By Fatemeh Shams. In this article, the author reflects on seemingly disconnected events, such as “the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban” (2021), the rise of the “Women Life Freedom” Movement in Iran (2022) and the ongoing war in Gaza, under the lens of transnational feminist solidarity.
By Aleksandra Ancite-Jepifánova. Recent years have seen an increase in the violation of asylum-seeker rights in the EU, including through so-called pushbacks. These practices have typically not been authorised by domestic legislation and have been denied or concealed by the relevant Member States. However, this changed with the crisis at the EU-Belarus border that has unfolded since summer 2021.
By Paniz Musawi Natanzi. Following the military invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, private universities in Kabul became sites of marketisation and models for other cities in the country. In the process of neoliberal transformation, gender mainstreaming was a key cross-sectoral tool, intersecting foreign development and military policies, which included higher education. Funding for the development of university degree programmes and scholarships in gender studies came with conditions of adhering to an anti-social political and epistemological understanding of gender that builds on expanding “individualisation and financialisation”, while claiming to serve communities through entrepreneurialism. The hegemony of finance under neoliberal imperialism, the current manifestation of capitalism and process of empire-building, in sites of military and humanitarian-developmental intervention, reconfigured social, political, economic and epistemological structures also through the university. A critical analysis.
By Fatemeh Shams. On 15 August 2021, Kabul fell to the Taliban, after twenty years of US-led military occupation. As the situation escalated over the following days and weeks, harrowing footage of airport stampedes, Taliban violence, protestors, chaos, and panic dominated the news. Four months later, the news cycle may have quietened, but the crisis in Afghanistan intensifies every day.
This article is part of the TRAFO Series “The ‘1979 Moment’ in the Middle East”. By Amir Moosavi On June 15-16, 2017, in the framework of Europe in the Middle...
This article is part of the TRAFO series ‘Emerging Topics. Insights from ‘Behind the Scenes’. Today, we put the spotlight on the workshop “Reading the ‘1979 Moment’ in the Middle...
TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research is a platform for scholars in the humanities and social sciences who are interested in transregional exchange and research on current issues. TRAFO is the blog of the Forum Transregionale Studien (Berlin) and the Max Weber Stiftung – Deutsche Geisteswissenschaftliche Institute im Ausland (Bonn).
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