LSE Lecture: Islam and the Politics of Resistance: the case of women in Iran

Recorded on 16 January 2013 in Sheikh Zayed Theatre, New Academic Building.

Prominent Muslim feminist and peer Haleh Afshar will speak on the situation facing Iranian women in their country today.
Haleh Afshar (BA York, PhD University of Cambridge) teaches Politics and Women’s Studies at the University of York and serves as a Crossbench Peer in the House of Lords. In 2005 she was awarded an OBE for services to equal opportunities. She is also the Visiting Professor of Islamic Law at the Faculté Internationale de Droit Comparée at Strasbourg. She was born and raised in Iran where she worked as a journalist and a civil servant. She has served as the Chair for the British Association of Middle Eastern Studies and Chair of United Nation Association’s International Services.

Fresh Air: 'Double V': The Fight For Civil Rights In The U.S. Military

In his new book, The Double V: How Wars, Protest and Harry Truman Desegregated America’s Military, author Rawn James Jr. argues that if one wants to understand the story of race in the United States, one must understand the history of African-Americans in the country’s military. Since the country was founded, he tells Fresh Air’s Dave Davies, the military “has continually been forced to confront what it means to segregate individuals according to race.”

Fresh Air interview with James

Russia finally joins WTO

Russia has finally closed the book on its campaign to accede to the World Trade Organisation (WTO), becoming a full member after 18 years of talks – despite the ratification of the accession treaty in the final stages being accompanied by protests from some State Duma deputies and businessmen.

Now that it enjoys the status of a full member of the organisation, Russia is entitled to play its part in formulating the rules for global commerce.

Bidding farewell to its inconspicuous status as an observer, the country will now enjoy lower customs duties, from which Russian exporters of metals and chemicals will be the first to benefit.

Iran Faces Backlash Over "Morality Police" Spying on Coffee Shops

Since last year, the Islamic regime’s Basij forces have been targeting cafes because students and intellectuals meet there to share ideas often deemed “Western.” The Basij are under the command of Iran’s supreme leader and are tasked with carrying out a range of police functions—including suppressing dissident activity and making sure “morals” are not being breached. Previously the Basij were among a group of officers that in 2012 raided a reported 87 restaurants and cafes for “not following Islamic values,” such as by allowing women to smoke pipes in public.

Now, the authorities are turning to a new tactic: surveillance. This became apparent last week, when one of Tehran’s most popular cafes, Café Prague, closed in protest after state officials had tried to force it to install a series of cameras inside its premises.

This American Life: Little War on the Prairie

Growing up in Mankato, Minnesota, John Biewen says, nobody ever talked about the most important historical event ever to happen there: in 1862, it was the site of the largest mass execution in U.S. history. Thirty-eight Dakota Indians were hanged after a war with white settlers. John went back to Minnesota to figure out what really happened 150 years ago, and why Minnesotans didn’t talk about it much after.

STW: Germany and the EU

On Start the Week Andrew Marr looks at Germany’s role in Europe. Katinka Barysch argues that despite the crisis, support for EU integration still dominates, and that unlike Britain, the ability to compromise is seen as a skill, not a weakness. Two British MPs, from left and right, Gisela Stuart and Douglas Carswell, remain sceptical about the EU, but German-born Stuart understands her birth country’s emotional connection to it. Carswell argues that the digital revolution calls for smaller, not larger governments, and Karen Leeder believes that despite Germany’s belief in the European project it still has not laid to rest the ghosts of unification.

'Operation Delirium:' Psychochemicals And Cold War

In the latest issue of The New Yorker, journalist Raffi Khatchadourian writes about a secret chemical weapons testing program run by the U.S. Army during the Cold War.

Khatchadourian’s article, “Operation Delirium,” profiles Jim Ketchum, one of the military doctors who helped lead the project. To this day, Ketchum maintains that the tests were conducted in the interest of a greater good.

Khatchadourian calls him “an unreconstructed advocate of chemical warfare,” and says that he “went about his work in the belief that chemicals are more humane instruments of warfare than bullets and shrapnel.”

Listen to an interview with Raffi Khatchadourian