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Dichotomy of Methodology Between the American and the French Approach in Frontier/Border Studies: Sloboda-Ukraine in the 18th Century

By Yuliia Koniva. Historical geography as an interdisciplinary discipline offers many of the conceptions for studying space and territory. In this essay, I want to address that there is no common ground on how to apply these conceptions. In every national historiography we can find plenty of historians who utilize the approaches of studying space or territory according to the research goals which were put forward in front of each scholar.

Whose Imaginary? Coptic Intellectuals and the Question of Subjectivity

By Ismail Fayed. The collapse of the Assad regime and HTS’s rise in Syria have revived debates in Egypt and the region, over the fragile status of religious minorities, particularly Copts, long caught between authoritarianism and Islamist extremism. But when freed from such choices, what kind of worlds do they imagine? In this paper, Ismail Fayed explores this question through the life histories and reflections of two prominent Coptic intellectuals, Salama Musa and Louis Awad.

Towards a Global History of War, Disability and Gender

By Natalie Tongue. Only in recent years has the history of disability become a focus of global history. This essay seeks to examine the connection between disability and masculinity, particularly in relation to histories of war. This will be achieved through a review of a series of books, articles and edited collections to piece together a full picture of the trends in this intersection of the respective fields and to understand where a global history approach would enhance disability histories. A global history approach would highlight the diverse and complex ways in which disability and masculinity interact in contexts of war. Further, as war, conflict and colonialism are inseparable, racialised understandings of how masculinity differed across colonial epicentres and peripheries would be undeniable. This is essential for a meaningful and committed undertaking of the field.

Ukraine and Ukrainians in the Panels: Global Comics Perspectives on the War

By Svitlana Pidoprygora. Russian aggression against Ukraine in 2014 and the subsequent full-scale invasion in 2022 have brought Ukrainian issues to international headlines and sparked extensive reflections in various genres of fiction and non-fiction, with documentary comics and graphic reportages being no exception. International authors bring varied perspectives to Ukrainian historical and contemporary issues, striving to explain to their audience what is happening right now – why there is war, why the Russian Federation attacked Ukraine. I am focusing on arguably the most significant documentary comics that emerged after the beginning of the full-scale invasion and primarily focus on depicting the war experience. In this essay, I will delve into several key aspects of how these comics depict Russia’s war against Ukraine.

‘Isn’t Everything an Afterlife?’

Yasmine Kherfi and Sigrid Corry in Conversation with Dr Atef Said on Ethnographic Methods, Temporality and History. What does it mean to write, witness, and take part in history in the making? Yasmine Kherfi and Sigrid Corry speak to Dr Atef Said, Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Illinois, to explore questions of methodology, as well as its personal, scholarly and political implications. His book, Revolution Squared: Tahrir, Political Possibilities, and Counterrevolution in Egypt (Duke University Press, 2024), traces the story of the Egyptian revolution of 2011, documenting the spaces and histories through which it unfolded. Through ethnographic fieldwork in Tahrir Square, its surrounding streets and digital platforms, Said examines the dynamic character of revolution—one that is both indeterminate and shaped by historical contingencies.

‘Acting Like a Law’: Regulating ‘Care’ Through Germany’s Anti-BDS Resolution

By Sophia Hoffinger. In May 2019, the German Parliament (Bundestag) passed a resolution condemning the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, a campaign initiated in 2005 by Palestinian civil society actors to pressure Israel into complying with international law. The resolution passed with the support of all major political parties, except for Die Linke and the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). The story of the anti-BDS resolution in Germany raises pertinent questions about the relationship between law, the state, and the mobilization of antiracist principles: what does the application of a non-legally binding resolution as quasi-law reveal about the underlying norms shaping perceptions of history, Palestinians, Jews, and their relationships with Germany? Whilst laws are coercive, I suggest that quasi-laws like the BDS resolution present a site where we can follow the iteration and sedimentation of norms, which gives insights into how care is distributed between racialized subjects in Germany.

Reading Public Space through Masculinities in a Maghrebian Context – 5in10 with Khadidja Boussaid

Khadidja Boussaïd holds a Ph.D. in Urban Sociology from the University of Algiers 2 and is a senior researcher at CREAD (Research Center for Applied Economics for Development). She is part of a research team focused on the socio-economic dynamics of families, with a particular emphasis on the transformations of gender identities within Algerian households, but also focusing on the issue of Gender inequalities to access to public space. She is a short-term fellow at MECAM (Merian Centre for advanced studies in the Maghreb, Tunis University), where she is conducting a study about urban public space and its reading through masculinities in a North African context. Khadidja Boussaïd is accredited to supervise research (HDR) and is a member of the LASADET Laboratory (Socio-Anthropological Analysis of Territorial Development). She is also an associate member of the Gender Studies Center (CEG) at the University of Lausanne, contributing to research on the intersection of gender, space, and power.

When Conviviality Hides Inequality. Lélia Gonzalez on Brazilian Racial Democracy

By Rúrion Melo. The idea of racial democracy, also known as the myth of racial democracy, is not just a mistaken belief. In fact, it encompasses a set of mechanisms that regulate social practices, power relations, forms of social interaction, and collective thinking within a historically established system of ethnic-racial domination. Based on Lélia Gonzalez’s analysis, we will investigate which social actions concretize, support, and at the same time hinder the perception of everyday racism. How can we explain the widespread acceptance and propagation of the myth of racial democracy? And what does the myth of racial democracy hide, apart from what it reveals? The purpose of this text is to understand the paradigmatic issue of Brazilian racial democracy by assuming indirectly the conceptual framework of the relationship between conviviality and inequality. How does conviviality hide inequalities?

Liminality and Museums in Ukraine: the Khanenkos’ Case

In this essay, I apply “liminality”—linked to the idea of a specific contact zone characterized by ambiguity, high potential to hybridization of identities and subversion of authority—to examine the case of Bohdan and Varvara Khanenko. The Khanenkos were prominent collectors of Ukrainian cultural heritage and the founders of the first public museums in Kyiv in the late 19th and early 20th century. Mentally shaped by the empire(s), the Khanenkos started acting on both sides of the colonial divide since the 1890s: At the Russian court, they played impeccably loyal subjects. Simultaneously, in Kyiv, they converted the empire’s trust into a new freedom of action enabling grand, future-oriented cultural changes.

Clara Mattei, Austerity, and the Soviet Union

By Michel Wong. Clara Mattei might not have set out to write a Global History of austerity politics, but as a student of Global History, I find her framework of austerity as measured by the wage share very useful and would like to apply it in my own history writing. I just have one problem with it. Mattei’s framework is a framework for analysing capitalist societies, but history – even just modern history – has many examples of societies that cannot really be called capitalist. What I want to know is: can Mattei’s framework also be applied to non-capitalist societies? In the sections that follow, I shall try to test the limits of Mattei’s framework by seeing if it can be applied to one of modern history’s more important non-capitalist societies – the Soviet Union.