Author: Forum Transregionale Studien
Eli Osheroff is a historian of the modern Middle East, with a focus on Arab political and intellectual history and the Arab-Zionist conflict. He holds a PhD from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Truman Institute, at the Jacob Robinson Institute at the Hebrew University, and in the Dan David Society of Fellows at Tel Aviv University. His first book, based on his doctoral dissertation, is forthcoming from the Van Leer Institute and deals with Arab political imagination from the late Ottoman period to 1948. The book focuses on Arab visions for an independent Palestine and the place of Jewish settlers in the future Arab state. Eli’s articles have appeared in the British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, the Israel-Palestine Review, and other venues.
By Rosa Ristawati. This post discusses selected decisions in which the Indonesian Constitutional Court attempted to conceptualize democracy more explicitly. The principles of democracy have included public participation in the open-proportional system of election, the open and fair contest of election (the simultaneous resources elections provide for political legitimacy and free competition), political inclusion (the elimination of threshold and minimum age judgment), and equal access to the political system (anti-discrimination standards for candidates). Ultimately, the Court’s discourse in these decisions leans towards formulating an obligation for democracy to give room and opportunity for all people without exceptions.
By Loes Hendriks, Çiçek İlengiz, Florence Potter and Judith Sieber. ‘Berlin Museums Set To Return Everything’ reviews a temporary exhibition of the Berlin Pergamon Museum, a glimpse into their year-long reconstruction phase, against the grain. The mock piece looks optimistically at the display of the exhibition that gives the impression that a critical reflection of the state of restitution in Germany has actually led to its logical solution: to finally return everything in order to arrive at the form of the decolonial museum.
By Valentina Golunova. On 12 November 2025, the European Commission presented its long-awaited Communication ‘European Democracy Shield: Empowering Strong and Resilient Democracies’. It promises to ‘reinforce the core elements that allow citizens to live our shared democratic values every day’ (European Commission, 2025c). To that end, the European Democracy Shield (EUDS) puts forward a broad spectrum of measures to strengthen the security and integrity of the European Union’s (EU) information ecosystem, particularly in the face of foreign interference.
Souhir Zekri holds a PhD in English Studies from the University of Strathclyde (Glasgow, Scotland) and currently teaches at the Higher Institute of Digital Engineering of Tunis (University of Tunis). Her main research areas include life writing theory, motherhood and gender studies, the Italian Diaspora in Scotland, and spatial theory. She also writes short stories and first-person testimonies in relation to gender and harassment. In the academic year 2025–26, Souhir is a MECAM Fellow, working on her project on traditional women singers in Tunisia.
By Miglė Bareikytė, Natasha Klimenko and Viktoriya Sereda. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 has swiftly spread through both social and traditional media on a global scale. Meanwhile, with the spread of widely available generative AI technologies and its misuse for strategic disinformation by authoritarian regimes like Russia, the future of visualising war and conflict zones seems poised for confusion and uncertainty. The aim of the dossier is to analyse the difficult and painful environments that have emerged in Ukraine in the aftermath of various legacies of violence, including Russia’s full-scale invasion.
By Mustapha Majidi. Over the past two decades, several renewable energy strategies and initiatives have been launched in Europe, many of which focus on exploiting and importing the renewable energy potential of the South. This study critically examines the main disadvantages of renewable energy project partnerships in the region, focusing on Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, which represent key actors in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) with ambitious and dynamic energy goals. It then analyses the structural imbalances in partnerships, arguing that cooperation in this sector remains largely tilted in favour of the North.
By Nurçin İleri. Early Republican discourse on hygiene-focused modernization in Turkey intersected with the visual and rhetorical representations of electric household appliances. Those appliances functioned less as everyday tools than as material and symbolic markers of an imagined modernity. Rather than reflecting local realities, they projected a normative vision of the future and of women’s roles in society and the household. While these technologies ostensibly eased women’s labor, they simultaneously disciplined it, making women both carriers and regulated figures of modernity.
Dalia Halabi is a sociologist of education who adopts a “study up” approach to critically examine educational and social disparities. She holds a PhD in Leadership and Policy in Education from the University of Haifa and an MA in Conflict Management and Mediation from Tel Aviv University. Her doctoral research explored the formation of elite identity among Palestinian students and alumni of private schools in Israel, analyzing how educational experiences shape distinction, belonging, and social trajectories within a context of national marginalization.
By Donatas Murauskas. The issue of civil unions for same-sex couples has long been one of the most contentious and sensitive topics in Lithuanian politics, reflecting deeper societal tensions. This changed on 17th April 2025, when, in a significant development, the Lithuanian Constitutional Court addressed the long-standing issue of legal recognition for same-sex and opposite-sex civil unions. This blog post examines how the Constitutional Court addressed one of the fundamental challenges of deliberative democracy in practice – value pluralism – which had stalled the Parliament for many years.