De Verbranders

De Verbranders presents, Tongues Untied, an audio series in which Muslim women in the Netherlands share what it means to speak out against injustice. Presented and created by Neske Baerwaldt and Asma Mataich. What does it mean to make yourself heard publicly as a Muslim woman in the Netherlands? What forms of politics, resistance, love and community exist behind this act, and what emerges from it? Today, we’re speaking with Manar Ellethy, a lecturer in cultural history at Utrecht University. In our conversation with Manar, we explore how her interest in Black radicalism developed, eventually leading to the PhD dissertation she wrote and defended in 2025. In her dissertation, Manar analyzes Black documentary films produced in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. She understands these films as part of a quest for truth, and that quest as part of the broader struggle for Black liberation. For Manar, truth does not mean finding windows that offer a transparent view onto reality. Rather, truth emanates from the lived experiences of people whose realities are continuously silenced. As she explains, this silencing runs so deep that its audacity is almost incredible. Toward the end of the episode, we draw a thread from her work on Black documentary films to her organising work for Palestine today. We ask what it takes to keep going in the face of the challenges and contradictions inherent in organising. To paraphrase Mohammed el-Kurd and James Baldwin, we cannot afford despair in the presence of burning flesh. The summers of revolution will continue. It is up to us whether we choose to be part of them. Read more about Manar's academic work here: https://www.uu.nl/staff/MEllethy

De Verbranders presenteert: Ontknoopte Tongen, een audioserie waarin moslimvrouwen in Nederland vertellen over wat het betekent om zich uit te spreken tegen onrecht. Gepresenteerd en gecreëerd door Neske Baerwaldt en Asma Mataich. Wat betekent het om je als moslimvrouw in Nederland publiekelijk hoorbaar te maken? Welke vormen van politiek, verzet, liefde en gemeenschap leven daarachter en ontstaan daaruit? Vandaag spreken we met Nawal Mustafa, universitair docent in Black Studies, Critical Race Studies and Indigenous Studies aan de Universiteit van Amsterdam. Op Nawals verzoek vertellen we geen levensverhaal met een duidelijke, chronologische lijn. In plaats daarvan reizen we door verschillende delen van haar leven aan de hand van geluidsfragmenten. We luisteren samen naar stemmen die voor haar van betekenis zijn: van Shaykh Nourin Mohamed Siddiq, Malcolm X, James Baldwin en Nikki Giovanni tot de Somalische dichters Abwaan Jaamac Kadiye en Caasha Luul uit de gabay-traditie. Aan de hand van die fragmenten praten we over hoe je liefde vormgeeft als zwarte vrouw in een wereld die gebouwd is op dominantie. Over de illusie dat je stabiliteit en zekerheid krijgt in ruil voor het investeren in een systeem dat uit elkaar valt. Over dansen op Somalische bruiloften, de rol van poëzie in de revolutionaire strijd in Somalië, solidariteit; de islam als gids in Nawals leven, en nog veel meer. We beginnen deze serie met Nawal omdat zij degene was die de Surah inbracht waaruit Ontknoopte Tongen als beeld voor deze serie ontstond.

In this episode, we talk with Rex Osa and Aino Korvensyrjä about what it means to be in solidarity with people who self-organize against encampment, isolation, and deportation. In doing so, they take us to the struggles that took place in southern Germany’s large asylum and deportation camps in 2017 and 2018—struggles that continued in the following years. Self-organizing, as Rex explains, is the ability of people who are affected by structural violence to organize themselves and to be part of the decision-making process in struggles for their dignity and liberation. What does practical solidarity with people facing state violence require? How do you organize together with the people most affected in a way that centers their dignity? And what is the importance of archiving our struggles from below? While we interview Aino and Rex, many people were—and still are—part of the organizing they speak of. We’d like to shout out everyone who fought in the camps, starting with the people living in Bamberg, Donauwörth, Deggendorf, and Ellwangen who resisted their isolation and deportation. We also want to acknowledge the groups and individuals who supported them, including Aktion Bleiberecht, the Bavarian Refugee Council, Justizwatch, the Campaign for the Victims of Racist Police Violence, International Women Space, and all of the lawyers who stand in solidarity with people in struggle. We also want to thank Afrique-Europe-Interact, migration-control.info, and the Initiative in Remembrance of Oury Jalloh for documenting and challenging Euro-African deportation cooperation, border externalization, and racist police brutality and criminalization in Germany. Finally, a special shout-out as well to The VOICE Refugee Forum and the Caravan for the Rights of Refugees and Migrants, two self-organized groups that have been important in developing the methods of organizing and the anticolonial critiques discussed in the episode. The audio clips we play can be found on www.cultureofdeportation.org, a collective that Aino and Rex founded, initially together with Claudio Feliziani. The interview we play with Yusupha Jarboh was shot by Kin Chui together with Rex in The Gambia and Sierra Leone. If you would like to support people after they’ve been deported, consider supporting the Safe House for Deported Persons in Lagos, which Rex is involved with: https://refugees4refugees.org/en/2025/11/28/return-reintegration-illusion-of-an-eu-moral-for-solidarity/ For an overview of Aino’s research, visit: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Aino-Korvensyrjae

In this episode, Shahram Khosravi, Professor of Social Anthropology at Stockholm University, reflects on a lifetime of theorizing from outside the law, and his ongoing urge to create otherwise. When Shahram talks about theorizing from outside the law, he is not using a metaphor, he is referring to his experiences growing up Bakhtiari, and the refusal of his people to be dominated by colonial powers, whether in Tehran, or European. Shahram also talks about being Young and Defiant in Tehran, to name one of his books, and about crossing borders as a so-categorized Illegal Traveler, to name his auto-ethnography, or auto-theory of borders. And, he talks about refusing modes of knowledge production that are hostile to him and his people. As Shahram explains, coming from Indigenous People, such refusals are not about negation, but rather about creation, and walking in the fog of the unknown At the time of this recording, in June 2025, Israel and the United States were bombing Iran, putting people outside of the law, again. In the episode, we take this moment to reflect on how deep we are falling, and how dark the times are, in which we are again witnessing genocide in the name of freedom, human rights, and democracy. But, we also talk about how we can build on the movements that came before us, and from other places, to fight these dark times. And, in this spirit, we listen to music that transports into those other worlds. We listen to Aida Shahghasemi, who sings the song Gole Bavineh, taking us to the Bakhtiari world of Shahram’s youth. We then listen to Parvin, who sings the song Ghoghaye Setargan, which carries different Iranian revolutions in it. Finally, we listen to Soheil Nafisi, who sings Nima Yushij’s poem Ay Adamha, in which a person drowning in the sea cries out to a festive crowd on the shore and the old world they represent, demanding to be seen, and demanding a liveable world. Enjoy listening.

In this episode, we speak to Rebecca Yeo, about her recent book Disabling Migration Control. In it, Rebecca draws on her many years of organizing within the disabled people’s movement and against borders, and more specifically on her engagement with disabled people in the asylum system in the UK, to argue that borders are disabling. People with existing impairments are further disabled by the restrictions of the immigration system. And these also create new impairments, particularly high levels of mental distress. Rebecca draws on those years of organizing and engagement to explore what we can learn from each other across movements, what it takes to truly be in solidarity with one another, and how we might collectively resist, and disable, borders. To capture her politics, and the spirit in which she wrote her book, Rebecca brings a recording of the song El Pueblo, Unido, Jamás Será Vencido to the episode, because indeed, The People, United, Will Never Be Defeated. And she brings the voices of two of her interlocutors, who tell us how navigating the asylum system is a 'constant battle', and how that 'makes you lose your mind.' The work of resisting such a system is collective, and throughout the book, and in the episode, Rebecca mentions the people and collectives she has been working with. One of them is community artist Andrew Bolton, with whom Rebecca collaborated several times to create murals, together with disabled people across different communities. The murals are reproduced in the book, and you can find them, and learn more about them on www.disabilitymurals.org.uk/about.php Currently, amongst many other things, Rebecca is working to foster shared learning, solidarity, and collectively resistance through the Disability and Migration Network (DAMN). This episode was recorded in January 2025, and at the time, Rebecca and others at DAMN and the DPAC Crip Tank were planning a conference called DAMN Borders! The conference is fully booked but you can learn more about the work of DAMN and get information about future events on https://disability-migration.org.uk/network

Our guest is Manja Petrovska, a PhD candidate at the University of Amsterdam and the Université libre de Bruxelles. We start our conversation today in the Balkans. Before her PhD, Manja spent five years supporting people travelling through the Balkans to Europe’s more affluent northwest, including at the Macedonian-Greek border and in Bosnia. Witnessing the intense violence that Croatian, Greek, Macedonian, and other police forces inflicted on people on the move, she increasingly started questioning who governs and funds this violence. This led her to focus on the International Organization for Migration, or the IOM. From this five-year engagement, Manja co-authored a report from this five-year engagement, titled Repackaging Imperialism: The EU-IOM Border Regime in the Balkans, published by the Transnational Institute. Although the report’s other authors are not featured in this episode, everything we discuss related to the report is based on their work as well, so special thanks to Nidžara Ahmetašević, Sophie-Anne Bisiaux, and Lorenz Naegeli, as well as Niamh Ni Bhriain, who was the report’s main editor. As the report lays out, while the IOM portrays itself as a neutral broker and knowledge center on migration, it is, in fact, an active implementer of particular states’ border policies, bolstering police, border guards, and private contractors known to commit atrocities. Most IOM funding comes from affluent states that can directly commission projects, which the IOM then implements in regions far from its primary funders. What emerges from the conversation is a European Union border regime that extends its influence into the Balkans through the IOM, funding violence that northwestern European states can then distance themselves from by mobilizing racist depictions of brutality as always something occurring in various elsewheres. From the perspective of people living in the region, this is not a new phenomenon but rather one that echoes the efforts of past empires that sought to shape what we now call the Balkans. Hence the report’s title: Repackaging Imperialism. In addition to affecting the lives of people on the move, this regime is also leading to a remilitarization of borders in a region still recovering from war and genocide. We then move to discussing Manja’s current PhD project. As part of this project, she has recently attended a number of border technology fairs, which are marketplaces where security companies showcase their ideas for border security, with government officials as their clients. Manja takes us into a world where cowboy hats, raffles, and rampant alcohol consumption are used to aid in the selling of heartbeat monitors, document scanners, and weapons—illustrating how absurdly and soul-crushingly removed the worlds of weapons sales are from the people whose lives these weapons affect. Finally, Manja recounts her own encounter with border enforcement. After leaving one of the last security fairs she attended, she was administratively detained and taken to immigration detention in Belgium. There, she met and tried to support many others who were in a much worse situation than she was, mainly people from other Balkan states and Palestinians. We end the conversation by reflecting once again on the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the need to resist the brutal slaughter, starvation, displacement, and land theft of Palestinians at the hands of the Israeli state. We feel pain at this destruction of life. Weapons companies, Manja explains, profit, not only from causing mass death but also from surveilling, governing, and dividing people when displaced, once again showing us that our struggles are deeply interconnected.

Today, we have two guests: Marcus Rediker, a distinguished Professor of Atlantic History at the University of Pittsburg, and Nandita Sharma, a professor of Sociology at the University of Hawaii. Marcus Rediker has spent a lifetime studying oceans rather than lands, immersing himself in the worlds of sailors, pirates, and the enslaved. As he explains in the episode, it was the labor of seafaring people that knitted together the continents, enabling the rise of global capitalism. Yet these people—brought together on ships and in ports—not only generated immense profits for the wealthy; they also developed what he calls “projects of their own,” often in opposition to the interests of rulers. This self-activity of ordinary people across the Atlantic lies at the heart of his work. We then turn to The Many-Headed Hydra, a book Marcus co-authored with Peter Linebaugh in 2000. In it, Marcus and Peter use the metaphor of the Hydra and Hercules to connect revolutionary struggles and counter-revolutionary efforts across centuries and continents. In The Many-Headed Hydra, radical religious groups struggling against enclosures in 17th-century England appear alongside, and interlinked with, the uprisings of enslaved people that swept through the Caribbean and the Americas in the 18th and 19th centuries. Time and again, we see that mobility is essential for capital accumulation. But it also emerges as a problem for those in power once people start “projects of their own,” prompting intense repression and efforts to fracture revolutionary coalitions. One of these technologies of division, Marcus explains, is citizenship. Marcus’s work has much to offer those of us who struggle against borders today. As Nandita explains in the second part of the episode, borders and legal status divide us from one another. As vital resources continue to be extracted and privatized, and investments in technologies of war increase, what does it mean to practice a politics radically oriented toward life? How do we strengthen our connections to one another? How do we build the body of the Hydra so that our movements interlink and regenerate? These are some of the questions we discuss. We recorded this discussion in October 2024, as the Israeli state continues to kill and starve people in Gaza on an unimaginable scale, its onslaught now also reaching deeper into the West Bank and Lebanon. We must continue to do whatever we can to stop this mass killing, to resist the ongoing expropriation of people from their lands, and to resist the border regimes that trap those who want to leave. At the end of the conversation, Marcus and Nandita offer hope at a time that does not always seem very hopeful. People all over the world live and love in ways that reach far beyond the orders imposed on us—and they do so under the most difficult and unjust of circumstances. Something in these radical visions of freedom, in these struggles for life, practised in different times and distant places, connects us to one another. This reminds us of something simple, something we already know: that we all breathe in the common wind.

In this episode, we speak to Miriam Matthiessen, who takes us to the world of shipping, through the phenomenon of so-called Abandoned Seafarers. As it happens, because of the way in which the shipping industry is organized, ship owners sometimes have an incentive to abandon their ships, and the crew on it. Formally, a ship and its crew are considered abandoned when the ship owner does not pay wages, or fails to provide adequate supplies for two months, but in practice, abandonments carry on for many months, and even years. Miriam’s own entry point into this is her work for Abandoned Seafarer’s Map, which was created by Eliza Ader, and which Eliza and Miriam now maintain together with Jacob Bolton. This map uses databases by the International Labor Organization, the ILO, and the International Maritime Organization, the IMO, to show where and how often abandonments take place. These databases structure what the map does and does not show, but either way, by logging case after case, you’ll learn what kind of vessels typically get abandoned, and how nationality structures who gets abandoned, and how an abandonment then subsequently unfolds. In this episode, Miriam shares the lessons that she learned, while also bringing abandonments to live, by describing the situations seafarers may find themselves in, and the effects that abandonments may have on their extended families. Throughout the conversation, Miriam references the book Sweatshops at Sea, by Leon Fink, as well as the work of anthropologists Johanna Markkula on the labor of Filipino Seafarers, and that of economist Hercules Haralambides on container shipping, ports, and global logistics. She also references Jacob Bolton’s dissertation, parts of which he has now published in his article Supply Nets: The Logics of Seafarer Abandonment We end the episode with a conversation on the value of staying with an issue for a prolonged period of time, the need to create counter-hegemonic infrastructures that we can actually maintain, and the need to recognize such maintenance work as making possible the work of trying to change everything. We recorded this in April 2024. So, as we speak about the structural violence inflicted upon seafarers, and the total disregard of their lives, we are thinking of mass murdering of Palestinians by the same powers that be. And when we speak about wanting to change everything, this includes ending the illegal occupation, and the incarceration of Palestinians in open air prisons. Enjoy listening

Our guest today is Ghassan Hage, a professor of anthropology at the University of Melbourne in Australia. Today, we talk with Ghassan, not about Europe’s borders, but about Palestine, and the intensification of the destruction of life in Gaza at the hands of the Israeli state and the powers that support it. We recorded our conversation a few weeks ago, in January 2024. As I record this introduction, I am struck by how difficult it is to find words that speak to the moment we are in. We are witnessing military attacks of unimaginable brutality, with countless bodies still to be found under the rubble. Alongside this obliteration of Palestinian life, we see the destruction of the conditions of possibility for life, with the bombing of water wells, tanks, greenhouses, food depots, ports, fishing boats, hospitals, schools, and bakeries. At the same time, as Ghassan points out, this violence is not new, but an intensification of the structural, settler colonial violence inflicted upon the Palestinians for the past 76 years and more. We must pause and reflect on the histories that made it possible for Gaza to become the place it is today, a place where Israel can cut off the supply of water, food and electricity to Gaza, turning hunger and thirst into weapons of war. As Ghassan points out, violence is inherent in the very existence of Gaza. Where does the legitimacy of such violence come from? How do we accept living in a world where it is normalized? Ghassan identifies the root of the problem as the virtual absence of the very thought of negotiating one’s existence with others, creating the fantasy in Israel that supremacy over everyone is possible. This fantasy is fueled by a frightening racism that makes it such that Palestinians can be treated as if their death is meaningless. In the episode, Ghassan describes Israel as an ethno-racial state and as a meta-colony, a colonialism of all colonial powers. This means responsibility lies not only with the Israeli government but also with the meta-colonial powers that make this destruction possible, in the form of massive military aid and diplomatic support. And we must dig deeper, and think about the global infrastructures in place that provide the materials and cover necessary to sustain this onslaught and find ways to challenge it. We close the episode with a reflection on the future. Israel as an ethno-racial state, Ghassan asserts, is going to come to an end. The question is what kind of an end. Tragically, with massacres and counter-massacres? Or through a negotiated mode of existence where everyone can live together? Let us work towards the latter. In the episode, we play a clip of Refaat Alareer, the writer, poet, professor, and activist, who was killed by an Israeli airstrike on the 6th of December 2023, along with several members of his family. Refaat was a professor at the Islamic University of Gaza. He also co-founded the We Are Not Numbers project, which provided writing workshops for young Palestinians. We close the episode with a recital of one of Refaat’s poems, titled, ‘If I must die, let it become a tale’. It became widely shared and recited at protests all over the world after he was killed. The recital we use is read by Peter Griffin and can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0zYDME9oaw

Our guests in this episode are Bridget Anderson, Cynthia Wright, and Nandita Sharma. We speak to them about their editorial called “Why no Borders”, which they published in 2008. In it, they distill the scholarship on borders at the time, in order to draw the conclusion that we should get rid of borders. Taking the editorial as our starting point, we speak about collaboration, and the joy of working together with people with whom we share a politics, and a sense of humor. And we talk about no borders as a practical political project, that is carried out in the here and now, by all of us who refuse to conform to nationalized borders. Bridget, Cynthia, and Nandita bring two pieces of music to the episode: No One Is Illegal, by Renovatio, and Absolute Power, by Akala. We recorded this episode right after the Maritime Solidarities conference that brought Bridget, Cynthia, and Nandita to Amsterdam in September of 2023. This was a few weeks before the Israeli state took the Hamas attack on the 7th of October as an opportunity to escalate the destruction of Palestinian life in Gaza and the Westbank. We don’t speak about Palestine in the episode. But, as we publish this in January 2024, we want to state that the freedom dreams we express in this conversation apply to Palestine in Particular. And right now, we must act. We must reject this total destruction of life. We must resist the occupation, we must resist settler colonialism, and we must resist ethnic-nationalist states. And, we must refuse to lose, as Bridget puts it in this episode. Graphic design by Thomas from Dark Roast (www.instagram.com/thomas.darkroast) Theme music: David (guitar) and Joris (drums) Theme music: Allen (accordion) and Neske (violin), after Doina from the Fanfare Ciocarlia