In Solidarity - by openDemocracy

Content warning: This episode discusses sexual assault, rape and trauma.

When our investigative reporter Sian Norris heard worrying claims about a Silicon Valley-style start-up targeting rape survivors at universities in Bristol, she knew she needed to uncover what exactly was going on.

Over the next six months, Sian interviewed more than a dozen people on and off the record, sent multiple FOI requests and reviewed countless soci...

This is the first episode of our new mini-series exploring the financial interests of political parties in England and Wales. 

Nigel Farage’s Reform UK has banked almost £5m from wealthy donors since 2023, including those with links to fossil fuels, the financial services industry and tax havens. It has also received significant financial investment from the general public in the form of party memberships. 

There se...

On 17 June 2025 UK Parliament voted to decriminalise abortion in England and Wales, reversing a Victorian-era law. The amendment will prevent women from being prosecuted for ending a pregnancy after 24 weeks or without approval from two doctors.

We spoke to our senior investigative reporter Sian Norris, author of Bodies Under Siege: How the Far-Right Attack on Reproductive Rights Went Global. 

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Earlier this year, openDemocracy explored how successive governments had cracked down on protest rights. Now, with Just Stop Oil activists facing lengthy sentences for "conspiring" to commit protest offences, the impact of these laws is being felt more than ever. We sat down with human rights lawyer Katy Watts to discuss the sentencing, and how she and the NGO Liberty won a legal challenge against the government's new protest laws....

Boomers ruined everything, Millennials are work-shy and Gen Z can’t comprehend anything that isn’t a TikTok dance. Generational language defines the way we think about broad cohorts of society, but is this way of viewing the world dividing us further at a time when solidarity has never been more important?

Tom Nicholas, a writer, filmmaker and YouTuber, joins us to discuss his latest film Boomers: The Rise of Gerontocracy, gener...

This week on In Solidarity, we're in discussion with openDemocracy's senior investigative reporter and feminist activist, Sian Norris. Sian joins us on the podcast to reveal how recent laws are quietly dismantling the right to protest in the UK.

Drawing on six months of in-depth reporting, Sian breaks down the true impact of the Public Order Act 2023 and the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022. These laws allow protest...

As a young woman in 1980s Iran, Nasrin Parvaz was arrested, imprisoned and tortured by the Iranian regime. In this moving interview, she shares her experience of torture and incarceration, reflects on the successive women's revolutions in Iran, questions the West's ideas of regime change, and offers a powerful call for global sisterhood.

http://www.nasrinparvaz.org/web/tag/https-www-victorinapress-com-product-one-womans-struggle...

For many years, politicians have sold the public a simple story: The answer to undocumented immigration is a strong, fortified border. This story has a seductive, common-sense reasoning — but it is also wrong. 

Decades of research has shown that people determined to move, find a way to move. 

And when States respond with border controls, people turn to smugglers to circumvent these controls; and on and on this cycl...

Community organisers around the world have long argued that to change a country, canvas a community. But is that really true? 

In this episode, we catch up with someone who literally wrote the book on the subject. Our guest George Goehl started organising in a soup kitchen in Southern Indiana 30 years ago in the Clinton era and continues to do so in the time of Trump. 

Listen in to understand how to fight effectivel...

The already fraught relationship between the United States and South Africa has been put under even more strain with Donald Trump's decision to cut foreign aid, not to mention South Africa's case against Israel at the ICJ.

Menzi Ndhlovu, a political economist and risk analyst at Signal Risk a risk analysis consultancy focused on Africa, joins us to discuss this critical moment for South Africa.

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Danny Sriskandarajah is the author of Power to the People: Use your voice, change the world

Sriskandarajah discusses the shift from a positive phase of civic engagement to a reversal over the past decade, emphasising the importance of community networks beyond state and market fixations. He highlights the role of civil society in nurturing democracy and the need for international solidarity. Sriskandarajah shares personal experi...

Jimmy The Giant is a popular YouTuber who did what many would consider to be beyond the pale - he changed his mind about politics. Jimmy went from heading down the right wing pipeline of self improvement gurus to U-turning and becoming, dare we say, ‘woke’. 

In today’s episode Aman Sethi talks to Jimmy about how and why he changed his mind about the political landscape and together they examine the changing online landscape...

Borders patrolled by AI-powered robotic dogs once seemed like something purely in the realm of dystopian sci-fi novels. But the border industrial complex is working hard to make them a part of our (still dystopian) reality. 

Petra Molnar, author of The Walls Have Eyes: Surviving Migration in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, joins us to discuss the militarization of border technologies, the racial politics of migrati...

Something strange is happening in Germany. 

Last year, the Alternative for Germany or AFD, as it scored, became the first far right party to win a state election in Germany since World War Two. Then in February this year, the AfD came second in Germany's national elections, with 20% of the votes.

The AFD isn't just another populist right wing party. Members of the party have consistently downplayed the horrors of Nazi Ge...

What do the Ukrainians at the heart of the conflict with Russia feel about being used as a bargaining chip by countries like the United States? In this episode we speak to Volydomyr Yermolenko, a Ukrainian philosopher, academic, and editor of Ukraine World. Volydomyr lives in Kyiv and is also the host of the Explaining Ukraine podcast.

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The rising global far right is violent, racist and misogynistic – and depends on exploiting women. 

While many of us associate attacks on women’s bodily autonomy with ultra-religious groups, openDemocracy’s Sian Norris argues that the stripping away of abortion rights is a political issue, rooted in fascistic ideas about women and men. Her book, Bodies Under Siege: How the Far-Right Attack on Reproductive Rights Went Global...

Have we all been looking at Donald Trump’s success in the wrong way? Jeff Sharlet, journalist and author of The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War, makes a compelling case for examining his rise not as a political figure, but as a religious one. After all, Trump himself would surely be the first to suggest that he is divine.

Do the president’s most ardent supporters truly believe that he is an ‘imperfect vessel’ chosen by Go...

Since al-Assad’s regime fell from power in December 2024, much of the reporting on Syria has focussed on geopolitics in the region. More concern has been paid to the reactions of neighbouring nations than the ordinary Syrians whose lives have been uprooted by years of violence. 

But Syria is so much more than a strategic stronghold to be fought over by nations in the Global North. 

We spoke with Waseem Albahri, a Sy...

Trump 2.0: Is This the Inauguration of A New Era of the Strongman?

Professor Wendy Brown is an American political theorist, UPS Foundation Professor in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and an author. 

Professor Brown’s bibliography includes what we refer to as ‘the Trump trilogy' - three books that span the political career of President Donald Trump. Given Trump’s return ...