Polis Project Conversation Series

Polis Project Conversation Series is a grave, interview-centered forum for conversations about state violence, historical memory, law, technology, and political accountability. It treats political history as something still unfolding. Recent episodes move from China's Xinjiang region to Congo, Bangladesh, Palestine, Gaza, Iraq, Afghanistan, India, and the prosecution of Julian Assange. The subject range is wide, but the questions keep returning to a few hard problems: how violence is organized, how it is justified, how it is documented, and how institutions try to make it disappear. The Technologies of Genocide conversations form a major part of that work. They connect surveillance systems, digital platforms, data centers, predictive algorithms, corporate power, and military or state violence without reducing any of them to a slogan. The show is at its strongest when it asks guests to separate what happened from how it happened. A conversation on Xinjiang turns toward language, schools, family separation, birth control policy, and forced transfer. A conversation on Bangladesh centers forensic reporting, video evidence, witness accounts, and the difficulty of naming the dead after protest violence. A conversation with 7amleh examines digital rights, platform moderation, and Palestinian visibility online. The episode on Congo places current violence beside colonial extraction, regional politics, and the language of security. The War Lawyers episode considers the relationship between military law and the operations it is supposed to regulate. The Julian Assange conversation focuses on publishing, whistleblowing, prosecution, and the public meaning of press freedom. The Indian Emergency conversation returns to 1975 and asks whether that period should be seen as an aberration or as part of deeper legal and political histories. The Five Objects format adds a more biographical route into intellectual and political life. The tone remains sober. The conversations are not streamlined for quick takes, and they do not turn grief into atmosphere. They work through testimony, reports, books, legal categories, timelines, and institutional language. The result is a show for sustained attention: difficult, specific, and committed to keeping evidence in view.