of a two-part series, guest host Esaa Mohammad Sabti Samarah, PhD, LMSW leads a powerful conversation examining how anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab, and anti-Muslim racisms function as distinct yet interconnected systems of harm. Together with scholars and practitioners Dr. Siham Elkassem, Dr. Bryn King, Dr. Nuha Dwaikat-Shaer, and Doctoral Candidate Amilah Baksh, the discussion examines how these forms of racism operate across structural, institutional, and interpersonal levels, and how they are sustained through histories of colonialism, racialization, and political violence.

The episode critically interrogates the social work profession’s response to these realities, confronting the ga...

There has been an alarming surge of anti-Muslim sentiment across the European continent. As Islamophobia continues to gain momentum throughout Europe—home to tens of millions of Muslim citizens—Professor Hafez offers listeners a comprehensive analysis of this troubling phenomenon. His work examines the multifaceted causes of this rise in Muslim prejudice, from historical legacies and media representations to contemporary political movements. 

Join us as Professor Hafez delves deeper into the divisive effects of Islamophobia on both Muslim and non-Muslim communities across Europe. He explores how this prejudice manifests in various spheres—from institutional discrimination and policy decisio...

In this episode, we welcome Professor Jonathan Hafetz for an insightful discussion on the complex legal challenges involved in prosecuting individuals accused of mass crimes. Our conversation traces the development of international justice mechanisms from the foundational Nuremberg trials through to contemporary approaches in the age of global terrorism.

Professor Hafetz examines how nations have attempted to hold perpetrators accountable while maintaining commitment to fair trial principles - a tension that continues to define international criminal law. The discussion explores the significant impact of the U.S. War on Terrorism on legal frameworks and its disproportionate effects...

There is a critical need for a comprehensive examination of the historical forces that have shaped the Palestinian-Israeli conflict from its colonial origins to the present day. Professor Joseph Massad has meticulously analyzed Western imperial involvement in Palestine, tracing the pivotal events that preceded and followed Israel's establishment. European colonial ambitions and policies have created the foundation for ongoing tensions in the region, demonstrating historical patterns of Western imperial expansion. Massad's perspective reveals the often-overlooked continuities between historical colonial projects and contemporary geopolitical realities, offering listeners a framework that challenges conventional narratives about the Middle East. A deep appreciation...

"Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine" examines the profound concept of sumud—psychological resilience and defiance—within the context of Palestinian life under occupation and settler colonialism. This episode explores psychoanalytic frameworks that illuminate the complex psychological expressions of both individual and collective endurance in circumstances of ongoing trauma and oppression. Clinical case studies reveal the sophisticated ways Palestinian mental health practitioners and communities navigate lives marked by systematic violence while actively resisting the narrative of victimhood. Moving beyond conventional human rights discourse, we will uncover how psychological resistance manifests as a form of political and existential assertion, offe...

Islamophobia functions as a transnational political strategy weaponized by both democratic and authoritarian regimes worldwide. The American War on Terror has served as a crucial catalyst, amplifying and connecting anti-Muslim campaigns across continents—from Europe and Asia to the Middle East and beyond. There are striking parallels between seemingly disparate anti-Muslim policies in different countries, exposing how these measures share common ideological foundations despite emerging from vastly different political systems. This comprehensive global perspective shifts understanding of Islamophobia from isolated incidents to a coordinated, worldwide phenomenon with profound implications for international relations, human rights, and Muslim communities.

Th...

Muhammad Ali is widely recognized as one of the greatest athletes of all-time and one of the most important figures of the 20th century. In addition to his long and celebrated career as a boxer and three-time heavyweight champion of the world, Ali changed the conversation about race, religion, and politics in America. Ali’s refusal to be inducted into the U.S. military during the Vietnam War on religious grounds—a profound act of resistance that resulted not only in Ali’s three-plus-year exile from professional boxing, but also a criminal conviction and five year-prison sentence that Ali almost...

In this episode, we speak with award-winning investigative journalist Azad Essa about his research on the evolving relationship between India and Israel. Our conversation explores the historical development and contemporary significance of this alliance, particularly in light of recent events in Gaza.

Essa discusses how, despite growing grassroots pressure for India to implement an arms embargo against Israel, the Indian government has instead strengthened its military and financial ties with Israel. The discussion examines how the Hindutva political movement has played a significant role in supporting and expanding this partnership.

Throughout the conversation, our guest...

In this episode, Sahar Aziz is in dicussion with Dr. Audrey Truschke and Dr. Dheepa Sundaram about the new groundbreaking report published by CSRR entitled Hindutva in America: A Threat to Equality and Religious Pluralism, which is available for download at csrr.rutgers.edu

Audrey Truschke is a Professor of History and Director of Asian Studies at Rutgers University-Newark.  She is the author of numerous books about India published by Columbia University Press, Stanford University Press and Princeton University Press.  She just released her fourth book with entitled India: 5,000 Years of History on the Subcontinent.

In this episode, Professors Nathan J. Brown and Shibley Telhami, leading experts on the region and U.S. foreign policy toward Israel, offer a thoughtful examination of the current situation in Israel-Palestine. Our guests provide nuanced analysis of how decades of unsuccessful peace negotiations have transformed the political landscape.

The conversation explores the increasingly apparent "one state reality" that exists across territories under Israeli control, challenging traditional diplomatic frameworks that have long focused on a two-state solution. Dr. Brown and Professor Telhami discuss how this reality necessitates reconsidering fundamental concepts of statehood, sovereignty, and national identity that...

In this episode, regional experts of the Middle East share their knowledge about Syria's healthcare system and how it has been affected by years of conflict. 

Based on research from the book "Everybody's War: Politics of Aid in the Syria Crisis," (published by Oxford University Press), our guests provide thoughtful analysis of several important issues:

The discussion examines the practical and ethical challenges facing healthcare w...

Host Sahar Aziz is in conversation with scholar and organizer Dr. Maha Hilal as she unpacks two decades of the War on Terror and its devastating impact on Muslim communities. This eye-opening episode, based on Dr. Hilal's book Innocent Until Proven Muslim: Islamophobia, the War on Terror, and the Muslim Experience Since 9/11, explores how government narratives have been weaponized to build an extensive apparatus of state violence rooted in Islamophobia.

Dr. Hilal offers unique insights into: (1) the evolution of counter-terrorism laws and policies (2) how Muslim Americans have internalized systemic oppression and (3) the complex role prominent Muslim American...

Sahar Aziz speaks with Josh Paul about the law, politics, and policies surrounding the United States decades long military aid to Israel and specifically how such aid makes the U.S. complicit in Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza since October 2023. 

Josh Paul resigned from the State Department due to his disagreement with the Biden Administration’s decision to rush lethal military assistance to Israel in the context of its war on Gaza. He had previously spent over 11 years working as a Director in the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs, which is responsible for U.S. defense diplomacy, secur...

Dr. Audrey Truschke and Professor Ivan Kalmar analyze the alarming global surge in Islamophobic violence and discriminatory policies, particularly in Eastern Europe and South Asia.  

Our guests explore how economic and political insecurities have fueled dangerous scapegoating of Muslim citizens and refugees, transforming vulnerable religious minorities into targets of state-sanctioned persecution. This thought-provoking episode examines the human cost of populist rhetoric and offers critical insights into one of today's most pressing human rights issues: the systematic marginalization of Muslim communities across national borders. 

Listen to the conversation on the intersection of religious identity, nationalism, and th...

Prisons are a microcosm of how carceral apartheid operates as a larger governing strategy to decimate political targets and foster deceit, disinformation, and division in society. White supremacy within the institutional conditions in US prisons produces a power dynamic of racist intent in the prison system that culminates in what Professor Brittany Friedman terms carceral apartheid. 

Host Sahar Aziz discusses the many shocking discoveries that Friedman finds from the research for her book Carceral Apartheid: How Lies and White Supremacists Run Our Prison published in 2025. Beginning in the 1950s, California prison officials declared war on imprisoned Black p...

In January of 2025, the human rights organization, Democracy in the Arab World Now (DAWN), made a formal request with the International Criminal Court (ICC) to investigate former U.S. officials President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin for their accessorial roles in aiding and abetting, as well as intentionally contributing to, Israeli war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza.

With the support of ICC-registered lawyers and other war crimes experts, the submission details a pattern of deliberate and purposeful decisions by these officials to provide military, political, and public...

In the Global South, the possibility of a post-imperial reality self-determined by former subjects of the empire has been undermined by the dominant Western narrative that centers “humanitarian initiatives, politics of counterterrorism, and migration control”. Host Sahar Aziz will speak with expert, advocate and Law Professor Dr. Asli U. Bali to deconstruct the mainstream narrative that portrays the international system and its dominant actors as benevolent agents of humanitarianism in regions like Libya. 

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Autonomy and self-determination for all individuals cannot be realized and sustained unless true within every person. Enslavement and dehumanization remain true of citizens of imperial nations so long as they remain true for colonized peoples. This week’s episode explores the contradictions between stated commitments to human rights and actions in Western and post-colonial societies. Host Sahar Aziz addresses these issues with Emory University School of Law Professor Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na'im.

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This episode of the Race and Rights podcast features Professor Sherene Razack discuss how racialized Muslim bodies and gender are constructed by global white supremacy that produces and sustains networks, affinities and ideas in the so-called Global War on Terror. 

Sherene Razack is a Distinguished Professor and the Penny Kanner Endowed Chair in Women’s Studies at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) and author of the Nothing Has to Make Sense: Upholding White Supremacy through Anti-Muslim Racism (University of Minnesota 2022).

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Syria's complex history and politics led to the overthrow of Bashar Al Assad on December 8, 2024 – as unexpected as the Arab Spring revolutions that gripped the Middle East thirteen years earlier.   Located at the center of regional competition, the nation of Syria will continue to experience foreign intervention from its neighbors, as well as the United States.  Meanwhile, the millions of Syrian refugees outside the country are gradually returning to rebuild their homeland.  

Host Sahar Aziz speaks with Professor Bassam Haddad about the origins of Syria’s uprising in 2011 that culminated in the overthrow of the Assad regime in 2024...

Let’s take stock of the American experience within the global history of colonialism – specifically by examining the intertwined relationship in U.S. constitutional practice between internal accounts of freedom and external projects of power and expansion. This episode reinterprets American political traditions from the colonial period to modern times by placing race, immigration, and national security in the context of shifting notions of empire and citizenship. Host Sahar Aziz addresses these issues with “The Two Faces of American Freedom” author and Boston College Law Professor Aziz Rana.

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This week’s episode offers a powerful introduction to the scope of Islamophobia in the United States. The legacy of Barack Obama and the mainstream media’s typically negative portrayals of Muslims offer incisive examples into the vast impact of Islamophobia – connected to the long history of racism – both within the borders of the United States, and as a matter of foreign policy and global politics. Host Sahar Aziz addresses these issues with “Islamophobia, Race and Global Politics” author and Stockton University Professor Nazia Kazi.

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In the face of pervasive racial violence in American society, the effort to address and subdue white supremacist extremism has been underserved by the framing of “hate crimes,” and the movement to re-frame these events as domestic terrorism, as these terms do not meet the heavy task of eliminating the perpetuation of institutional oppression. 

Host Sahar Aziz will discuss with Law Professor Shirin Sinnar what she has coined the “frame analysis,” where she argues against these labels as insufficient means of challenging the predominant racial and social order in the U.S. 

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A complex array of domestic, regional, and international factors contributed to the rise of Hafez Al Assad as president of Syria in 1970 and the ultimate demise of his son, Bashar Al Assad on December 8, 2024 – thirteen years after the Syrian people unsuccessfully rose up peacefully as part of the regional phenomena commonly referred to as the Arab Spring.  Located at the center of geopolitical competition between Israel, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Iran, the nation of Syria will continue to play an instrumental role in regional politics, which in turn impacts U.S. interests in the oil-rich Middle East.

Hos...

In what a growing consensus of international legal scholars describe as a genocide, the systematic destruction of Gaza by the Israeli military has killed over 55,000 Palestinians and injured over 100,000 Palestinians in less than 15 months.  The Israeli government’s severe restrictions on the entry of humanitarian aid into the blockaded Gaza Strip have produced unprecedented malnutrition, disease, and starvation of 2.3 million Palestinians.

While only a few mainstream American media outlets have covered what has come to be known as the Second Nakba – harking back to Israeli militia's ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in 1948 – even fewer journalists have covered the experie...

On December 8, 2024, the Syrian people overthrew Bashar Al Assad, bringing to an end a brutal fifty-four-year dictatorship.  Although the Syrian people partook in the wave of revolutions during the Arab Spring, their efforts to bring about democracy in Syria were hijacked by a host of external actors in what deteriorated into a violent proxy war between Russia, Iran, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the United States.

As a result, over 300,000 Syrians were killed, and 13 million Syrians became refugees or internally displaced within the country, as explained in CSRR’s 2019 report “Toward Empowerment and Sustainability: Reforming America’s Syrian Refugee...

The present state of the unfulfilled peace brokering process between Palestine and Israel stands to undermine any meaningful progression toward the two-state solution proffered by dominant actors in the West. Host Sahar Aziz, in discussion with the former Egyptian Ambassador Hesham Youssef, explores the argument that Western ambivalence to the issue of Palestinian sovereignty has significantly eroded the path toward a peace agreement.

#Palestine #Israel #Gaza #CSRR

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The bilateral relationship between the U.S. and Israel has effectively blinded it to the most detrimental factors to the dissolution of the peace-brokering process, most notably the impact of Israeli occupation on Palestinian sovereignty and the legitimacy of international human rights law. Host Sahar Aziz will discuss these complex dynamics with author and political scientist Khaled Elgindy by decentering a unilateral perspective on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from a socio-historical lens.

#Palestine #BlindSpot #Gaza #Israel #KhaledElgindy

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The indeterminate and contested nature of the terms of international law indicate a prevalent concern regarding the legitimacy of international law in the context of Israel’s war with Hamas and the ongoing military campaign in the Gaza Strip. Host Sahar Aziz explores this topic with Law Professor and expert on Middle Eastern studies Dr. George Bisharat to dissect the prevalent inconsistencies in enforcing and applying international human rights as persistent roadblocks to achieving justice for Palestinians. 

#Palestine #Hamas #Gaza #Israel #GeorgeBisharat #CSRR

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