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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 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.

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.

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.

A crowd of people at a street protest holding rainbow flags and signs.

Issues

When Gender Identity Becomes State Certification

By Bhavya Johari. On March 30, 2026, a day before International Transgender Day of Visibility and five months after India secured its seventh term on the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) for 2026-2028, the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Amendment Act received Presidential assent. The Amendment replaces self-determination with mandatory certification by medical boards. This potentially invalidates the legal recognition of thousands of individuals who obtained certificates under the self-identification framework. The paradox this exposes is foundational: States can systematically violate norms while occupying positions meant to uphold them.

A grafitti of a group of protesters holding signs and flags.

Areas and Disciplines / Issues

Systems of Conflictivity

By Andréa Gill. In places where violence functions as the norm sustaining systemic inequalities – and, hence, not as a moment of exception or as the occasional breakdown of order – it becomes necessary to reconceive the peace and conflict archives in ways which take into account structural insecurity and socio-economic precarisation. From the perspective of postcolonies, we can perceive the multiple and imbricated ways in which conflict springs from the inequality embedded in relations of power. The concept of ‘systems of conflictivity’ enables us to grasp, then, the determinants of violence as a continuum in a manner which linear causality (of periodisation and events) fails to do so.

A Renaissance painting of hell by Hieronymus Bosch.

EUME / Issues

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.

Issues

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."

Areas and Disciplines / Issues

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.

EUME / Issues

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.