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Tagged: globalisation

Beyond “Alternative Globalization” in Socialist Eastern Europe: A Critique of the Concept

By Béla Tomka. Research on the globalization of socialist Eastern Europe has become a thriving field within international historiography over the past decade. At the same time, scholars have made ambitious efforts to develop new conceptual tools for identifying the distinctive features of globalization in socialist Eastern Europe. Some of these new concepts go beyond just examining the transnational ties of socialist states — they also make broader claims about globalization itself by suggesting that globalization is not a single, uniform process but rather one that unfolds in distinct, segmented ways. The approach of “alternative globalization” introduces a profoundly new way of thinking about the topic by reshaping how we understand the dynamics and chronology of globalization in the region.

Ghost Writers of Upper Egypt: A Paradigm Shift in Archaeological Knowledge Production

By Wendy Doyon. Within the global archive of archaeology created by the past two centuries of excavation in the Middle East and North Africa, a significant portion of archival documents, notes, and photos form a shadow archive of Middle Eastern history. It documents the knowledge transfer, techniques, craftsmanship, apprenticeship, material studies, and linguistic community of Arabic-speaking co-producers of archaeological knowledge. Rayyis Sayyid Ahmad Sayyid Dirāz and his family are the “Ghost Writers” par excellence of Upper Egypt. Their first-hand narrative of excavation over thirty years of work in the field is the best documented example we have of the fundamentally multilingual process of archaeological knowledge production in Egypt and Sudan.

Branding the Middle East: Communication Strategies and Image Building from Qom to Casablanca

In this article, Steffen Wippel presents his newest book (De Gruyter, 2023) on communication strategies and image building employed by governments and corporations across the MENA region. Through them, the credibility of state narratives, the position of the rulers in power, as well as the respective nation brands, have been strenghtened. This development has been paralleled by growing academic interest and conceptual elaboration.

Training as a Gatekeeper at the Indo-German Factory

By Josefine Carla Hoffmann. Vocational education and training was an important part of Indo-German technical collaboration from the mid-1950s onwards. Companies and other institutions all over India collaborated with the West German state and its companies, rhetorically stressing the priority of skilling the workforce, amongst other things.

100 Histories of 100 Worlds in one Object

This article is part of the TRAFO series “Emerging Topics. Insights from ‘Behind the Scenes’”. Today, we put the spotlight on the Explorative Workshop “100 Histories of 100 World in one...

Maras and the Darker Sides of Globalization

By Marlon Carranza In 2006 Arjun Appadurai published his book Fear of Small Numbers: an Essay of the Geography of Anger, to evaluate “the darker sides of globalization” (p.3). Appadurai’s...