The Principal of Somerville College is delighted to invite members of Somerville College and the wider University to a live recording of Arthur Snell’s geopolitics podcast Behind the Lines.
This special episode of the podcast will feature members of the Somerville College sanctuary community whose lives and work have been shaped by conflict and its aftermath. The conversation will spotlight themes of resistance, relief, and human rights as we hear from Ukrainian political journalist Nikita Vorobiov, Sudanese physician and global health pioneer Dr Hadeel Abdelseid and Afghanistan’s first professional rapper, the pioneering women’s rights activist Sonita Alizadeh.
Chaired by former British diplomat Arthur Snell, the event offers a chance to learn about the journeys of displaced students and consider how academic communities, by empowering those students, can generate lasting benefit for their students, their communities and the world.
↩️ Sign-up to secure your place: Behind the Lines Live: The Sanctuary Scholars
📍 Flora Anderson Hall, Somerville College
📆 5:30pm, Tuesday March 3rd 2026
Biographies
Arthur Snell
Arthur Snell is a British author, political commentator, and former diplomat who served as the United Kingdom’s High Commissioner to Trinidad and Tobago from 2011 to 2014. He held diplomatic postings in Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Yemen, Iraq and Afghanistan prior to his role as the UK’s High Commission to Trinidad and Tobago. Arthur led the Foreign Office contribution to the UK’s “Prevent” anti-terrorism programme and, outside government service, joined the risk consultancy Orbis Business Intelligence. In July 2022, Arthur published his first book How Britain Broke the World. He is a regular contributor to political podcast The Bunker and host of the popular geopolitics podcast Behind the Lines.
Dr. Hadeel Abdelseid
Hadeel was still a medical student in Sudan when the civil war broke out again in 2023. She went straight from attending lectures to treating gunshot wounds in improvised PPE, using tutorials shared via smartphone. Hadeel has since gone on to become a Director of Sudro, a developmental network providing rapid, tech-enabled health programmes to relieve crises in Sudan and across Africa as they occur. The recent projects on which Hadeel has led or contributed include treating gender-based violence during the conflict and training volunteer counsellors working with children orphaned and severely traumatised by the conflict. Despite experiencing acute trauma herself, Hadeel is a beacon of warm humanity, humour and resilience, who somehow manages to organise her directorship of Sudro and managing a network of over 80,000 Sudanese volunteer emergency care-givers all while conducting a full-time MSc in International Health and Tropical Medicine!
Nikita Vorobiov
Nikita (Mykyta) Vorobiov is an Oxford-based political writer of Ukrainian-Russian origin, reading for an MSc in Russian and East European Studies as an EAA Qatar Sanctuary Scholar. Nikita has previously studied at the Universities of Zagreb, Tartu and Bard College, Berlin, where he gained a BA in Ethics and Politics and specialised in Russian visual propaganda. Since 2021, Nikita has been working as a political writer, publishing more than fifty op-eds for leading US think tanks, contributing monthly articles to the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) and serving from 2023 to 2025 as Senior Editor at JURIST, where he helped launch the Balkan Dispatch and subsequently received the 2025 Wolmuth Award for extraordinary dedication. Nikita’s research focuses on political psychology, nationalism, and military propaganda, where his Russian-Ukrainian background has enabled him to contribute in-depth analysis of highly nuanced topics and to collaborate the European Journalism Observatory (EJO), Amnesty International’s Mnemonics Project and the Tamizdat Project, among others.
Sonita Alizadeh
At the age of 16, Sonita Alizadeh found out that she was to be sold into marriage. Facing the threat of forced marriage for the second time in her life – the first time had been when she was 10 years-old – Sonita felt compelled to do something to publicise her experience and the experiences of other women around her. The young Afghani woman turned to rap music and gained worldwide attention with her 2014 single ‘Daughters for Sale’. Her story was documented in the Sundance award-winning film Sonita, and she was offered a student visa to come and study in the United States by the Strongheart Group. In 2023, Sonita graduated from Bard College and she won a Rhodes Scholarship to study at the University of Oxford. Alizadeh is the co-founder of Arezo and The Dreams Book, a secret school for Afghan girls deprived of education under Taliban rule. The first professional Afghan rapper, Sonita uses her music and her convictions to fight for the rights of women and girls all over the world.
Somerville College
Building on its founding principle to include the excluded and a history of welcoming displaced academics that dates back to the 1930s, Somerville College gained recognition as a University College of Sanctuary in 2021. Since then, the College has welcomed 29 Sanctuary Scholars from regions including Afghanistan, Syria, Somalia, Ethiopia, Liberia and Palestine.