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Author: Forum Transregionale Studien

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.

A man with dark hair wearing a blue suit jacket and a white shirt.

re:constitution / Rule of Law Reflections

The European Union’s Democratic Turn

By Matteo Bonelli. The “constitutional backsliding” crisis in the European Union started almost fifteen years ago. Since then, EU institutions have sought to address and reverse backsliding processes in the Member States with a variety of tools, initiatives and strategies. This article argues that we are witnessing a “democratic turn” in EU initiatives to protect and promote EU values. This democratic turn complements, but does not replace, the initiatives developed in the last decade to strengthen the rule of law in the EU and the Member States, as well as the Union’s fundamental rights policy that has even earlier roots.

A woman standing on a staircase, surrounded by books and magazines.

5in10 / EUME

Humanities scholars have the ability and responsibility to bridge clashing worldviews – 5in10 with Hanan Natour

Hanan Natour is a German-Palestinian scholar of Arabic and Comparative Literature and a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Queen Mary University of London, where she contributes to the UKRI-funded project “Digital Al-Andalus: Radical Perspectives Of and Through Al-Andalus”. Hanan obtained her PhD in Arabic and Literary Studies with a thesis on modern Tunisian fiction at Freie Universität Berlin, co-supervised at the University of Oxford (2024). During her PhD, she served as a Research Associate to the ERC-funded project “PalREAD – The Reading and Reception of Palestinian Literature from 1948 to the Present” where she explored literary networks between the Maghreb and Mashreq.

Tall palm trees behind dense green reeds under a partly cloudy sky.

MECAM / Reviews

Mysticism and the City: Temporality, Spatiality, Culture, and Society

By Miriam Hanses. Mysticism and Sufism are often portrayed as historical and spiritual traditions detached from present-day realities. The MECAM Traveling Academy “Mysticism and the City: Temporality, Spatiality, Culture, and Society”, held in Gabès, challenged this perspective by addressing present-day dynamics.The question of how mystical traditions continue to shape urban life in the Maghreb and beyond today, particularly in contexts marked by crisis, marginalization, and heritage politics, was at the heart of the Academy.

Three figures in historical clothing with one holding a child and another raising a hand, a small flag with text in the upper right corner.

Issues

A Global Perspective on the German History of Race: Iberian Roots and Colonial Entanglements

By Adrian Masters and Moritz Herrmann. The purpose of Project GloVib is to investigate the global history of racial categorization. Our point of departure is the thesis that racism and racial thinking in the German-speaking world should not be understood as autochthonous developments. Rather, the categories and practices of human differentiation emerged through the political, economic, and intellectual integration of the German territories into European—and especially Iberian—expansion. Through the global circulation of people and ideas, Iberian notions of natural hierarchies, “purity,” and “mixture” were introduced into the German-speaking world at an early stage.