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Category: Issues

What are current issues, ideas, themes or concerns that merrit transregional debate and exchange, and why? Issues offers an opportunity to introduce, report, explain and contextualize academic events, new and ongoing projects. For more information see Contributions.

A Renaissance painting of hell by Hieronymus Bosch.

Cynical Uses of Suffering: Gaza, Antisemitism, & the New Digital Right

By Aya Labanieh. During the pandemic, the landscape of the Anglophone Internet, especially in North America, drifted rightward—rewarding influencers who churned out pandemic disinformation and conspiracy theories with high engagement, fame, and easy income. The popular term online for such a person is a “grifter”: someone who betrays their convictions, political or otherwise, for material gain, transforming what they claim to believe based on what is trending or what sells. While one can never be sure what a particular influencer truly believes, especially since many content-creators became as radicalized as their own audiences during lockdown, grifters can serve as useful indicators of where money can be made online.

An abstract mural with multiple circular faces and geometric shapes in black, gray, and yellow on a textured wall.

An Anguished Debate Among Iranians

By Nahid Siamdoust. There is no precedent in the modern Middle East — or for that matter anywhere — for a war producing a quick and clean democratic outcome, as the architects of this one implied in their promises. The complete dismantling of a functioning state, however brutal and however widely despised, without any credible plan for what follows, will not produce democracy by miracle, but ruins by design. The division that has emerged — between those Iranians who will not support a war on their own country and those who have, through suffering and desperation, arrived at support for the war — is real and painful and will not be resolved easily.

Old black and white photograph of a group of people sitting on a conference table under a sign saying "How noice it is to meet our brothers! Vive le cameroun unifié."

Colonialities of Power and Peace in Cameroon

By Nicanor Tatchim. This article makes the case that the militarised model of peace favoured in the discourse around Cameroon’s Anglophone crisis falls within a hegemonic, liberal/Western conception of peace shaped by the coloniality of power. This top-down perspective makes no space for a pluriversal dialogue, which is essential for resolving the crisis. Drawing on the concepts of decolonial peace and coloniality (of power), the article outlines several pathways for enshrining peace in Cameroon – and in Africa more broadly – within African peoples’ systems of values and knowledge. The core argument is that lasting peace in Cameroon and other conflicts on the continent requires a decolonial and Indigenous approach to peace.

A group of women dressed in black dances while holding colorful handkerchiefs.

Iran: A Nation Inscribed Anew in Joyful Mourning

By Nahid Siamdoust. These days in Iran people are marking the 40th day after the passing of the thousands who were killed in the January 2026 protests, an Islamic tradition that symbolizes the closure of the mourning period. Reports and videos from the country show hundreds of people gathered, clapping in honor of the dead and singing the national anthem, in unconventional ceremonies that are more akin to political events than personal commemorations. In rejecting long entrenched traditions of collective mourning, these Iranians are enacting a new articulation of national identity, one that refuses to trade in the same language of the Islamic Republic.

Old black-and-white photo of three people, from left to right: A man with glasses wearing an uniform and a black hat, a boy with short hair, an older boy in the same uniform and hat.

Memoirs of a Palestinian Communist

By Najati Sidqi, Introduction by Margaret Litvin. In the opening chapter of his posthumously published memoir, the activist and intellectual Najati Sidqi (1905–1979) reminisces about the cultural heterogeneity of his birthplace Jerusalem. In 1924, he became one of its first Arab members of the Palestine Communist Party (PCP). The PCP rejected both British imperial rule and Zionism, which they considered “a bourgeois movement that benefited only wealthy Jews. They insisted that their party, which “was for all inhabitants of Palestine,” could “reconcile the interests of the working classes” of Jews and Arabs alike.

A group of scholars in front of a brown building with a sign reading "Innovation and Entrepreneurship Centre".

Disrupting the Knowledge Trap ‒ Early-Career Researchers and the Global South as Agents of Epistemic Change

By Natália Bueno, Roberta Holanda Maschietto, and Sarah Njeri. This entry questions the foundations of knowledge production in Peace and Conflict Studies by advocating an incremental movement that adopts a bottom-up and inside-out approach. Specifically, we argue that, with support, early-career researchers (ECRs) from the Global South can be pollinators, spreading new knowledge production methods across ECR groups globally and scaling up to engage mid- and senior-level researchers. This is essential for the progression of better, more inclusive knowledge production worldwide.

A mural showing Baschar al-Assad holding a sign that reads "Syrial killer".

Staying With Uncertainty: Syrian Intellectual Life in Germany

By Anne-Marie McManus. In a recent essay published by Reset Dialogues on Civilizations, Elizabeth Suzanne Kassab called on scholars to attend closely to the forms and concerns that shape contemporary Arab thought, locating its newness in the uprisings of 2011 and the ruptures that followed. In his response, included in the broader dossier, Samer Frangie cautioned that the category of “Arab thought” functions as a “historiographical device,” one that has brought together “dispersed, contradictory, and elusive acts of” intellectual production under a shared political horizon.

Colorful graffiti showing a blue flower in the center.

“Revolution has become more conceivable today”

By Nahid Siamdoust. For four decades, the Islamic Republic has systematically repressed internal opposition: targeting civil, labour and women’s rights activists through imprisonment, exile and violence, leaving Iran without a structured political alternative. Nevertheless, Iranians have risen up several times in nationwide protests to demand more rights and freedom. Is Iran’s regime at a breaking point? The economic crisis is central to the recent protests, argues EUME-Fellow Nahid Siamdoust. She assesses the significance of the recent uprising, examines its potential leaders and outlines five possible scenarios for what comes next.

Six men listening to the portable radios in their hands, looking happy.

UnArchive: Sonic Materialities and Sound Media of Migration

By Nazan Maksudyan. The cultural history of labor migration is a well-established field with a rich body of scholarship. However, the production of everyday life by labor migrants through sonic means, and the sound cultures shaped by experiences of displacement, have received comparatively little attention. In this short intervention, following Tom Western, I argue that sound is a central dimension in understanding and representing migration, making it necessary to integrate sound studies into migration history. I further emphasize the audibility of migration and propose that it is possible both to listen to and listen with migration.

Electric Istanbul

In her research project, EUME Fellow Nurçin İleri traces the electrification of Istanbul during the transition from the Ottoman Empire to the modern Turkish nation state. She examines how, where and by whom electrical energy was generated and how it was distributed. In doing so, she shows how the electricity grid spread around the Bosphorus with street lights and electric trams, creating new social and political interdependencies and permanently changing the everyday lives of many Istanbulites.