Digital resources in the Social Sciences and Humanities OpenEdition Our platforms OpenEdition Books OpenEdition Journals Hypotheses Calenda Libraries OpenEdition Freemium Follow us

Kategorie: Projekte

When Gender Identity Becomes State Certification

By Bhavya Johari. On March 30, 2026, a day before International Transgender Day of Visibility and five months after India secured its seventh term on the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) for 2026-2028, the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Amendment Act received Presidential assent. The Amendment replaces self-determination with mandatory certification by medical boards. This potentially invalidates the legal recognition of thousands of individuals who obtained certificates under the self-identification framework. The paradox this exposes is foundational: States can systematically violate norms while occupying positions meant to uphold them.

Systems of Conflictivity

By Andréa Gill. In places where violence functions as the norm sustaining systemic inequalities – and, hence, not as a moment of exception or as the occasional breakdown of order – it becomes necessary to reconceive the peace and conflict archives in ways which take into account structural insecurity and socio-economic precarisation. From the perspective of postcolonies, we can perceive the multiple and imbricated ways in which conflict springs from the inequality embedded in relations of power. The concept of ‘systems of conflictivity’ enables us to grasp, then, the determinants of violence as a continuum in a manner which linear causality (of periodisation and events) fails to do so.

Are Migrants’ Rights (still) Human Rights? Protection & Exclusion amid the Crisis of Liberalism in the Americas

By Farid Dabour. In February 2026, scholars from Latin America and Europe met at the Latin American Institute of Freie Universität Berlin for the workshop Are Migrants’ Rights (still) Human Rights? Protection & Exclusion amid the Crisis of Liberalism in the Americas, organized by Professor Luisa Feline Freier (FU Berlin) and the Department of Political Science. The conference focused on a timely question: what happens to migrants’ rights when liberal democracies are under pressure, hemispheric orders are shifting, and the authority of human rights institutions is increasingly contested?

Cynical Uses of Suffering: Gaza, Antisemitism, & the New Digital Right

By Aya Labanieh. The landscape of the Anglophone Internet itself, especially in North America, drifted rightward—rewarding influencers who churned out pandemic disinformation and conspiracy theories with high engagement, fame, and easy income. The popular term online for such a person is a “grifter”: someone who betrays their convictions, political or otherwise, for material gain, transforming what they claim to believe based on what is trending or what sells. While one can never be sure what a particular influencer truly believes, especially since many content-creators became as radicalized as their own audiences during lockdown, grifters can serve as useful indicators of where money can be made online.

Choice Illusions: Through ‘Rule by Law’ to ‘Electoral Capture’ in Hungary and Poland?

By Stefan Szwed. National populist leaders across the EU, and in particular governments in backsliding Members States such as Hungary under Fidesz and Poland under PiS, like to proclaim themselves as true representatives of the people. They pit the principle of popular choice against the demands of the rule of law, defined among others as protection against abuses of majority rule. This exploratory research examines how ‘strongmen’ in office undermine the rule of law to not only advance their illiberal agendas, but also lower the risk of losing future ballots. Across key aspects of the process, it considers how the pair had laid foundations to game if not capture electoral competition.

Food is Where all my Interests Meet – 5in10 with Omri Polatsek

Omri Polatsek is a historian of science, technology, and the environment, with a regional focus on Egypt and the Middle East. He is a doctoral student at the International Max Planck Research School “Knowledge and Its Resources: Historical Reciprocities” at the Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte and a researcher at the “History of Technology” Department at the Technische Universität Berlin. Before joining EUME, Omri was an affiliated researcher at the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient. He holds an MA in Global History from Freie Universität Berlin and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and a BA in Middle Eastern Studies and Political Science from Tel Aviv University.

Convertir a la música en un negocio

Ornela Boix focuses on music fairs in Latin America over the last 15 years, aiming to contribute to an understanding of the formation of music markets that transcend national borders, against a backdrop of transformation in the music industry driven by digitalisation. Drawing on a theoretical framework that emphasises the social, convivial and unequal nature of the art worlds and their markets, and an ethnographic approach, the text situates the emergence and development of these fairs historically at the intersection of processes of change within the music industry’s business model, public cultural policies, cultural activism, Latin American regionalism and the relationship between art and capitalism. The article specifically examines the role of educational activities (workshops, conferences) in the production of narratives about the contemporary music industry, which have consequences for the ways in which actors behave and for the very constitution of music markets. In this way, the article outlines the cultural dimension of these markets.

Bumantara and a World Federation. Revisiting Sutan Takdir Alisjahbana’s Ideas on a Culture of Inclusion in Times of Crisis

By Fathun Karib. Sutan Takdir Alisjahbana (1908–1994) was a prominent Indonesian author and intellectual who developed an alternative term for the Southeast Asian area. This article will focus on examining his concept of Bumantara – a combination of the words Bumi (land) and Antara (in between) – and delve into his proposal for a “World Federation” as a solution for addressing ongoing global crises. Bumantara and the World Federation refer to specific territorial units that offer alternative opportunities for those living in this era.

Constitutional Adjudication: Beyond Reductionist Reading of Democracy

By Raunaq Jaiswal and Max Steuer. In February 2024, the Supreme Court of India unanimously struck down the Electoral Bonds Scheme—a mechanism through which corporations could make anonymous donations to political parties—holding that anonymous donations to political parties violated the right to information. This ruling represents a significant development in constitutional adjudication, as, on the one hand, it represents a limitation of what a court can accomplish within existing frameworks of democracy, and on the other, it illustrates the risks of not developing a thicker conception of democracy and the remedies for breaching it.

OPERAS supporting outreach and engagement for Open Research Europe

Starting in the second half of 2026, ORE will enter a new pilot phase, operated by the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) and will be co-financed by a consortium of research funding and performing organisations, along with the European Commission. As part of this new phase, OPERAS Research Infrastructure will work in partnership with the ORE consortium to strengthen outreach and community engagement across Europe. OPERAS will contribute its expertise in multilingual, inclusive, and community-driven scholarly communication to help ensure that eligible researchers and institutions are aware of and able to benefit from the platform.

AEGIS-OA launches to advance sustainable Diamond Open Access publishing in Europe

AEGIS-OA (Activate European Guidance and Incentives for Sustainable Open Access publishing), a new EU-funded project under the Horizon Europe research and innovation programme, officially kicked off on 19-20 March 2026 in Brussels. The project aims to strengthen a transparent, sustainable, and high-quality open access scholarly publishing ecosystem in Europe by building on and expanding the services of the European Diamond Capacity Hub (EDCH), a program hosted by OPERAS.

Mobility is also humility ‒ 5in10 with Yann Lorans

Yann Lorans studied European Union law at the Universities of Montpellier, Lund, Paris-Est Créteil, and at the College of Europe (Bruges). After an internship at the Court of Justice of the European Union in the cabinet of Advocate General Michal Bobek, he began a joint PhD at Université Paris-Est and KU Leuven. He defended his thesis on the collaborative relationship between the European judiciary and legislature in the field of fundamental rights. Alongside his research, he was a guest researcher at Lund University and has taught constitutional theory, French public law and EU law at Université Paris-Est Créteil, KU Leuven, Sciences Po Paris, and Université Paris-Panthéon-Assas. Since 2025, he has been working on the defence of democracy through EU media regulation as a re:constitution fellow, including research stays at the European Commission (Brussels) and NOVA School of Law (Lisbon).

An Anguished Debate Among Iranians

By Nahid Siamdoust. There is no precedent in the modern Middle East — or for that matter anywhere — for a war producing a quick and clean democratic outcome, as the architects of this one implied in their promises. The complete dismantling of a functioning state, however brutal and however widely despised, without any credible plan for what follows, will not produce democracy by miracle, but ruins by design. The division that has emerged — between those Iranians who will not support a war on their own country and those who have, through suffering and desperation, arrived at support for the war — is real and painful and will not be resolved easily.

Debates over Cultural Phenomena

By Laura Schmidt, Lisa Schmidt, and Sofie Leubert. On December 10, 2025, the geography course of the 11th grade at Walther-Rathenau-Gymnasium in Berlin, focusing on the central themes of home, integration, and inclusion, visited the nearby Forum Transregionale Studien for a workshop entitled “Debates over Cultural Phenomena.” The workshop was organized and led by the Ukrainian sociologists Viktoriya Sereda and Lidia Kuzemska and focused on the complexities of multicultural societies and the challenges they are facing today.

Colonialities of Power and Peace in Cameroon

By Nicanor Tatchim. This article makes the case that the militarised model of peace favoured in the discourse around Cameroon’s Anglophone crisis falls within a hegemonic, liberal/Western conception of peace shaped by the coloniality of power. This top-down perspective makes no space for a pluriversal dialogue, which is essential for resolving the crisis. Drawing on the concepts of decolonial peace and coloniality (of power), the article outlines several pathways for enshrining peace in Cameroon – and in Africa more broadly – within African peoples’ systems of values and knowledge. The core argument is that lasting peace in Cameroon and other conflicts on the continent requires a decolonial and Indigenous approach to peace.