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Issues / Prisma Ukraïna

Negotiating What Endures: Exploring Connections Between the Flossenbürg DP Camps and Ukrainian Memory Work Today

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.

Two small boats on a lake.

A Decolonial Mediterranean – Disparities, Imaginations, Power Relations / MECAM

Representing ‘Sub-Saharan’ Boat Migrants: Global and Tunisian Media Narratives of the Mediterranean Migration ‘Crisis’

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.

Three people seated on a stage with a large screen behind them showing a fourth person participating remotely.

Conversations / Prisma Ukraïna / Rethinking East European Studies in Times of Upheaval

What Could War Monuments Be Silent About? – A Conversation with Misсha Gabowitsch and Mykola Homanyuk

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.

Neoclassical museum building with tall columns and steps leading to the entrance.

Conviviality and Inequality

Restitution and Postcolonial Justice. A Dialogical Approach

By Julia von Sigsfeld. Confronting a history of dispossession and alienation, and of accumulation thereby, restitution is generally seen as a recognition of and corrective to historical injustice or, rather, as an element thereof. Demands for the return of museologized objects, belongings, and ancestral remains are thus deeply connected to and indicative of struggles over postcolonial memory and justice. Not only do these demands surface suppressed histories and memories in public discourse, but they also expose the violence and Eurocentric foundations of heritage practices and museums.

Collage of Photographs, including the Ukrainian Flag with a dove symbol.

Fragmented Lives / Prisma Ukraïna

Fragmented Lives in Times of War – An Introduction

By Lidia Kuzemska. What are the challenges faced by forced migrants within and from Ukraine due to the Russian invasion? Ukrainians feel, live with, and live through uncertainties, whether emotionally, intellectually, or bodily. The new edited collection sheds light on the lives of displaced persons, which are divided, in terms of time, space, and social context, into a “before” and “after” the war. It analyses the uncertainties faced by war migrants and those who have decided to remain in Ukraine, as well as how people cope with these uncertainties in their daily lives.

A drawing of hands casting their ballot in front of an hungarian flag.

Issues / re:constitution

The Limits of Representation: Three Dimensions of Constrained Choice in Hungary’s 2026 Election

By Stefan Szwed. Hungary’s parliamentary elections on 12 April 2026 were, by most metrics, historic. With turnout approaching 80 percent — the highest in the post-1989 era — the centre-right opposition alliance Tisza founded in 2023 swept Fidesz from power with a constitutional supermajority, ending 16 years of Victor Orbán’s government. The scale of the result was sufficient to turn the system designed to favour Fidesz flatly against it. Three perspectives map, from three distinct empirical angles, a system comprehensively engineered to purposefully narrow the political choices available to specific categories of voters.

Newspaper front page with a headline in Spanish about an attack on the Israeli embassy.

Conversations / EUME

Who Owns a Story? Palestinian Memory, Family Archives, and the Ethics of Witnessing

Nada El-Kouny in conversation with Hadeel Assali. In 1969, Golda Meir’s government drew up a secret plan to move up to 60,000 Palestinians out of the Gaza Strip and resettle them in Alfredo Stroessner’s Paraguay. Only a handful made the journey before the scheme was exposed. One of them was Mahmoud, a nineteen-year-old who boarded a plane believing he was bound for work and a future in Brazil, and who realized only later that the promise was a lie. Decades on, his great-niece, the anthropologist Hadeel Assali, has spent years documenting his story and those of the other transferees. Palestinians in Paraguay, a four-part investigative documentary series, for Uncovering Roots co-produced by Max Saakyan, Nada El-Kouny and Nadeen Shaker tells this story.

Four soldiers in uniform looking over a landscape of hills.

Law and Care

Multiplying Care: Israeli Rules of Engagement and the Embodiment of Jewish Sovereignty

By Revital Madar. In the case of Arie Schiff, who shot Mohammed al-Atrash on November 28, 2020, the Israeli Lower Court of Justice acknowledged the risks faced by Jewish residents of Southern Israel. This context is presented as a collective trauma that can explain Schiff’s decision to shoot al-Atrash. It did not acknowledge the context of the 2015 violence between Jews and Palestinians and increased civilian use of force with impunity. His decision to shoot al-Atrash is analysed similarly to how military and civil courts treat state security agents, police or soldiers, who are tried for excessive use of force and claim they did not violate Israeli ROE.

Cover of an album, showing a tree covered in snow.

EUME / Issues

The Cold That Stays. The 1953 Coup and Its Afterlife in Iranian Political Memory

By Mina Khanlarzadeh. Sometimes a parent’s story touches a larger history and defamiliarizes them: you glimpse someone who belonged to a world before you, and who is now quietly offering you its interior. This essay traces a personal memory of a father, a Persian song and tries to understand his hopes and disappointments, and their entanglement with Iran’s political fate.

Hebrew text in a black font on a white background, arranged in six lines.

EUME / Issues

Ghayath al-Madhoun in Hebrew Translation Today

By Daniel Behar. In Arabic literary circles the rumor circulates that Ghayath al-Madhoun is the only living Arab poet in 2026 who can live off his poetry. As his Hebrew translator, I can attest that the rumor is plausible, even if matters might be more complex than the formula suggests. In a binational reading group where we read the poems in Hebrew and Arabic side by side, emotions ran high, but the debates were never strictly political, because in al-Madhoun’s work the politics cannot be separated from the personality. That inseparability is precisely what the poems aim for.