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Author: Forum Transregionale Studien

“Civil Disobedience is Not a New Phenomenon” — 5in10 with Philipp Schönberger

Philipp Schönberger studied International Relations in Dresden and Law at the Humboldt University of Berlin. After his second state examination in February 2022, he started working for the environmental law NGO Green Legal Impact Germany e.V. in Berlin as a legal advisor for climate policy and the protection of climate activists. At the same time, he works as a freedom of information lawyer for the transparency initiative FragDenStaat, focusing on access to environmental information. Since 2019, he has been coordinating a litigation project against the violation of migrants’ human rights at the EU’s external borders, successfully representing more than fifty applicants before the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) in both interim measures and ordinary proceedings. Previous work experiences include stays at the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies in Potsdam, the European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights in Berlin, the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg and two law firms specializing in climate litigation.

The Porous and the Pure: An Artifactual History of Ties Between Asia, Europe, and Latin America

By Ajay Gandhi. This essay uses three kinds of artifacts to frame connections between Asia, Europe, and Latin America, between the 1500s and the present. These items – simultaneously tangible things and symbolic projections – plot a method and chronology of entanglement. The first are precious-metal decorations made in Goa, on India’s western coast, for Portuguese patrons. A second is a 17th-century painting of a young slave from India taken to the Netherlands. The third artifact is the spider’s web, and the Caribbean folk figure of the Anansi spider. Such artifacts can be read through purity and silence, as well as porosity and convergence. In this itinerary of artifacts, we begin with a social imaginary that is determined and untainted, and move to conditions that are fluid and open-ended.

Rethinking Slow Science from the Perspective of Warzone Academics

By Anastasiya Leukhina et al. With its “publish or perish” imperative, stiff competition for grants and positions, and focus on quantifiable output, neoliberal academia breeds fast science. Many academics have pointed to the need to slow down, emphasizing that good quality academic work takes time. This text attempts to expand the contextual boundaries of understanding slow science. It was born out of a conversation among eight female Ukrainian scholars, each of whom has been affected in their own way by the full-scale Russian invasion. While discussing the speed and quality of academic output, we arrived at the conclusion that the fast vs slow science debate acquires additional nuances in a war zone. The work on this text reflects the practices of slow science we are advocating for: collaborative work, sensitivity to contexts—collective and personal—and experimentation with formats. 

التراث الثقافي السوداني بين مخاطر الحرب والغياب المؤسسي الفاعل

By Ahmad Adam. This text is a summary of a paper presented by the author on November 9, 2024 at the 27th Arab Archaeologists Union Conference in Cairo. It examines the impact of war and political instability on Sudan’s cultural heritage. Sudan, a country with a rich and diverse historical legacy, has faced repeated conflicts that have endangered its archaeological sites, museums, and intangible heritage. His text assesses the current situation in war-torn Sudan, highlighting the destruction, looting, and neglect of key heritage institutions, including the National Museum of Sudan, the Ethnographic Museum, the Khalifa House Museum, and regional archaeological sites. It also addresses the absence of effective institutional protection and the challenges posed by the 2023–armed conflict. Additionally, he explores ongoing efforts to safeguard Sudanese heritage, emphasizing the role of local and international collaborations, digital documentation, and community-driven initiatives. It calls for urgent action to document, preserve, and protect Sudan’s cultural assets amid the ongoing crisis.

The Political Activities of Dual Citizens in the Western Mediterranean, with a Focus on Tunisia, Algeria and France – 5in10 with Thomas Serres

Dr. Thomas Serres’ research spans the field of Middle Eastern studies, critical security studies, and comparative politics, combining an ethnographic approach with a conceptual apparatus inspired by critical theory. He is particularly interested in the effects of protracted and entangled crises (popular uprisings, “war on terror,” refugee crisis, neoliberalization) in North Africa and beyond. His first book, The Suspended Disaster: Governance by Catastrophization in Bouteflika’s Algeria, was published in 2023 with Columbia University Press, expanding on a French edition initially released in 2019. He also co-edited the volume North Africa and the Making of Europe with Bloomsbury Publishing (2018).

Beyond “Alternative Globalization” in Socialist Eastern Europe: A Critique of the Concept

By Béla Tomka. Research on the globalization of socialist Eastern Europe has become a thriving field within international historiography over the past decade. At the same time, scholars have made ambitious efforts to develop new conceptual tools for identifying the distinctive features of globalization in socialist Eastern Europe. Some of these new concepts go beyond just examining the transnational ties of socialist states — they also make broader claims about globalization itself by suggesting that globalization is not a single, uniform process but rather one that unfolds in distinct, segmented ways. The approach of “alternative globalization” introduces a profoundly new way of thinking about the topic by reshaping how we understand the dynamics and chronology of globalization in the region.

The Making of Modern Austerity: Insights from Clara Mattei’s “The Capital Order” and its Contributions to Global History

By Julie Birke. Clara Mattei’s book “The Capital Order. How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism” offers an important contribution to our understanding of austerity policies and the debate on the origins of neoliberalism by putting class challenges at the heart of her argumentation and linking it to monetary and financial policies of the 1920s. By comparatively analysing the economic policies of interwar liberal Britain and fascist Italy, the book shows how austerity worked as a set of fiscal, monetary and industrial mechanisms, with the common goal for economists in those countries to reimpose capitalist relations of production where they were gravely endangered. This essay will demonstrate how Mattei revives and updates the class interpretation of neoliberalism and to what extent it makes a compelling contribution to the field of global history.

The State’s Friendly Face? Post-2013 Egyptian Exiles and Turkey’s Exceptional Legal Tools

By Elsayed E. Abdelhamid. Turkey’s selective approach to regularizing displaced Egyptians, initially as diplomatic leverage and later as a gesture of goodwill, fundamentally shaped their everyday lives and future prospects. The use of exceptional legal measures, such as presidential decrees and discretionary citizenship policies, not only reflected Turkey’s shifting foreign policy interests but also created spaces for forced migrants to negotiate their legal status through community mobilization and “everyday diplomacy.”

“I learned that academia could be a shared path” – 5in10 with Ido Fuchs

Ido Fuchs is a Ph.D. candidate in the Program for Comparative Literature at Tel Aviv University. He is also an Associated EUME Doctoral Fellow for the academic year 2024/2025 at the Forum Transregionale Studien and a Visiting Scholar at the Utrecht University Network for Environmental Humanities for Spring 2025. His project, Writing Returns, studies the poetics of return in Palestinian literature, focusing on questions of gender, anti/post-colonialism, and world literature. His second project, tentatively titled The Atmosphere of Doomsday, brings together research on colonialism, violence, apocalyptic discourses, and contemporary cultural production in Palestine/Israel. His works, deriving from both projects, have appeared or are forthcoming in journals such as Interventions, Biography, Theoretical Practice, Mafte’akh, and Bezalel.

Tensions Over Participation: How Inclusive are Renewable Energy Partnerships Between the EU and Maghreb Countries?

By Philipp Wagner. Energy transitions have become a key process around the globe to decarbonise economies in response to climate change. Structural transformations such as the expansion of renewable energy infrastructures are not free of conflict since they are deeply entangled with questions of distribution, access, and participation. To illustrate this, the following essay aims to intervene in the debate on renewable energy partnerships between the EU and Maghreb states with concrete policy evaluations and recommendations. It aims to unravel the forms of participation and political exclusions in these processes: What is at stake is the place of local communities and citizens in the energy transitions of the Maghreb.