Ideas

In 2000, Bashar al-Assad became president of Syria, also known as the authoritarian "Kingdom of Fear" that his father Hafez al-Assad had created three decades earlier. The younger Assad continued and intensified the use of imprisonment, torture and surveillance as tools of domination. His crackdown on a pro-democracy revolution turned into a 13-year civil war. Nahlah Ayed and panelists discuss what we can learn about the rise and collapse of authoritarianism from Assad’s rule and the 2024 collapse of his regime.

Listen to other episodes in our series, How to Defeat Authoritarianism:

How to Defeat Authoritarianism | Benito Mussolini's Italy
How to Defeat Authoritarianism | Idi Amin's Uganda
How to Defeat Authoritarianism | Augusto Pinochet's Chile

Guests on this podcast:

Basilios Zeno is assistant professor in the Department of Political Studies at Trent University in Canada. His work combines research, advocacy, and policy work on forced migration and asylum, legal violence, social movement, and interpretive decolonizing methodologies.

Marie-Joelle Zahar is a professor of political science at the University de Montréal. She has served multiple terms as a mediation expert, in fact, still serving in that role, for the United Nations, including as senior expert in the office of the Special Envoy for Syria in 2017.

Abdulrahman Matar is a Syrian-Canadian writer and journalist, a novelist, poet, and a painter. He is the founder and director of the Seagull Cultural Forum and executive director of the Syrian Writers Association. He was arrested five times and spent nearly 10 years in prison as a result of his writing and his positions on issues of freedom and human rights.

Tareq Yousbasi is a journalist and a producer at the CBC of Syrian origin, who assisted with live translation.

Would you 'doo-be-doo' if you know it would help bridge divides? Try vocal improvisation — singing sounds, rhythms and melodies. PhD graduate Erwan Noblet teaches the practice and says it's a great way to open up and connect at another level being together. He believes the human voice has the power to communicate creatively when it's released from everyday verbal tasks. We asked three former politicians from different political parties to communicate through vocalization, without words. Their conversation may inspire you to take on vocal improv.

*This episode originally aired on Jan. 6, 2026 and is part of our ongoing series Ideas in the Trenches, which showcases fascinating new work by Canadian PhD students.

Guests in this episode:

Former Conservative MP Lisa Raitt
Former Liberal premier of Ontario Kathleen Wynne
Former NDP MP Peggy Nash
Erwan Noblet has a PhD in critical studies in improvisation

French scientist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck is mostly remembered for being wrong. He published an early theory of evolution, before Charles Darwin. His claim was that animals were in charge of their own evolution. That didn’t hold up. But author Jessica Riskin
argues maybe it’s time to redeem Lamarck, a little bit. Riskin says that we should give animals — and humans — some credit for our own progress.

Guest in this episode:

Jessica Riskin is a historian of science at Stanford University, and author of The Power of Life: The Invention of Biology and the Revolutionary Science of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck.

She’s famous for her caustic quips and her love of cocktails, but there was a lot more to Dorothy Parker than her time at the famed Algonquin Round Table. The icon of New York in the 1920s spent decades in Hollywood as a screenwriter, won awards for her short stories and was a committed social activist, who ended up being blacklisted because of her ties to communist causes. She was also a war correspondent.

Guests in this episode:

Kevin Fitzpatrick is the founder and president of the Dorothy Parker Society.
Michelle Dean is a screenwriter, critic and author of Sharp! The Women who made an Art of Having an Opinion.
Nina Miller is a former English professor at Iowa State University, and the author of Making Love Modern: The Intimate Public Worlds of New York's Literary Women.
Ellen Meister is a novelist and the author of Dorothy Parker Drank Here and Farewell, Dorothy Parker.
Gail Crowther is a researcher, writer and the author of Dorothy Parker in Hollywood.

Blind life is an individual experience. But from neighbourhood walks to international travel, blind people want momentum, adventure, and a sense of place, like everyone else. This podcast features an artist and a scientist imagining bolder ways forward.

Guest in this episode:
Alex Bulmer is a Blind writer and theatre artist. Her play Perceptual Archaeology or How to Travel Blind, is included in the collection Rebellious Bodies and Radical Acts. She is at work on a multimedia project called May I Take Your Arm.
Joshua Miele is a Blind scientist, inventor and a MacArthur Fellow who’s designing accessibility tech from inside the experience of disability. He's also the author of Connecting Dots: A Blind Life.