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By Yuliia Kravchenko. The history of Soviet camps contains little-known yet inspiring pages from the lives of political prisoners. One of them is the story of the humanity and dignity demonstrated by dissidents, against which the repressive system was powerless. In particular, it shows how the relationships between Ukrainians and Jews in the camps challenged the authoritarian system. Their mutual…
By Nora Lafi. Writing a decolonial history of the Mediterranean is a collective endeavor that requires analyzing past configurations of coloniality on the ground, in society and in the books, as well as the relationship between all that. This inevitably implies a severe process of deconstruction. An inclusive historiographical approach and a methodological reflection has, in my opinion, to start…
By Maria Grynevych. In this piece, Maria Grynevych explores the question: What does it mean to be at once the beneficiary of an exceptional protection regime and someone who feels that exception as a weight – something to be justified, measured against others’ losses, and where possible refused? The condition has a deliberately uncomfortable name: privileged refugeehood.
By Edwin Mutyenyoka. In this piece, Mutyenyoka examines the paradoxical reality of post-Apartheid South Africa, where a state founded on human rights and Pan-African solidarity now actively scapegoats and discriminates against migrants. The state enables xenophobia through three interconnected actions: neoliberal economic policies and corruption that cripple public services, the securitization of…
By Raquel Rojas Scheffer. Housewives’ and domestic workers’ organisations have been present in Latin America for decades. These groups not only perform – at least to a certain extent – the same kinds of tasks. They also tend to share an interest in the valorisation of domestic work: If this activity were recognised as work, housewives could claim retirement rights, while domestic workers would be…
By Cristina Moreno Almeida and Hanan Natour. What do we really mean when we speak of “Al-Andalus”? Was medieval Iberia a model of coexistence, a lost paradise, or something far more complex? How do historians find people and ideas that barely appear in the official record? And how do political and cultural actors today reach back to remember, romanticise, or instrumentalise the medieval past for…
Olha Haidamachuk in Conversation with Denys Shatalov. In this piece, Olha Haidamachuk and Denys Shatalov discuss the question: What historiographical misunderstandings could the frontier theory reveal when applied to the study of the Ukrainian Cossacks as a border phenomenon? To do so, they engage with scholarly approaches to Ukrainian history throughout the centuries, parsing myth and reality in…
Maria Josua in Conversation with Diana Abbani, Souhir Zekri Masson, Maxine Rubin, and Andreas Ufen. Scholars working with and on the world regions in the Global South face a dilemma of doing fieldwork and researching in local languages and then publishing results in international outlets dominated by the English language. In this conversation based on the roundtable, we reflect on this tension…
By Ahmed Adam. This paper examines the educational experience in Sudan from 2023 until the present. In 2023, with the outbreak of the civil war, the Sudanese universities completely ceased operations. In this text, Adam explores the innovative ways Sudanese educators and students continue university education during times of war and what this means for education, community and contribution of…
By Anna Skiba. How do Ukrainian individuals and organisations in Germany and Norway negotiate what memory and identity to preserve, emphasise, or make visible under conditions of displacement? How does the historical memory context of the host country shapes what is available to them as they do so? The experiences of Ukrainian DPs in Flossenbürg offer an interesting point of comparison here,…
