The MERIP Podcast Episode Ten: Raouf Farrah
On the Sumud Convoy, the Gaza Flotilla, and North African Solidarity
On this episode of The MERIP Podcast we are featuring an interview with Raouf Farrah, an Algerian activist and researcher based in Tunis, about his article "On the Road to Rafah -- The Global Sumud Convoy and New Maghrebi Geographies of Resistance" which appears in Middle East Report 315-316 Material Politics of Normalization (Summer/Fall 2025). In the interview, Farrah and MERIP Executive Director James Ryan discuss Farah's experience traveling with the Sumud Convoy across North Africa in June and July 2025, and the efforts to reconfigure their mission in the months after being turned back in Sirte by forces allied with Khalifa Haftar. Farrah reflects on the lessons of the Convoy and the later Global Sumud Flotilla in light of the present ceasefire in Gaza, and how those experiences are informing new ways of thinking about Palestinian solidarity, and political activism.
This conversation was recorded October 14, 2025.
Further Reading:
Raouf Farrah "On the Road to Rafah – The Global Sumud Convoy and New Maghrebi Geographies of Resistance" in Middle East Report 315-316 Material Politics of Normalization
Raouf Farrah and Suraya Dadoo, eds., Rising for Palestine: Africans in Solidarity for Decolonization and Liberation (Pluto Books, forthcoming 2026):
Middle East Report 315-316, The Material Politics of Normalization, Summer/Fall 2025
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Written by
James Ryan is the Executive Director of the Middle East Research and Information Project
Raouf Farrah is a writer, analyst and co-founder of Twala.
