By Burcu Alkan. From Vienna to Cairo cafés have always been microcosms representing the foundational fabric of their respective societies, as well as being distinctive worlds in their own right. They are public spaces where people socialise and groups interact, ideas are born and changes are observed.
By Ulf Engel. Four years after his ground-breaking presidential address to the International Studies Association (ISA) in 2014, in which the author called for decentring the Western-dominated field of international Studies, Amitav Acharya has produced a monograph on global order in which the contours of a different way of practicing international studies are outlined.
Reviewed by George White. Through their work at the Collaborative Research Centre at Leipzig University, Steffi Marung, Matthias Middell and their collaborators have produced a comprehensive and impressive volume on the weighty topic of globalization. The topic is innately geographical, specifically spatial, and geographers not only have a lot to say about it, they already have written much about it.
By Mehdi Khorrami and Amir Moosavi. Can a text, in its broadest sense, transcend its primary sensory medium and trigger multisensory reactions? Can a painting activate the sense of taste, in addition to sight? Is it possible to see, taste or touch a piece of music while listening to it?
By Regina Elsner. Russian Orthodoxy is often suspected to be pre or anti-modern because of its difficulties engaging with a plural and secular society – for example, when relating to democracy, human rights, or gender diversity. After the end of the Soviet Union, the Russian Orthodox Church associated increasingly with the agenda of the political elites in Russia and other successor states of the Soviet Union.
By Diana Ayeh. When I first came to Houndé (Province of Tuy) in November 2016, the town of 150,000 inhabitants in southwestern Burkina Faso already had a certain gold-rush atmosphere. Not only was the landscape in and around Houndé marked with indications for future extraction (e.g. flags and fences symbolizing corporate “possessions”).
By Ulf Engel. In October 2021, I published the Yearbook on the African Union (YBAU). This yearbook is the first of its kind. The YBAU is first and foremost an academic project that provides an in-depth evaluation and analysis of the institution, its processes, and its engagements.
This book was conceptualized at an international conference on refugee studies in Germany in 2018, where the editors, Staci Martin and Deepra Dandekar, first met. At the time, Staci wanted to explore a pedagogic practice of teaching that co-creates spaces of critical thinking and hope in the classroom, resulting in social action or change. Deepra was focused on questions of migration, gender, and belonging outside the bureaucratic-administrative purview of citizenship.
By Ulf Engel. Contemporary conflicts in Ethiopia are overshadowed by the ongoing war between the government of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed on the one hand and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front on the other. Between 1991 and 2018 both parties were partners in a Tigray dominated coalition front which finally failed to impose its hegemonic nation-building project on the multi-ethnic country.
By Immanuel R. Harisch. Only recently, the decades-old debate regarding former Mozambican contract workers in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) experienced new momentum. Characterized by Marcia C. Schenck as “wandering journeymen of the Cold War” (“Wandergesellen des Kalten Krieges”), the trajectories of Mozambican contract workers were crucially shaped by socialist encounters and the close relations between the GDR and Mozambique.
By Carl Rommel. One does not have to spend a long time in Egypt to apprehend that football is a serious matter that stirs powerful emotions across the male population. Match shirts of Cairo’s two giant clubs, al-Ahly and al-Zamalek, are omnipresent in streets and squares throughout the country; club rivalries are a source of passionate controversies and banter in cafés, workplaces, and social media.
By Imen Louati and Julius Dihstelhoff. This anthology aims to generate a new approach to address regional studies in the Maghreb. Indeed, capturing the Maghreb’s heterogeneity and its dynamic is central for reflecting on recent transformations, not only in the Maghreb but in the Arab world generally, particularly in relation to the Arab uprisings of 2010–11.
Par Imen Louati and Julius Dihstelhoff. Cette anthologie vise à produire une nouvelle approche pour aborder les études régionales au Maghreb. En effet, saisir l’hétérogénéité du Maghreb et sa dynamique est essentiel pour réfléchir aux transformations récentes, non seulement au Maghreb mais dans le monde arabe en général, en particulier en relation avec les soulèvements arabes de 2010-11.
By Ayşe Dayı and Hilal Alkan. The edited volume The Politics of the Female Body in Contemporary Turkey: Reproduction, Maternity and Sexuality illustrates and examines the various ways in which neoliberal modes of governing women’s bodies come together with religious, conservative, and authoritarian measures in contemporary Turkey.
By Katarzyna Puzon. This year marks the twentieth anniversary of 9/11 – an event that triggered a significant and sustained rise in prejudice, discrimination, and hate crimes against Muslims. These trends have accelerated steadily since then. The tragic developments that followed, especially the invasions of Afghanistan in 2001 and of Iraq in 2003, still reverberate across Europe, not least in the recent ‘refugee crises’.
By Randa Abou Bakr, Ulrike Freitag, and Sarah Jurkiewicz. The uprisings in the Arab region in late 2010 and early 2011 took many observers of the political scene by surprise, given the authoritarian nature of most regimes in the area. However, the roots and reflections of these uprisings can be found in the social, cultural, and artistic spheres of these locations, as we argue in our book, Spaces of Participation: Dynamics of Social and Political Change in the Arab World (Cairo, AUC Press 2021).
Mohammed Bamyeh’s 2007 book, Of Death and Dominion, was translated into German in 2020 and released by Turia + Kant. We spoke with the author about his research process, how death played out within historical power structures, and the role of mortality in contemporary society.
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