Forum Transregionale Studien | Veranstaltungen

Hungary after the elections – what’s next for the rule of law?

Wed, 15 Apr 2026 11:00:00 +0200

On 12 April 2026, Hungarians will head to the polls in what many have called the most consequential parliamentary election in the EU this year. The result — whatever form it takes — raises urgent questions about the future of the rule of law, democratic institutions, and Hungary's place within the European Union.

Join re:constitution and Democracy Reporting International for a timely webinar bringing together experts to unpack the implications of the vote. Whether the election brings continuity or change, the path ahead is complex.

We will examine what the result means for judicial independence, media freedom, and Hungary's ongoing Article 7 procedure; what a new or returning government would need to do — and how much it realistically can do — to uphold the rule of law and democratic standards; and what the EU and international community should expect in the months ahead.

Friendship in Revolution: Politics of Life in Kurdish Mobilisation

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

The Kurdish struggle is often narrated through conflict, pain, and loss. Yet beneath this history lies another story: one of joy, love, and friendship. This presentation examines the significance of friendship in Kurdish youth mobilisation in Diyarbakır during the 1990s, a period marked by intense state violence and mass political mobilisation. Rather than a decade among others, the 1990s marked a revolutionary moment that reconfigured Kurdish political life, generating forms of mobilisation and subjectivity that would go on to reshape political life in Turkey and the broader Middle East. Drawing on ethnographic research, it explores how, during the 1990s, friendship constituted a ground for political subject formation among Kurdish youth.
This analysis argues that friendship is not peripheral but foundational to politics: a life-producing relation through which political life becomes possible. In a social world shaped by violence and suffocation, friendship enables the everyday production of a dignified life by sustaining joy, love, and commitment, while also offering space to confront fear, loss, and uncertainty. As a movement between self and other, and between private and public, it functions as a daily practice of recognition, care, and becoming. By centring friendship, the talk proposes that political mobilisation is not only a response to domination but also a process grounded in the production of life, whose effects may persist beyond their initial context, opening space to rethink political difference through community-building practices that move beyond predefined divisions.

Delal Aydın is a Research Fellow in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at the Geneva Graduate Institute and an associated EUME Fellow at the Forum Transregionale Studien since 2024. Her work brings together political anthropology and historical sociology to examine Kurdish political mobilisation, community-building, and the role of intimacy in shaping political subjectivity under conditions of violence. She received her PhD in Sociology from SUNY Binghamton. Her current research explores Kurdish transnational mobilisation and diaspora politics, with a focus on relational practices. She has held postdoctoral positions at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Florence and the University of Duisburg-Essen, and has conducted research at Humboldt University in Berlin.

Zeynep Türkyılmaz received her PhD from the Department of History at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) in 2009. After holding many fellowship and teaching positions, she is currently an associated EUME Fellow at the Forum Transregionale Studien. Her research and teaching interests include state formation, gender, nationalism, colonialism, and religion with a focus on religious non-conformity and missionary work in the Middle East from 1800 to the present.

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.

Hungary 2026: Elections, Institutions, Participation

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 09:00:00 +0200

Hungary’s 2026 parliamentary election offers a concentrated moment to present and connect research that the re:constitution network and the Centre for Social Sciences at ELTE university are conducting on elections, political communication, institutional governance, participation and mobilisation. The workshop is designed to provide scientifically grounded, methodologically transparent analyses of (i) campaigns and information environments, (ii) rules, enforcement and litigation, and (iii) participation, representation and mobilisation.

The workshop is organised in collaboration with the ELTE Centre for Social Sciences (CSS/TK) in Budapest and will take place in person in Budapest and online.

To register, please send an email to jti.titkarsag(at)tk.hu.

European Times of a Palestinian Anti-Fascist: The Secret Life of Najati Sidqi

Wed, 22 Apr 2026 17:00:00 +0200

As a young communist activist, Najati Sidqi (1905-1979) was both energetic and unlucky enough to live through many of the early twentieth century’s upheavals. He experienced the first decade of Stalin’s Soviet Union, the violence of 1929 in Palestine, and the Spanish Civil War. He served time in Jerusalem’s British prisons, ran an underground newspaper in interwar Paris, and drank vodka with Muslim bureaucrats in Tashkent. He crossed borders and broke taboos. In 1940, during the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, he was expelled from the Communist Party for publicly calling Nazism incompatible with Islam. Sidqi’s memoir, now available in English for the first time, narrates this dizzyingly eventful life with intelligence, wit—and a strange emotional detachment. This talk will explore both his adventures and the darker stories he chooses not to tell. And it will ask: one hundred years later, why does Sidqi’s ultimately unsuccessful work with the global Left seem both so far away and yet so eerily contemporary?

Margaret Litvin is associate professor of Arabic and Comparative Literature at Boston University (USA) and the author, most recently, of Red Mecca: The Life and Afterlives of the Arab-Soviet Romance (Princeton University Press, forthcoming). Her co-translation of Najati Sidqi’s memoir (University of Texas Press, 2025) is part of an ongoing research project on Najati Sidqi, his wife Lotka Lorberbaum Sidqi, and their daughter Dawlieh Saadi. Margaret was a EUME Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in 2017/18.

Gendered Retirement - Women in the Shadows of Illiberal Constitutionalism

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 14:00:00 +0200

This project investigates how the constitutional value of gender equality is strategically reinterpreted in illiberal contexts within the EU, using a comparative analysis of Austria and Poland. While equality, democracy, and the rule of law are nominally co-equal under Article 2 TEU, equality often receives less substantive attention in EU governance and scholarship. Drawing on constitutional theory and empirical fieldwork, the project conceptualizes “instrumentalized equality discourse” – a phenomenon in which illiberal actors invoke gender equality rhetorically to justify regressive reforms, especially in family and labor law, while simultaneously hollowing out its emancipatory meaning. Focusing on retirement age regulation, a policy area both gendered and constitutionally significant, the study reveals how formal equality rhetoric may in practice reinforce structural inequality and hinder women’s democratic agency. The project employs a mixed-methods approach, combining doctrinal legal analysis, qualitative discourse analysis, and semi-structured interviews with stakeholders in Poland and Austria. By connecting legal norms to their implementation and effects on the ground, this research advances a more context-sensitive, substantive reading of equality. My goal is to generate empirically informed, legally grounded insights that respond to the selective enforcement of EU equality norms and contribute to more inclusive democratic and constitutional frameworks within the EU.

Defending Democracy through EU Media Regulation: A Constitutional Appraisal

Wed, 29 Apr 2026 14:00:00 +0200

The EU faces growing threats to democracy, including the rise of far-right governments and foreign political interferences. The media sector is particularly vulnerable to global disinformation, and journalists have faced legal harassment, or even assassination, as seen in Malta, Slovakia or Greece. In response, the EU has taken an increasingly interventionist role, adopting media legislation aimed at defending the value of democracy enshrined in Article 2 TEU. The adoption of the European Media Freedom Act (EMFA), the Political Advertising Regulation, and the Anti-SLAPP Directive epitomises this shift. This project examines whether these recent EU legislation on media can be conceptualised as “militant democracy”, broadly defined as democratic self-defence, and assesses the balance struck between the EU’s defence of democracy through media regulation and its constitutional principles. From a conceptual standpoint, this research would reassess the militant democracy applied to the EU by reflecting on the democratic self-defence nature of EU media legislation. Furthermore, it aims to highlight the specificity of these legislation, in comparison with the EU protection of the rule of law within Member States. Finally, this project aims at assessing the constitutional tensions surrounding EU media regulation.

Cultural Capital of a Minoritized Elite: The Intersection of Class and Ethnonational Identities of the Emerging Palestinian Elite in Israel

Wed, 29 Apr 2026 17:00:00 +0200