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Category: Reviews

Reviews introduce new books, articles, special issues of journals, films, exhibitions, and music recordings that are of interest within the field of transregional studies. For more information see Contributions.

Tall palm trees behind dense green reeds under a partly cloudy sky.

MECAM / Reviews

Mysticism and the City: Temporality, Spatiality, Culture, and Society

By Miriam Hanses. Mysticism and Sufism are often portrayed as historical and spiritual traditions detached from present-day realities. The MECAM Traveling Academy “Mysticism and the City: Temporality, Spatiality, Culture, and Society”, held in Gabès, challenged this perspective by addressing present-day dynamics.The question of how mystical traditions continue to shape urban life in the Maghreb and beyond today, particularly in contexts marked by crisis, marginalization, and heritage politics, was at the heart of the Academy.

A group of people sitting at a table, listening to a speaker outside of the frame.

Reviews

Soviet Paradoxes: A Day of Investigation

By Veronica Marcinschi. Communism promised to resolve the dilemma of reconciling the core modern value of equality with cultural and sociological diversity, yet was in a sense dissolved by it. What can the communist experience teach us about the nature and historical evolution of political modernity, and about the fundamental dilemmas of modern society? The conference “National Internationalism? Nation, Race, and Class in the Soviet Sphere” at Bard College Berlin discussed such questions.

A group of people sitting in a conference room, listening to a presentation.

Reviews

Are Migrants’ Rights (still) Human Rights? Protection & Exclusion amid the Crisis of Liberalism in the Americas

By Farid Dabour. In February 2026, scholars from Latin America and Europe met at the Latin American Institute of Freie Universität Berlin for the workshop Are Migrants’ Rights (still) Human Rights? Protection & Exclusion amid the Crisis of Liberalism in the Americas, organized by Professor Luisa Feline Freier (FU Berlin) and the Department of Political Science. The conference focused on a timely question: what happens to migrants’ rights when liberal democracies are under pressure, hemispheric orders are shifting, and the authority of human rights institutions is increasingly contested?

A group of students sitting in a seminar room while a woman presents in the front.

Prisma Ukraïna / Reviews

Debates over Cultural Phenomena

By Laura Schmidt, Lisa Schmidt, and Sofie Leubert. On December 10, 2025, the geography course of the 11th grade at Walther-Rathenau-Gymnasium in Berlin, focusing on the central themes of home, integration, and inclusion, visited the nearby Forum Transregionale Studien for a workshop entitled “Debates over Cultural Phenomena.” The workshop was organized and led by the Ukrainian sociologists Viktoriya Sereda and Lidia Kuzemska and focused on the complexities of multicultural societies and the challenges they are facing today.

The skyline of Tunis in front of a cloudy sky.

Areas and Disciplines / Reviews

Re-thinking Peace and Conflict Studies in a Postcolonial World

By Miriam Bartelmann, Viviana García Pinzón, and Fabricio Rodríguez. The conference Re-thinking Peace and Conflict Studies in a Postcolonial World took place in Tunis in October 2025, marking the culmination of four years of collaborative research, while opening a space for collective reflection on the network’s contributions to the field. The discussions addressed the deep relationship between knowledge production and global hierarchies, showing that rethinking peace and conflict studies necessarily entails confronting the field’s epistemic foundations while remaining attentive to geopolitical developments, uneven power relations and the political economies affecting it.

Two pictures on exposed brick wall, showing objects of the Pergamon Museum in boxes.

BEYONDREST / Reviews

Berlin Museums Set To Return Everything

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.

Colourfull streetart.

MECAM / Reviews

“Is there a Moroccan Thought?”

By Idriss Jebari. The question “Is there a Moroccan Thought?” drives the recent volume Contemporary Moroccan Thought by Mohamed Hashas (University of Rome Tor Vergata), published earlier this year by Brill. This review focusses on Hashas’s introductory essay titled “Rabat School of Thought: Tradition, Modernity, and Critique from the Edge.” At over 120 pages, it could represent a book in its own right. It contains the editor’s original and provocative answer to the above-mentioned question. In the following six points, I explore how it might be received by its different publics, and suggest the volume’s possible aftermaths.

A person presenting in front of a room.

EUTIM / Reviews

Theorie und Geschichte der „Kleinen Literaturen“

Von Erik Martin. Vom 25. bis 27. Juni 2025 richtete die Europa-Universität Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder) im Rahmen des Projekts „Europäische Zeiten/European Times“ (EUTIM) einen Workshop zu Fragen der Theorie und Geschichte der „Kleinen Literaturen“ aus. Die von Claudia Dathe, Oksana Pashko, Schamma Schahadat und Annette Werberger organisierte Veranstaltung brachte Literaturwissenschaftler·innen mit Expertise in ukrainischer, jiddischer, polnischer, rumänischer und bosnisch-herzegowinischer Literatur(-geschichte) zusammen, um über die Konzeptualisierung, die ästhetischen Strategien und historischen Entwicklungen sogenannter „kleiner Literaturen“ zu diskutieren.

Part of the book cover.

Conversations / EUME / Reviews

Dust That Never Settles: Literary Afterlives of the Iran-Iraq War – A Conversation with Amir Moosavi

Amir Moosavi in conversation with Anne-Marie McManus. In his book “Dust That Never Settles: Literary Afterlives of the Iran-Iraq War”, Moosavi explores the massive literary output of the Iran-Iraq War, choosing a comparative approach: In contrasting Iranian and Iraqi writers, it shows the common experiences of war and writing under authoritarian regimes as well as the writers’ various entanglements with this war that overlapped and diverged over time.

Old photograph of a boy, above it a rubber stamp.

Reviews

Witnessing Witnessing – On the Role of Art and its Audience in Times of Violence

By Judith Sieber. With the thematic focus “Witnessing Witnessing”, the European Media Art Festival (EMAF) 2025 took up the question of second degree witnessing “to explore the role of witnesses today, how testimonies – like statements, documents, individual objects or entire archives – shape our view of the world and how they can influence political reality.” This text is not a review of the festival – both the plurality of approaches and the political discussions that took place were far too complex. Rather, it is an attempt to think along the line of three of the films shown and to try to explore the meaning of witnessing in the current moment. The author takes a look at three films – “Das falsche Wort” (English The Lie, 1987) by Katrin Seybold and Melanie Spitta, “Empty Metal” (2018), a feature film directed by Adam Khalil and Bayley Sweitzer, and “Vents Violents” (Two letters to Chantal Akerman) from 2025.