Razan Ghazzawi’s research focuses on everyday queer and trans encounters at checkpoints, prisons, and queer asylum in the contexts of “war on terror” and the “refugee crisis”. Razan is a EUME Fellow in the academic year 22/23 and they are a former prisoner of the Syrian state and an award winner of Frontline Defender in 2012.
By Friederike Pannewick. This essay focuses on a Syrian author who spent most of the 1980s in self-imposed silence: the dramatist Saadallah Wannous (1941-1997). This internationally acclaimed author belonged to a generation of Arab intellectuals and artists whose artistic self-understanding was strongly molded by the Palestine conflict. Deeply concerned about the political consequences of the Israel-Egypt unilateral peace treaty on Palestinians, Wannous stopped writing literature for a whole decade after Egyptian president Sadat’s visit to Israel in fall 1977.
By Natasha Klimenko. On April 13th, 2022, I spoke to Sasha Kurmaz, an artist from Kyiv who now lives in Ivano-Frankivsk, a city in western Ukraine. When we started the interview, he told me to keep one thing in mind: “If the air raid siren goes off, I’ll have to close everything and go”.
The artist Alevtina Kakhidze lives not far from Kyiv. She was active in the Maidan protests, and her performance for Manifesta 2014, in St. Petersburg, focused on the war in Eastern Ukraine. She speaks about the role of artists in conflicts, what happens to morality during war, and when it is acceptable to be a pacifist.
By Ulf Engel. Contemporary conflicts in Ethiopia are overshadowed by the ongoing war between the government of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed on the one hand and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front on the other. Between 1991 and 2018 both parties were partners in a Tigray dominated coalition front which finally failed to impose its hegemonic nation-building project on the multi-ethnic country.
Aymen Amayed is an independent Tunisian researcher based in Tunis. He is currently contributing to a research project about margins and marginality at the Department of Conflict and Development Studies at Ghent University. The interview was conducted during André Weißenfels’ MECAM fellowship on a research tour through different oases in Southern Tunisia.
By Ulf Engel The new special issue “Africa’s Transregional Conflicts” of the journal Comparativ. Zeitschrift für Globalgeschichte und vergleichende Gesellschaftsforschung (Journal for Global History and Comparative Research on Societies) addresses...
Part of the TRAFO series “Reconstructing Neighborhoods of War” By Kevin Mazur Predatory capitalism and central authorities’ acts of misrule feature prominently in accounts of contestation, violence, and reconstruction in...
An Introduction to the TRAFO series “Reconstructing Neighborhoods of War” By Birgit Schäbler The blog series that is about to start with this contribution assembles the presentations of the 3-day...
In this interview the celebrated Lebanese comics artist and illustrator Zeina Abirached talks with Rasha Chatta (EUME Fellow 2017–19) about the sources of inspiration for her work. Beirut has been...
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).
ISSN: 2199-2134
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