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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.

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.

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.

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.

Breaking Bias: Training Judges to Challenge Gender Stereotypes in Courts

By Beate Streicher. As part of her re:constitution project, Beate Streicher investigated the impact of stereotypes related to gender identity and expression, sex characteristics and sexual orientation on judicial proceedings and decisions and identified key challenges and good practices related to judicial training on this topic. To provide practical recommendations, she examined the guidance of international monitoring bodies, responsible for monitoring the implementation of the Istanbul Convention, combined with insights from elite interviews with eight experts (six identifying as female and two as male) involved in Council of Europe (CoE) cooperation projects dealing with the topic and the respective courses from the Human Rights Education for Legal Professionals (HELP) Programme, including the HELP course on WAJ, violence against women and gender equality and gender mainstreaming.

Female Agency and Colonial Repression: Memory and Archives in Tunisia

By Nora Lafi. Reflecting on the role of women under colonialism crucially contributes to debates on how
to write the history thereof in contemporary Tunisia. Based on a corpus of original archives relating to French repression of women designated “rebels,” it is shown how a focus on women’s agency makes it possible to write the history of colonisation differently and to cast issues of memory in a new light.

Breaking Bias: Entry Points for Gender Stereotypes in Judicial Decision-Making

By Beate Streicher. As part of her re:constitution project, Beate Streicher investigated the impact of stereotypes related to gender identity and expression, sex characteristics and sexual orientation on judicial proceedings and decisions within the European context and beyond, applying an intersection perspective. The multimethod approach combined an analysis of key cases from the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) dealing with gender stereotypes, recommendations of international monitoring bodies such as the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) and the Group of Experts on Action against Violence against Women and Domestic Violence (GREVIO), and elite interviews with eight experts (six identifying as female and two as male) involved in CoE cooperation projects dealing with the topic such as the projects on Women’s Access to Justice (WAJ) and the respective courses from the Human Rights Education for Legal Professionals (HELP) Programme.

New Approaches to MENA Prison Literatures After 2011

By Anne-Marie McManus. In the past fifteen years, the mass relocation of prison survivors, families of the disappeared, activists, and cultural actors from MENA (the Middle East and North Africa) countries to Europe and North America has placed carceral experience at the heart of contemporary debates and cultural work. The hubs of the new MENA diasporas are in western Europe, but the numerous MENA writers, activists, artists, and former prisoners who are producing work on prison today are to be found globally, from the Gulf and Turkey to North America. This emerging body of work and activism on prison in the MENA is inextricably tied to ongoing struggles for justice for the detained, the tortured, and the disappeared.

Ghost Writers of Upper Egypt: A Paradigm Shift in Archaeological Knowledge Production

By Wendy Doyon. Within the global archive of archaeology created by the past two centuries of excavation in the Middle East and North Africa, a significant portion of archival documents, notes, and photos form a shadow archive of Middle Eastern history. It documents the knowledge transfer, techniques, craftsmanship, apprenticeship, material studies, and linguistic community of Arabic-speaking co-producers of archaeological knowledge. Rayyis Sayyid Ahmad Sayyid Dirāz and his family are the “Ghost Writers” par excellence of Upper Egypt. Their first-hand narrative of excavation over thirty years of work in the field is the best documented example we have of the fundamentally multilingual process of archaeological knowledge production in Egypt and Sudan.

„Ḥamā lam tamut” (“Hama did not die”) – Remembering the Hama Massacre after the Fall of the Assad Regime

By Anna Christina Scheiter. With the fall of the Assad regime in December 2024, the brutal violence with which the regime had held on to power for 54 years came increasingly and overwhelmingly into the public eye. The Hama massacre in February 1982 is a momentous example of this violence. This central and defining event of Assad’s rule, which was a strong taboo for decades and has never been discussed or dealt with publicly, is now openly and freely commemorated for the first time and the victims are mourning on the occasion of its 43rd anniversary in February 2025. Addressing the Assad regime’s atrocities of the last 54 years openly at last and seeking justice for its victims is central for social reconciliation and a basis for the establishment of a new collective identity after the end of the dictatorship.

“Affectueusement, Laila”: Being a Communist “Foreign” Woman in Post-colonial Egypt

By Rim Naguib. Naguib’s research surveys a process of securitization of nationality and foreigners’ residence, whereby the right to Egyptian nationality and to residence in Egypt were instrumentalized in the colonial and post-colonial policing of leftist internationalist ideas and movements. While analyzing state practice, Naguib also inquires into how this particular policing technique impacted the lives of individuals, and how those who were the most likely targets of deportation resisted their remov-al in different ways. The story of Noémie Canel is one such account.