Forum Transregionale Studien | Veranstaltungen

Data Sovereignty and Transitional Justice in Syria

Wed, 13 May 2026 10:00:00 +0200

What does data – including its infrastructures, ownership norms, and archives – have to do with transitional justice? Since 2024, transitional justice has been at the forefront of academic and political conversations in and around Syria. Its pursuit has brought together a range of actors: newly-established national institutions, Syrian civil society organizations, local community groups, international NGOs, two UN-mandated institutions, and private sector actors. These diverse actors were established with equally diverse mandates and within a wide spectrum of social and political frameworks. Many have built digital infrastructures – formal and informal, housed inside and outside Syria -- that are governed by varying regulations and norms. Today, those infrastructures are crucial for the gathering, storage, and analysis of information for anticipated trials and accountability processes.

As data sovereignty initiatives and scholars across the world argue, no technical infrastructure is neutral (e.g., GIDA, Winner 1988, Benjamin 2019). Norms and infrastructures for data and its stewardship will also have a formative impact on political representation and its asymmetries, agency in knowledge production, property rights, and the forms of individual and collective memory in Syria.

This workshop invites an initial conversation with scholars and practitioners who wish to explore data sovereignty and stewardship within the framework of transitional justice in Syria. It turns a spotlight on the “how’s” of owning, storing, and sharing data on Syria today, as well as on ways to empower the constituencies most affected by the violence of the war years and their aftermath. It invites discussion across topics including: just norms and sustainable structures for storage and stewardship, community-led knowledge production, critical data literacy and rights, the weaponization of data for surveillance and extraction, and the role of corporate infrastructures (e.g., al-Khatib 2020).

It will begin with a short introduction from SYRASP and members of the Lab for the Study of Violence before opening to a general discussion with participants. Based on this, we will explore next steps for longer-term collaborations and for policy- and academic-facing publications.

“The Whole World Knows Our Struggle”: Music, Memory, and Palestinian Resistance in Berlin

Wed, 13 May 2026 17:00:00 +0200

On a cold Berlin night, at a time of increasing restrictions on Palestinian expression in the city, a Moroccan DJ played “Rajawi Filistini,” a song that emerged among football supporters in Casablanca and later circulated across stadiums, social media, and protests. A few months into the genocide in Gaza, its use that night was a gesture of solidarity and a political statement, carrying collective mourning, anger, and care. Starting from moments like this, the talk traces how Palestinian songs travel across places and contexts, from stadiums and online platforms to protests and underground clubs. As they move, they reach different audiences and enter everyday listening practices, where people hear them, repeat them, and give them new meanings. They also carry forms of expression that are not always possible elsewhere. It argues that music can be understood as a living archive, carrying past struggles into the present while shaping forms of collective experience in the city. Through these movements, songs create shared references across places and communities and take part in a lived and shifting geography of solidarity. At the same time, they reveal the tensions shaping Berlin’s cultural scene today, from restrictions on Palestinian expression to ongoing debates over who can be visible, speak, and perform in the city.

Diana Abbani is a cultural historian of the modern Middle East. Her research focuses on popular culture, sound, and the history of music and entertainment industries in the Eastern Mediterranean, with attention to how cultural production reflects and shapes social and political change. She is particularly interested in the limits of official archives and in reconstructing histories through fragmented sources, oral accounts, and everyday practices. She holds a PhD in Arabic Studies from Sorbonne University and was a EUME and Fritz Thyssen Fellow (2018-2023) at the Forum Transregionale Studien. Her work moves between academic and public writing, with publications in the International Journal of Middle East Studies and contributions to public platforms. She has published widely on Beirut’s cultural history and is currently completing a book on alternative histories of recorded sound, foregrounding marginalized voices and transregional circulation. She is the Science Communication Coordinator at the Merian Centre for Advanced Studies in the Maghreb (MECAM) at the Forum Transregionale Studien in Berlin, and co-founder and editor of UntoldMag.org.

Loaay Wattad is currently a EUME Fellow and a Minerva Postdoctoral Fellow at the Freie Universität Berlin. His research focuses on the sociology and politics of Palestinian children’s literature, with particular attention to themes of folklore, imagination, and spatial politics under conditions of colonial constraint.

Pleaser register in advance via eume(at)trafo-berlin.de. Depending on approval by the speaker(s), the Berliner Seminar will be recorded. All audio recordings of the Berliner Seminar are available on SoundCloud.

Digital Evidence and Advocacy of Human Rights-Based Arms and Technology Treaties

Wed, 20 May 2026 14:00:00 +0200

The growing availability of digital evidence has transformed the monitoring of arms transfers and the use of emerging military technologies. From conventional weapons and surveillance tools to artificial intelligence–driven systems and lethal autonomous weapons, today’s conflicts require new approaches to documentation and advocacy. From AI-driven surveillance and predictive policing to autonomous weapons and algorithmic targeting, these technologies raise profound legal and ethical concerns. Civil society, investigative journalists, and legal practitioners increasingly turn to open-source intelligence and digital forensics to expose violations, trace weapons flows, and demand accountability. This research examines how digital methodologies—capable of geolocating attacks, verifying weapons deployment, and detecting AI-enabled targeting or surveillance—can enhance treaty enforcement, bridge evidentiary gaps, and strengthen advocacy for human rights-centered arms and technology regulation. It considers both traditional arms and emerging technologies as subjects of governance, with particular attention to their implications for international humanitarian law. Using a mixed-methods approach—combining case studies, expert interviews, and methodological review—it assesses how cross-sector collaborations can translate complex technical findings into policy change, with a focus on strengthening European Union frameworks on arms control, AI governance, and the rule of law.

Colonial Subjects to Surveilled Citizens: Depictions of the Regime Informant in the Cultural Memory of Baathist Syria and Iraq

Wed, 20 May 2026 17:00:00 +0200

More information will follow soon.

Rules Under Pressure: How Radical Right Populists Are Reshaping Europe’s Parliaments

Wed, 27 May 2026 14:00:00 +0200

Europe’s legislatures are under increasing pressure from radical right populist parties that claim to embody the unfiltered “will of the people” and challenge the legitimacy of parliamentary institutions. Historically, once in office, mainstream parties have relied on procedural mechanisms, many dating to the 19th century, that favour swift government business. This project examines whether the entry of radical right populist parties in European parliaments prompts systematic alterations to these procedures, thereby either restricting or expanding individual MPs’ rights to speak, propose legislation, and scrutinise the executive. Methodologically, the project will integrate quantitative and qualitative approaches within a comparative framework. First, it adopts the ParlRulesData method to track textual amendments in parliamentary rules of procedure over time, capturing macro-level (broad textual shifts), meso-level (specific policy areas), and micro-level (individual rule clauses) changes. Second, it draws on archival materials, semi-structured interviews with MPs and parliamentary staff, and direct observations of parliamentary sessions to clarify how radical right party entry interacts with legislative reform.

State, Citizenship, and Law in Crisis

Wed, 27 May 2026 17:20:00 +0200

More information will follow soon.

Schools and Positive Obligations under the European Convention on Human Rights: What Implications for Democracy in Europe?

Wed, 03 Jun 2026 14:00:00 +0200

Schools are crucial institutions in democracy. They are hubs of community togetherness, often the first place where children experience the power of the state, and crucial places of academic learning and socialisation vital for downstream rights and the ability to participate in democratic society. Equally, positive obligations have long been considered the “hallmark” of the European Court of Human Rights, which defines minimum obligations to comply with the ECHR, including what Council of Europe member states must do to secure respect for human rights in schools. Yet, no scholars have looked comprehensively at what positive obligations exist in relation to schooling in the member states of the Council of Europe. This is surprising as a brief survey of the case-law indicates that positive obligations actually play a significant role in defining the rights and obligations that exist vis-à-vis schools in a number of diverse areas, from keeping children safe in school to undoing histories of racial discrimination in schools to reasonably accommodating schoolchildren with disabilities. In line with this, this project seeks to typologise, conceptualise and theorise regarding the link between positive obligations and schools under the ECHR, utilising Amy Guttman’s pioneering book Democratic Education as a frame.

Indigenous Affinities: Toward Solidarity Across the Global South

Wed, 03 Jun 2026 17:30:00 +0200

More information will follow soon.

Gaza’s Children Write Back: Child-Authored Writing, War, and Political Agency

Wed, 10 Jun 2026 17:00:00 +0200

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Constitutional Democracy and Its Capacity for Self-Preservation in a Multipolar World: The Concept of Defensive Democracy in Germany, Ukraine, and the Broader European Experience

Wed, 17 Jun 2026 14:00:00 +0200

After the full-scale invasion, the Constitutional Court of Ukraine characterized Ukraine as a "self-defending democracy." This notion, close to militant democracy, means that despite martial law, restrictions on human rights must remain proportionate and justified to ensure the preservation of statehood. Germany was the first European country to embed the idea of a democracy capable of defending itself against anti-democratic forces. Drawing on the Basic Law of 1949, the German model rests on a commitment to democratic values, defensive capacity, and the promotion of democracy’s protection. Yet a fundamental concern follows: are these mechanisms enough? What if a party that complies with the constitution gains total control over the state? For Ukraine, the preservation of statehood should not be understood narrowly or instrumentally, and the limits of militant democracy’s toolbox must be carefully studied. As democratic states increasingly rely on national legal frameworks, Ukraine must harmonize its constitutional doctrine with the jurisprudence and constitutional principles of the European Union—while ensuring that defensive democracy does not become a threat itself. The research asks how democracies can defend themselves without undermining fundamental rights—and whether Ukraine’s constitutional framework is ready for this challenge under and after martial law.

Translate and Rule: Justice, Arabic Literature, and the Colonial Archive

Wed, 17 Jun 2026 17:00:00 +0200

More information will follow soon.

Feminist Comics in Arab and Latin American Protest Cultures

Wed, 24 Jun 2026 17:00:00 +0200

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Bi-Nationalism and the Future of Israel

Thu, 25 Jun 2026 17:00:00 +0200

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Narratives of Female Criminality in Turkish Literature and the Press: A Comparative Analysis (1870-1935)

Wed, 01 Jul 2026 17:00:00 +0200

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Queer Temporalities and Cultural Transformations in Central and Eastern Europe

Thu, 02 Jul 2026 10:00:00 +0200

This workshop addresses questions of time and temporality in Central and Eastern European literatures from queer perspectives, with a focus on Ukraine, Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Russia. Organized within the framework of EUTIM project, it explores how questions of time, sexuality, and literary form intersect across different historical moments and cultural settings.

Over the past decades, queer temporality—developed and articulated in literary and cultural theory by scholars such as Elizabeth Freeman, Jack Halberstam, Lee Edelman, and José Esteban Muñoz—has provided a way to describe and analyze literary conceptualizations of time in relation to queer experience, desire, and intimacy. Rather than treating time as linear or developmental, this scholarship has emphasized temporal phenomena such as delay, belatedness, interruption, repetition, and alternative temporal horizons. While approaches to queer temporality differ in their political implications and theoretical commitments, they share a concern with how dominant temporal regimes structure belonging, futurity, inclusion, and exclusion.

In the literary contexts of Central and Eastern Europe of the 20th and 21st centuries, questions of queer time intersect with particular historical conditions, including censorship, displacement, the fragmentation and uneven transmission of literary heritage, and shifting regimes of visibility, as well as with culturally specific ways of articulating same-sex desire. Against this background, the workshop brings together work on different literary traditions and languages to explore how literary texts engage with temporal structures through representations of sexuality, attachment, and non-aligned life trajectories shaped by political rupture, social transformation, and migration.

The workshop foregrounds literary analysis of a wide range of textual materials, including poetry, prose, drama, essays, diaries, correspondence, and other forms of life writing, in which temporal experience becomes narratively legible. Special attention is given to problems of archival absence, fragmentary textual survival, and locally situated narrative practices, understood not only as methodological challenges but also as constitutive elements of queer temporal experience.

Alongside research on lesser-known or understudied authors and corpora, the workshop also invites renewed engagement with more established figures commonly associated with queer literary history. In such cases, the emphasis lies on re-examining their temporal configurations and literary forms, rather than on reaffirming their canonical status.

The workshop will result in an edited volume featuring contributions from participants.

- more information follows -

Global Hijra: A Modern History of Muslim Refugee Migration

Thu, 09 Jul 2026 17:00:00 +0200

More information will follow soon.

Something is Passing in the Night: Iranian Hyphenates in the World

Wed, 15 Jul 2026 17:00:00 +0200

More information will follow soon.