Kategorie: Disziplinen und Ansätze
By Julius Dihstelhoff & Clara-Auguste Süß. The Mediterranean has become a key arena for addressing some of the most pressing policy challenges facing Europe and its southern neighbours. Energy security and the green transition, migration governance, regional stability, and security cooperation all converge in the region, making the future of EU-Maghreb relations strategically important for Germany as well. In this piece, the wider issues in response to the New Pact are explored from the MECAM Policy Talk 2026.
By Nataly Castillo Bennett. Global practices shaped by colonization and modernity have disrupted humanity’s intrinsic connection to nature, resulting in ecological and social crises. Rooted in the colonization of the Americas, colonial inhabitation imposed exploitative relationships with nature and marginalized communities, laying the foundation for the imperial mode of living. Superficial frameworks like green capitalism fail to address this crisis, perpetuating colonial ecocide. In contrast, Afro-Ecuadorian Maroon communities, through la vida simple – a philosophy grounded in African traditions and marronage – offer transformative insights for ecological sustainability and climate justice.
By Mina Khanlarzadeh. A recent Guardian open letter addressed Iran’s political prisoners directly, linking their struggle to US immigration detention and Israeli prisons holding Palestinians. It made two demands: that the Islamic Republic end executions and free political prisoners, and that the US and Israel end their wars and sanctions against Iran. The letter prompted a wave of criticism for failing some test of proper anti-imperialist politics. Mina Khanlarzadeh examines two responses, by Behrouz Ghamari-Tabrizi and Vijay Prashad, because each raises a broader question.
By Souhir Zekri.
As an entertainer who dresses and praises the bride, the mashta turns into a symbolic maternal figure who supports and preserves the feminine community surrounding her. This central character also has potential for women’s empowerment, in spite of her economic difficulties, and can help preserve an intangible Tunisian cultural heritage and identity. The mashta thus stands at the intersection of women’s labor, motherhood, cultural transmission, and community. Her changing presence also raises questions about what happens to these forms of knowledge when the traditions that sustain them begin to disappear.
By Yuliia Kravchenko.
The history of Soviet camps contains little-known yet inspiring pages from the lives of political prisoners. One of them is the story of the humanity and dignity demonstrated by dissidents, against which the repressive system was powerless. In particular, it shows how the relationships between Ukrainians and Jews in the camps challenged the authoritarian system. Their mutual understanding and cooperation defining the struggle for their rights was a way of asserting their agency. Researching this is highly relevant in the context of the contemporary discussion around the deimperialisation of Russia and the decolonisation of Ukrainian studies.
By Nora Lafi.
Writing a decolonial history of the Mediterranean is a collective endeavor that requires analyzing past configurations of coloniality on the ground, in society and in the books, as well as the relationship between all that. This inevitably implies a severe process of deconstruction. An inclusive historiographical approach and a methodological reflection has, in my opinion, to start from the nature of various archival corpuses. The theoretical question is whether uncovering the biased nature of a concept may lead to its inevitable rejection.
In this piece, Maria Grynevych explores the question: What does it mean to be at once the beneficiary of an exceptional protection regime and someone who feels that exception as a weight – something to be justified, measured against others’ losses, and where possible refused? The condition has a deliberately uncomfortable name: privileged refugeehood.
By Edwin Mutyenyoka
In this piece, Mutenyoka examines the paradoxical reality of post-Apartheid South Africa, where a state founded on human rights and Pan-African solidarity now actively scapegoats and discriminates against migrants.
By Raquel Rojas Scheffer.
Housewives’ and domestic workers’ organisations have been present in Latin America for decades. These groups not only perform – at least to a certain extent – the same kinds of tasks. They also tend to share an interest in the valorisation of domestic work: If this activity were recognised as work, housewives could claim retirement rights, while domestic workers would be granted the same labour rights as any other worker. But even while sharing the historical burden of care work, there are other social hierarchies that interrupt the common experience of these women and hinder the creation of alliances between them.
By Cristina Moreno Almeida and Hanan Natour.
What do we really mean when we speak of “Al-Andalus”? Was medieval Iberia a model of coexistence, a lost paradise, or something far more complex? How do historians find people and ideas that barely appear in the official record? And how do political and cultural actors today reach back to remember, romanticise, or instrumentalise the medieval past for political mobilisation? Cristina Moreno Almeida and Hanan Natour discuss how the digital Al Andalus project, an engaging podcast series, connecting scholars across disciplines, can engage and bring new light to these questions.
Introduction For generations, donkeys have been an indispensable part of everyday life in Northern Ghana. They transport water, firewood, manure, farm inputs, and harvested crops. They plough fields, support agricultural production, and reduce the.…
By Denys Shatalov.
In this conversation, Denys Shatalov, explores the question: What historiographical misunderstandings could the frontier theory reveal when applied to the study of the Ukrainian Cossacks as a border phenomenon?
Scholars working with and on the world regions in the Global South face a dilemma of doing fieldwork and researching in local languages and then publishing results in international outlets dominated by the English language. In this conversation based on the roundtable, we reflect on this tension navigating the requirements of academic publishing and career-related issues, and regional and local academic traditions in Southeast and West Asia as well as the African continent.
This paper examines the educational experience in Sudan from 2023 until the present. In 2023, with the outbreak of the civil war, the Sudanese universities completely ceased operations. In this text, Adam explores the innovative ways Sudanese educators and students continue university education during times of war and what this means for education, community and contribution of knowledge and innovation from the Global South.
By Anna Skiba. How do Ukrainian individuals and organisations in Germany and Norway negotiate what memory and identity to preserve, emphasise, or make visible under conditions of displacement? How does the historical memory context of the host country shapes what is available to them as they do so? The experiences of Ukrainian DPs in Flossenbürg offer an interesting point of comparison here, demonstrating how memory practices can generate agency and visibility amidst uncertainty and displacement.
By Imene Gannouni Khemiri. The escalating ‘irregular’ migration across the Mediterranean Sea has become a major topic of international interest. While it is not a new phenomenon, the number of ‘sub-Saharan’ migrants, along with the associated death toll, has recently reached unprecedented levels. Against this backdrop, the present study explores how the tragic deaths of ‘sub-Saharan’ migrants crossing the Mediterranean are represented in media discourse.
Olha Haidamachuk in Conversation with Misсha Gabowitsch and Mykola Homanyuk. Conflicts of interpretation and the semiotic contradictions of the war monumentscapes in Russian-occupied Ukrainian territories were recently explored by Misсha Gabowitsch and Mykola Homanyuk. In their book Monuments and Territory[1], focusing on memory study, they also raise issues of political and symbolic borders and, therefore, offer rich empirical and analytical materials for rethinking аpproaches to border study.
