Voices: The EISA Podcast

In this special Voices episode, we unpack the recent recognition of Palestinian statehood by several Western governments, including the UK, France, Portugal, Canada, and Australia. The move came shortly after a UN Special Committee report finding Israel’s actions in Gaza consistent with genocide. This historic decision has sparked intense debate about the timing, motivations, and consequences of recognising Palestine as a state. Emile Badarin (University of Oxford) and Victor Kattan (University of Nottingham) join host Polly Pallister-Wilkins to discuss these developments and examine the broader politics and legal aspects of recognition within the long struggle for Palestinian statehood.
Emile Badarin...

In this episode, we welcome Alvina Hoffmann (SOAS), winner of EISA’s 2025 Best Article Award from the European Journal of International Relations (EJIR). In her award-winning article “What Makes a Spokesperson? Delegation and Symbolic Power in Crimea” (2024, vol. 30, Issue 1, pp. 27-51), Alvina unpacks questions about who gets to speak for others, exploring themes of symbolic power, authenticity, and the universalism of human rights. In conversation with host Polly Pallister-Wilkins, Alvina draws on her research to explore the struggles and stakes involved in speaking on behalf of others through the lens of human rights politics in Crimea. She...

This month, we are flipping the script a little: Our new episode features our producer Judith Koch (University of Sussex), whose recent PhD research offers a fresh perspective on Brexit: rather than a sudden rupture, she interprets it as the latest chapter in a decades-long tension between the UK and Europe. What if Brexit wasn’t a bolt from the blue, but just the latest instance in a decades-long struggle between the UK and its European counterparts? In conversation with host Polly Pallister-Wilkins, Judith talks us through the longer history of Brexit, all the way back to the Suez Crisis of...

What do recent controversies over statues reveal about global politics and the legacy of empire? In this episode, Rahul Rao (University of St. Andrews) joins us to discuss his new book “The Psychic Lives of Statues: Reckoning with the Rubble of Empire” (Pluto Press, 2025). In conversation with host Polly Pallister-Wilkins, Rahul Rao talks us through his work in which he explores how debates over statues – from Cape Town to Bristol and Richmond – uncover deeper struggles over race, caste, and decolonisation, and how these disputes have reshaped anticolonial political thought. Journeying through sites of contestation across South Africa,...