Digital resources in the Social Sciences and Humanities OpenEdition Our platforms OpenEdition Books OpenEdition Journals Hypotheses Calenda Libraries OpenEdition Freemium Follow us

Category: MECAM

Sign reading "Projet de sauvegarde et de valorisation de la baie de cocody".

Southward Bound: Maghrebi Entrepreneurs and the Making of Real Intra-African Trade Corridors

By Youssef Cherif. In recent years, a new migratory dynamic has emerged in Africa: the movement of Maghrebi entrepreneurs toward sub-Saharan Africa. This is a development that remains largely underexplored, despite its growing significance. While most public and scholarly attention has focused on the northbound migration of West Africans or the outward mobility of North Africans toward Europe, the southward shift of North African entrepreneurs—particularly from Tunisia and Morocco—offers a window into how regional economic integration is already happening, from below.

A statue in front of a building.

Precolonial Memory, Postcolonial Critique: Ibn Khaldun in Tunisian Arabic Fiction of the 21st Century

By Hanan Natour. As part of this publication series on the decolonial Mediterranean, focusing on Tunisian literature serves as a gateway to creative engagements with the country’s significant geography. Tunisian literature links to the region in several directions — it is part of North African literature and modern Arabic literature. Grounded in the violent experience of colonialism, it also finds multiple ways of engaging with French literature from the other end of the Mediterranean Sea.

Street sign reading "Academic Freedom Rd" in front of greenery

Academic Freedom and Knowledge Production in Ghana: An Interview with Chika C. Mba

In this conversation, MIASA Academic Coordinator Dr. Agnes Schneider-Musah interviews Dr. Chika Mba, Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of African Studies at the University of Ghana and MIASA’s Principal Investigator for Human Rights, on issues concerning Academic Freedom and Knowledge Production in Ghana. They touch on the state of Academic Freedom in Ghana, the history of Ghanaian universities and the necessity of a decolonial approach in science.

Participants of the policy talk.

Bridging the Maghreb-Sahel Divide in Policy and Research: Take-aways from the MECAM Policy Talk 2025

By Clara-Auguste Süß, André Bank & Julius Dihstelhoff. In an era shaped by global crises, geopolitical realignments, and socio-economic transformation, strengthening partnerships between the Maghreb, the Sahel, and European counterparts is no longer optional. The Merian Centre for Advanced Studies in the Maghreb (MECAM) dedicated this year’s edition of its Policy Talk to exploring the nexus between the Maghreb and Sahel. The event’s theme “Entanglements between Maghreb and Sahel: Navigating Shared Challenges through Cooperation” aligned with MECAM’s guiding focus on “Imagining Futures: Dealing with Disparity”. Designed to connect academic analysis with policy dialogue, the event aimed to support informed political decision-making, deepen cooperation, and enhance MECAM’s visibility within Berlin’s political landscape.

Displaced from the Future: Crossing the Sea Back to Syria in Nesrine Khoury’s Speculative Novel Wadi Qandil

By Annamaria Bianco. In the late 1990s, the establishment of the border-free Schengen Area within the newly formed European Union was counterbalanced by sudden restrictions on the granting of visas to citizens of third countries. The novel Wadi Qandil (Wādī Qandīl), published in 2023 by the Spain-based writer and poet Nesrine Khoury, falls into the subcategory of “refugee futurism”. It contributes to the rewriting of the contemporary Mediterranean imaginary, proposing a heterotopic vision of this dual space at the time of the so-called migratory crisis.

The Hour of Absinthe: A Cultural History of France’s Most Notorious Drink – A Conversation with Nina Studer

Diana Abbani in Conversation with Nina Studer. In her book “The Hour of Absinthe: A Cultural History of France’s Most Notorious Drink”, Studer explores the history of absinthe through the lenses of cultural, social, and colonial history. She uses absinthe as a lens which allows to look at racial inequalities, gender inequalities, class inequalities and more. She is led by the question how a consumption shared between various groups – men, women and children, bourgeoisie, artists and working classes, colonizers and colonized – could be viewed and interpreted as having vastly different consequences, depending on both a person’s belonging to one of these groups and to behaviors associated to these groups.

Kira Jumet & Merouan Mekouar’s “Doing Research as a Native: A Guide for Fieldwork in Illiberal and Repressive States” – Reflections from a MECAM Workshop

By Charlotte Fiedler. At a recent event held as part of MECAM‘s “Rencontre Ibn Khadun” series, Dr. Kira Jumet (Associate Professor of Government at Hamilton College (USA)) and Dr. Merouan Mekouar (Associate Professor at York University (Canada)) presented and discussed their book “Doing research as a native: A guide for fieldwork in illiberal and repressive states”, which has recently been published by Oxford University Press. The edited volume brings together fascinating fieldwork accounts from social science and humanities researchers (spanning anthropology, sociology and political science amongst others) who conducted fieldwork in their 15 repressive and/or illiberal home countries across the world.

Reclaiming Movement: Hayet Amamou on the Maghreb’s Mobile Past and Future

Hayet Amamou in Conversation with Julius Dihstelhoff. Prof. Amamou argues that precolonial patterns of mobility—not rigid territoriality—forged the Maghreb’s identity. Her work challenges modern narratives of exclusion, insisting that historical connectivity, not isolation, holds the key to reimagining the region’s future. Amamou’s work aligns with MECAM’s mission to “imagine futures” by confronting historical erasures. Her keynote underscored that the Maghreb’s precolonial mobility was “a negotiated order, not chaos”—one that offers alternatives to today’s exclusionary policies.

Reading Public Space through Masculinities in a Maghrebian Context – 5in10 with Khadidja Boussaid

Khadidja Boussaïd holds a Ph.D. in Urban Sociology from the University of Algiers 2 and is a senior researcher at CREAD (Research Center for Applied Economics for Development). She is part of a research team focused on the socio-economic dynamics of families, with a particular emphasis on the transformations of gender identities within Algerian households, but also focusing on the issue of Gender inequalities to access to public space. She is a short-term fellow at MECAM (Merian Centre for advanced studies in the Maghreb, Tunis University), where she is conducting a study about urban public space and its reading through masculinities in a North African context. Khadidja Boussaïd is accredited to supervise research (HDR) and is a member of the LASADET Laboratory (Socio-Anthropological Analysis of Territorial Development). She is also an associate member of the Gender Studies Center (CEG) at the University of Lausanne, contributing to research on the intersection of gender, space, and power.

Not Lost in Translation: Textbook Exploring Arabic Studies in 21st-century Germany

Clara-Auguste Süß in Conversation with Anis Ben Amor and Christian Junge. On 19 November 2024, MECAM hosted a Rencontre Ibn Khaldun in Arabic, an event format designed to share research findings with the wider public and foster open, inclusive debate. The event was organized in cooperation with the Arab-German Young Academy of Sciences and Humanities (AGYA). Dr. Christian Junge and Dr. Anis Ben Amor led a discussion on Arabic Studies in 21st-century Germany. They presented their collaborative translation project of the German-language textbook “Arabistik. Eine literatur- und kulturwissenschaftliche Einführung” (English: Arabic Studies: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Studies”) and highlighted approaches, methodologies and challenges in the field.