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This paper offers a broad historical and comparative analysis of territorial organisation and autonomy in Russia from the early modern age to the present. To what degree, when, and why did the Russian and Soviet authorities accommodate and even promote regional and national autonomies on their expanding territory? The paper reviews efforts at decentralisation (and in some cases fede ralisation) as a set of imagined, proposed, and (partially) implemented measures. In so doing, it identifies historical 'moments' at which autonomous solutions became particularly important. It also highlights commonalities and differences, continuities and ruptures in longterm perspective while tracing the specificities of the Russian case. While different forms of territorial autonomy co-existed throughout Russian history, most were shortlived or heavily constrained.

Ausgehend von den aufgeregten Reaktionen auf Michael Rothbergs deutsche Übersetzung von Multi-directional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization im Jahr 2021, zwölf Jahre nach der Veröffentlichung des Originals, untersucht dieses Arbeitspapier die Debatte in Deutschland aus der spezifischen Perspektive von Migrant*innen der zweiten und dritten Generation. Zunächst wird beleuchtet, dass der migrantische Teil der westdeutschen Gesellschaft nicht ausgenommen war von der sukzessiven Vergegenwärtigung der Menschheitsverbrechen des nationalsozialistischen Völkermords ab Ende der 1970 Jahre - eine Tatsache, die heute ignoriert wird. Anschließend wird die Frage gestellt, wie sich Garantien der Nichtwiederholung, ein wichtiger Grundsatz von Erinnerungsarbeit, in einem Land auswirken, das große Anstrengungen unternommen hat, um dem Vergessen der Verbrechen entgegenzuwirken und ein Lernen aus der Geschichte umzusetzen. Am Beispiel jüdischer Reaktionen auf die Ermordung der ägyptischen Apothekerin Marwa el-Sherbini in Dresden im Jahr 2009 entwickelt die Autorin die These, dass sich im Zuge der anhaltenden Gewalt in Deutschland (NSU, Halle, Hanau) muslimisch-jüdische Solidaritätsnetzwerke entwickeln. Diese Verbindungen sind derzeit - bewusst oder unbewusst - Ziel heftiger verbaler Angriffe. Man muss sich fragen, warum nicht-jüdische Deutsche bereit sind, Juden in Deutschland und deutsche Juden, die solche Empathie-Bande aufbauen, als "antisemitisch" zu charakterisieren? Die Autorin schlägt vor, die "hermeneutische Schikane", mit der auf Beiträge von Michael Rothberg und Susan Neiman im sogenannten Historikerstreit 2.0 reagiert wurde, im Kontext jüdisch-muslimischer Solidarität zu verstehen. Stellen Kolonialhistoriker, postkoloniale Theoretiker und Wissenschaftler der vergleichenden Völkermordforschung tatsächlich die Einzigartigkeit des Holocausts in Frage? Oder sind andere Motive im Spiel, die über Deutschland hinausweisen, um ihnen zu unterstellen, eine, Departing from the fierce reactions to the German translation of Michael Rothberg's Multi-directional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization, published in 2021, twelve years after the original first appeared, this working paper investigates the debate in Germany from a migrant second and third generation point of view. To start, the paper looks into the awakening of West German society to the atrocities of the Holocaust in the late 1970s, zooming in on its migrant counterpart that was not exempted from this learning process - a fact ignored today. The paper then asks how guarantees for non-repetition, an important cornerstone of commemoration as a means of preventing future persecution of minorities, plays out today in a country that has invested much effort into countering the forgetting of past carnages. Choosing the murder of the Egyptian pharmacist Marwa el-Sherbini in Dresden in 2009 as a decisive event in time, I put forward the thesis that Muslim-Jewish networks of solidarity have developed in the wake of ongoing anti-migrant violence (NSU, Halle, Hanau), are now, explicitly or implicitly, the target of fierce verbal attacks. One must ask why non-Jewish Germans are ready to revert to casting Jews in Germany and German Jews who pursue such linkages, as "Antisemites"? This paper proposes to come to an understanding of the "hermeneutical chicane" that authors like Michael Rothberg and Susan Neiman have been confronted with in the so-called Historikerstreit 2.0 in the frame of such Muslim-Jewish bonds. Are historians of colonialism, postcolonial theorists and scholars of comparative genocide studies indeed questioning the uniqueness of the Holocaust? Or are other motives at play that point beyond Germany, which insinuate that they allegedly seek to construct a competition of sorts among victims?

Das Working Paper stellt dar, wie eine Gruppe von Menschen aus Syrien, die sich politisch gegen das Assad-Regime engagierten und zwischen 2014 und 2015 nach Deutschland kamen, ihren persönlichen familiären Sozialisationsprozess kritisch reflektieren und daraus praktische Konsequenzen für ihr Leben in Deutschland ziehen, indem sie den Kontakt zu Ehepartnern, Eltern oder anderen nahen Angehörigen abbrechen. Das Paper untersucht die Thematik anhand von drei Leitfragen: Wie beschreiben die Befragten ihre Familienbeziehungen und -erlebnisse in Syrien vor 2011 (insbesondere in Bezug auf familiäre Rollenbilder, Geschlechterverhältnisse, Erziehungsmethoden); inwiefern haben die Ereignisse in Syrien seit 2011 und die Ankunft in Deutschland ihre Sicht auf ihre familiäre Sozialisation beeinflusst; und inwiefern lassen sich bei den Befragten heute Veränderungen dieser Sichtweisen, das heißt Re-Interpretationen von Geschlechterrollen, familiären Beziehungen und Strukturen, feststellen? Das Working Paper zeigt, dass die sehr persönliche Reflexion über familiäre Sozialisation und der schwerwiegende Entschluss, familiäre Beziehungen abzubrechen, (auch) die Konsequenz einer politischen Haltung gegenüber der gesellschaftlichen und politischen Ordnung in Syrien beschreiben und stellt die These auf, dass diese kritische Haltung zum Zerfall des Patriarchats in der syrischen Gesellschaft beiträgt., The working paper presents how a group of people from Syria who were politically active against the Assad regime and came to Germany between 2014 and 2015 critically reflect on their personal family socialization process and draw practical consequences for their lives in Germany by breaking off contact with spouses, parents or other close relatives. The paper examines the topic based on three guiding questions: how do respondents describe their family relationships and experiences in Syria before 2011 (especially with regard to family role models, gender relations, upbringing and education; to what extent have events in Syria since 2011 and their arrival in Germany influenced their views of their family socialization; and to what extent can changes in these views, i.e. re-interpretations of gender roles, family relationships and structures, be observed among respondents today? The working paper shows that the very personal reflection on family socialization and the serious decision to break off family relationships (also) describe the consequence of a political attitude towards the social and political order in Syria, and proposes that this critical attitude contributes to the disintegration of patriarchy in Syrian society.

This paper presents the main outcomes of a joint research project conducted at ZMO Berlin between March 2018 and July 2021 with funding from the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research. The project analyzed how Syrians remembered their "normal lives" through daily interactions with each other, in neighbourhoods, institutions, or families, as well as routine encounters with the state through the interface of infrastructural provision and bureaucratic practices. Describing three distinct modalities of connection through which incomers of Syrian origin continue to engage with their distant homeland, the paper demonstrates that 'crisis' and 'normality' are not mutually exclusive states of reality, but can be experienced as overlapping states of being that may shape a given life alternately or simultaneously. Secondly, engaging with efforts to communicate the research findings to a wider public, this paper discusses the communicative "balancing acts" that arise when presenting and discussing the project findings with members of the public in Germany. It is suggested that social and political hierarchies inherent to "integration" contexts may complicate or hinder communication. Thus, opportunities to learn about life in Syria, but also Germany, from the perspective of new citizens, may be obscured and even lost. In conclusion, this paper argues for a perspective that does not essentialize (and generically flatten) people as "refugees" despite the distinct and specific legal and political regimes that shape their condition and set them apart from other categories of migrants. Rather, their experiences must be seen in the context of longer-term trajectories that encompass Syrian and German realities as intertwined and linked in many, often unexpected, ways.

This working paper traces the trajectory of Syrian official documents across Syria and Germany in times of political upheaval, flight and integration. Documents issued by the Syrian state continue to be a fundamental element in the life of Syrians in Germany as they are still needed for certain mundane, yet crucial, purposes. Syrians are therefore forced to engage with Syrian state bureaucratic apparatuses at a distance. The journey of the papers across time and geographical borders unveils the highly political ambivalences and tensions embodied in Syrian paperwork in the context of German policies of asylum and integration. In Syria, the documents and their retrieval are embedded in the politics of security governing the Syrian citizenship regime. On arrival in Germany, the papers gain new meanings in their encounter with the German integration process and legal system rooted in the Rule of Law. At the same time, the papers' enmeshment with German bureaucracy reproduces (from a distance) the political dynamics between Syrians and the Syrian state in the past. Situated at a crossroads of the web of state(-s) power in and between Syrian and German bureaucracies, the papers re-integrate Syrians’ past into their present in Germany. By revealing this complex web of relationships, this working paper offers a reflection on the limits of studying the European context of integration and asylum 'fromwithin'.

Digitalised music production and the rise of music streaming platforms shape music markets worldwide. Whereas in Western Europe and North America, the age of streaming has also been criticised for a casualisation of musical labour, in peripheral music economies like Kyrgyzstan it participates in structuring a market for music makers. At the same time, digitalisation also tends to reproduce global inequalities. Based on the case of hip-hop music production in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, the present working paper examines how the 'age of streaming' affects the musical production and the dreams and ambitions of music workers.

This paper follows the plight of Walter Ruben (1899-1982), an Indologist who had begun his career in Frankfurt am Main and later became one of the leading Indologists of the German Democratic Republic. In mid-1930s, he escaped Nazi persecution by seeking exile in Turkey. Relying on archival research in the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (BBAW) and the Prime Ministry's Republican Archives (BCA) in Istanbul, the Turkish press, and oral historical sources, together with the publications of Ruben during his Ankara years, I bring to light Ruben's life trajectory during his exile and internment with a balanced analysis of his 'production of knowledge' as a scholar at risk. The scholarly pressure and difficulties Ruben faced as an endangered scholar hired by a single-party authoritarian state delineate the precariousness and vulnerabilities of life as an exile academic. His original research and writing during his forced internment in Kırşehir, on the other hand, marks another dimension of his exile years, namely his endless effort to look for a real refuge within his intellectual production.

In 1943, the Soviet government decided to reverse its policy towards religious communities with the purpose of building alliances during the Second World War. With regard to Islam, it arranged for the establishment of a Central Asian Spiritual Administration of Muslims (SAD-UM) in Tashkent. Eventually, the state used SADUM to establish cultural diplomatic ties with some Middle Eastern countries by sending students of Soviet-based religious schools - the Madrasas Mir-i Arab (1946-1991), Bara-qkhan (1956-1961) and the Tashkent Islam Institute, Oliy Ma’had, (1971-1991) - to study and gain experience in Islamic universities of the Middle East, notably Egypt, Libya, Sudan, Morocco, Jordan, and Syria, between 1955-1991. The main aim of this essay is to study the exchange expe-riences of these Soviet madrasa students in Middle Eastern countries and the ways this exchange became part of Soviet foreign policy. Studying the foreign madrasa education of these Soviet students, their student life abroad, and their activity, will shed some new light on religious policy in the Soviet period. The analysis of the activities of these students is based on their correspondence. Specifically, I argue that these exchanges helped the Soviet Union to strengthen its ties with foreign academic institutions and Muslims in those countries. Strategically, it was to contribute to strengthening Soviet influence in the Middle East which played an important role in its global and regional political calculations. Here, I distinguish between the intended and unintended consequences of those foreign connections. Although the Party and government viewed this activity in primarily instrumental terms, I suggest that the students used the opportunities to exchange ideas with their foreign interlocutors, which also had its own impact on religious discourse and prac-tice upon their return to Central Asia.

The article demonstrates the challenges of the project, which argues that the pro-immigration policy of the Otto man/Turkish governments (1774-1989) was shaped by political concerns (concretely population and identity politics), in addition to humanitarian concerns. The pro-immigration policy, and more specifically the open-door policy, facilitated, encouraged, compounded, and even in some cases produced immigration. In other words it functioned as a "pull factor". As a working pa-per, this article will analyse epistemological, methodological and theoretical challenges that emanate from the scope of the topic. To examine two centuries of migration covering a territory extending to three continents and including millions of migrants, as well as those they were directly or indirectly tied to, is indeed quite a challenge.

Dieses Working Paper untersucht 14 ausgewählte pornographische Filme auf ihre sexistischen und anti-muslimisch rassistischen Inhalte. Diese Filme sind unter anderem als Refugee- oder Hijab-Pornos bekannt und zeigen bis auf ein Kopftuch nackte Darsteller*innen beim Sex mit (häufig) weißen (Cis-)Männern. Im Laufe der Anayse soll das pornographische Medium selbst nicht verurteilt, sondern als hilfreiche Linse behandelt werden, durch die etwas über Unterdrückungs- und Machtmechanismen erfahren werden kann. Es ermöglicht, das koloniale Blickregime bezüglich der verschleierten Muslima offenzulegen. Das umfasst sowohl das panoptische Bedürfnis nach ihrer Entblößung auf der Suche nach einer zu entdeckenden Wahrheit als auch ihre Fetischisierung über ihre angenommene Andersartigkeit und Prüderie. Auf ihre Verschleierung und "Fremdheit" wird wiederum mit Gewalt und Dominanzverhalten vonseiten ihres sexuellen Gegenübers reagiert., This Working Paper investigates 14 selected porno graphic films and their anti-Muslim, racist, and sexist content. These films are mostly known under the title of Refugee- or Hijab-Porn and show actresses wearing nothing but a veil having sex with (mostly) white (cis-)men. In the process of this analysis, the pornographic medium itself shall not be condemned, but rather taken as a useful lens through which one can learn about mechanisms of oppression. It makes it possible to take a closer look at the continuity of the colonial gaze in relation to the veiled Muslim woman. This includes the desire to know all, to undress her, always looking for a truth waiting to be discovered, as well as the fetishization of Muslim female bodies based on their “Other ness” and prudery. Her being veiled and her "foreignness" are then met with dominating behaviour and violence on the part of her on-screen sexual counterparts

This article aims to present a picture of Turkish journalism in German exile. By Turkish journalism, I refer to the production and circulation of news about Turkey, in Turkish and for a Turkish-speaking audience - primarily those living in Turkey. By German exile, I mean journalists who have migrated from Turkey since 2010 due to the country’s increasingly oppressive political climate, which has made journalism a dangerous profession there. Under-standing news in this context as the outcome of processes of transnational transfer of knowledge and experience from one regime to another, I ask how dissident Turkish journalists currently living in exile in Germany practise their profession from a distance, and what tools they use to critically engage with the overall political situation in Turkey. For this project, I have been carrying out ethnographic research in Berlin since November 2018. This research stands at the intersection of the anthropology of journalism and transnational migration. In the light of mapping the journalism scene in Berlin through this filter, I anchor historical foundations of the current migrant media scene where paths cross each other to understand their political references and to situate them in the context of Turkish-German migration. Then, I discuss the process of project-based journalism, by exploring the challenges and opportunities offered by the conditions within which journalists can practise their profession from a physical and temporal distance. Reviewing the choice of the audience that journalists aim to target, I also show how they meet a need for community media that had remained unaddressed in the Turkish-German context, in connection to the difficulty of establishing solidarities among themselves. Finally, I discuss recent debates on what journalism should be - or what happens to the expertise when activism and profession collide.

Scholarship on intelligence studies suffers three key limitations: 1) it fails to grasp that the knowledge-production of agencies is value-laden and thus political in itself; 2) scholarship disregards most of the non-English speaking world and 3) focuses nearly exclusively on foreign intelligence. I suggest that these limitations are due to a broader theoretical poverty of intelligence studies, and present three concepts through which a richer analysis may emerge: 1) "security" in the sense of understanding the meaning of security that intelligence agencies use as a basis for operating; 2) "secrecy" to investigate the concrete measures that agencies use to create and manage secrecy and 3) "bureaucracy" to investigate the day-to-day work done by the bulk of intelligence employees. These concepts turn the gaze towards the concrete, institutional processes of intelligence production, rather than towards abstract models such as the intelligence cycle, which dominate current scholarship. Intelligence studies needs to borrow from the rich tradition of organizational sociology and critical IR to develop a more thorough understanding of what intelligence agencies actually do, and what their effect on international politics is.

This working paper focuses on the provision of Egyptian and South Asian humanitarian aid du-ring decolonisation that saw the emergence of India and Egypt as independent nation-states in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The authors aim to show the continuities and shifts in the relief efforts of the Egyptian Red Crescent and of the Hindu Mahasabha by examining their ideas of giving and the practises they followed during the (late) colonial and the postcolonial periods. The paper starts with a short overview of the burgeoning field of humanitarian history. Our emphasis, hereby, is on the current lack of non-western perspectives on humanitarianism and its relationship with colonialism and decolonisation. Following this, the paper delineates local charitable and philanthropic traditions in Egypt and South Asia that influenced the Egyptian Red Crescent and the Hindu Mahasabha respectively. Finally, we analyse the work of these organisations in humanitarian crises during the period of decolonisation, paying special heed to their potential politicisation and their relationships with the postcolonial governments. The paper stresses the importance of taking into account the local and regional social and political contexts in order to understand seriously multiple forms of humanitarianism. We argue that in the wake of decolonialisation, both organisations continued their existing practises of relief provisions, but also had to adapt to new circumstances. Thus, they had to negotiate their relations and status not only with the newly established postcolonial governments, but also other (international) humanitarian organisations and actors.

This working paper examines migration as part of a large network of relations between Kuwait and the region of Baltistan in northeastern Pakistan. Apart from migrants, this network involves the participation of philanthropists from the Kuwaiti merchant class who finance development projects in Baltistan and religious clerics from Baltistan who have been educated in the Gulf and who engage in fundraising activities there to contribute to the development of their home areas. Hence, the paper discusses the relationship between migration, development and religion by referring to three accounts circulating in Baltistan of how migration to the Gulf began, the relationship of migration and development, and the role of local religious leaders in it. Migration is central in shaping and reinforcing ties over the course of time between these two regions, but it is rendered invisible in the narratives of charity and development. This transnational activity is characterised as much as by the crossing of state borders, and thus the actors' engagement in two or more societies, as by the actors being in an ambivalent position in terms of belonging to their own state. The study of this transnational space helps us to understand relations between these two territories in terms of how the participants in the network position themselves vis-à-vis their own state, on the grounds of need and solidarity but also in terms of other interests that are connected to the realities of their respective homelands.

Out of a total of approximately 1.4 million South Asians fighting in the First World War, more than 90,000 combatants fought on the Western Front in France and Belgium. Nearly 50,000 South Asian labourers were also sent to France and Flanders to support the British troops. During the First World War, South Asian combatants and non-combatants were taken prisoner in France, Belgium, Mesopotamia, East Africa, and other theatres of war. Around a thousand South Asian military POWs and approximately the same number of civilian South Asians living in Europe were detained in German camps. Within this article, these years of captivity in the life of the colonial soldier Gangaram Gurung are reconstructed - by exploring visual, auditory and textual evidence about him.

Der Beitrag diskutiert die Relevanz des frontier (Siedlungsgrenze)-Begriffes im Hinblick auf die Einrichtung von Goldminencamps in Westafrika seit Mitte der 1990er Jahre. Am Beispiel des handwerklichen Goldbergbaus in Westafrika werden die wirtschaftlichen, sozialen und kulturellen Aspekte mobiler Bergbaugemeinschaften, ihre internen sozialen Beziehungen sowie Konflikte mit den lokalen Gemeinden und des Staates untersucht. Dabei werden drei Goldminenorte verglichen und ihre Situation vor dem Hintergrund klassischer sowie jüngerer anthropologischer Studien zu Migration, sozialer Innovation und lokalem Ressourcenmanagement in Westafrika analysiert. Der frontier-Begriff dient dabei als heuristische Kategorie, um die sehr heterogenen Kontexte und Konfliktsituationen miteinander vergleichen und in einen größeren räumlichen Zusammenhang setzen zu können. Ich nehme dabei den Ansatz von Igor Kopytoff zur Untersuchung historischer Siedlungsbewegungen in internen frontier-Räumen Afrikas auf, modifiziere diesen aber insofern, als ich Migranten der Goldgräber-frontier sowohl wirtschaftliche, politische als auch kulturelle Innovationspotenziale gleichermaßen zuschreibe. Schließlich werden Wege der Integration von Goldsuchern unterschiedlichster Herkunft in die entstehenden Bergbaugemeinschaften, nachgezeichnet, die sich trotz vieler in diesem Bereich herrschender Konflikte offenbaren.

Chou Sar? (What happened?) is a documentary film by De Gaulle Eid, made in 2010 in Lebanon. The film consists of a number of interviews Eid undertook with his close and extended family about a massacre that took place one evening in December, 1980. Among the dead were Eid’s parents. Thirty years later, as he visits his relatives and records their stories, the question what happened? comes to be directed more towards the personal, social, and political circumstances in which the survivors have coped. In the following discussion I focus on how Eid's film addresses this event by concentrating on its aftermath. I am interested in how Chou Sar? engages the capacity of public and political cultures in Lebanon to approach memory of violence and enduring trauma as pressing concerns in and for the present. In doing so, I suggest that the film works to screen and situate violence and trauma as both actual and potential modes of address and response.

This paper challenges the common opposition between periodizations as a heuristic means for historians, on the one hand, and as a political element in narratives of groups and origins on the other. It conceives periodizations as elements within wider social uses of time and, thus, the symbolic production of the political. I demonstrate this by analysing the works of the Moroccan historian and intellectual Abdallah Laroui (*1933) on modernity, historical representation, time and difference. First, I look at how Laroui spells out the relation of particular and general periodizations. Then I compare his approach to Dipesh Chakrabarty’s in his book Provincializing Europe. I interpret their discussion of time and temporalities as a response to a general problem in the theory of history, as well as an expression of a certain way of experiencing a globalised modernity in (post)colonial contexts. I argue that the core of their critique is the challenging of hegemonic representations of time and the breaking up of unified time into multiple temporalities. Finally, I look closer at the various articulations of this Denkfigur (figure of thought), especially regarding the postcolonial context and Walter Benjamin’s notion of empty, homogenous time.

Im Folgenden dokumentieren wir die Rede von Prof. Dr. Ulrich Haarmann anlässlich der Eröffnung des Zentrum Moderner Orient im Mittelhof vor fünfzehn Jahren am 12. Juni 1998. Prof. Haarmann war im April desselben Jahres zum Direktor des ZMO berufen worden. Er behandelt hier die direkten Wurzeln des ZMO als Neugründung aus dem Bereich 'Geschichte der Entwicklungsländer' des Instituts für Allgemeine Geschichte der Akademie der Wissenschaften der DDR und stellt die Geschichte des ZMO in den Kontext der klassischen orientwissenschaftlichen Forschung seit Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts, die damals noch China, Indien, Japan, und das subsaharische Afrika einschloss. Die historischen Bezüge wie das institutionelle Selbstverständnis, die Prof. Haarmann hier nachzeichnet, sind auch heute von hoher Aktualität für das ZMO. Bis zu seinem frühen Tod im Juni 1999 widmete sich Prof. Haarmann unentwegt der Zukunft des Zentrums. Wir danken Dr. Maria Haarmann für ihre Unterstützung bei der Veröffentlichung der Rede in der Reihe Programmatic Texts des ZMO. [Sonja Hegasy]

The situation of the humanities and social and natural sciences in Germany is materially and structurally good in a European comparison (especially in comparison with Britain and France). The relationship between university and non-university research has some significant problems resulting from the restructuring of the universities. What is needed is agreement about the foundations and goals of the GSK, about the forms and support instruments in which and with which the goals can be pursued, and about how they can be reliably secured over the middle and long term.

The phenomenon of travelling religious traditions has attracted the attention of various scholars, but a differentiated understanding of its nature and impact is still lacking. This essay addresses the transnational and transregional impact of educational traditions in Islam in the South-South direction. It traces the impact of two education networks based in South Asia on Islamic learning in South East Asia. Both the modernist institutions of the International Islamic University and the conservative Deoband schools together with the affiliated Tablighi Jama'at have made significant headway in Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore and beyond. The case study argues that the impact is far from unidirectional and more multifaceted than often assumed. It is largely shaped by the social and cultural experience of local society and driven by its needs, rather than by a transnational agenda.

This paper explores the violent conflict between Lebanese Maronite and Druze communities that took place in the years 1982-1984. Commonly referred to as Harb al-Jabal, or the War of the Mountains, this conflict occurred during the fifteen-year civil war in Lebanon (1975-1990). My paper addresses how both the Maronites and Druze employed forms of group memory to define the historical trajectories of their respective identities and the conflict between them. As part of ZMO’s and UMAM’s larger research project Transforming Memories: Cultural Production and Personal/Public Memory in Lebanon and Morocco, my study goes beyond a conventional historiography to explore how collective memory and forms of remembrance played a significant role in constituting community allegiance and inter-community conflict. While this paper consults established archival sources, I also use oral history to analyze the communities' perceptions of themselves and each other. This study is informed by the assumption that postwar reconciliation in Lebanon would be considerable enhanced by researching the relationship between "collective memory" and violence.

Opposing certain dominant perspectives within urban studies, which give prominence to the role of capital in determining social space and urban social processes, there has been an emerging trend among scholars to develop Foucault's idea of heterotopia. This idea has been appropriated to explain spaces that have several levels or tiers of significance, meaning and relationships to other physical places and social spaces. This paper draws upon studies of and fieldwork from the Indian urban context and its evolution, linking these to larger processes of democratisation, social conflicts, and emancipatory struggles. It employs the idea of heterotopia to denote greater agency to class and non-class actors, groups and institutions, in the definition of urban visions and in the determination of urban spatial processes and spatially linked social processes. Various agentive groups and individual actors use the city and develop it for different social, political and economic purposes. For each of them, the city is an event that occurs (or is made to occur) in the specific evolutionary trajectory of their struggles for mobility and social emancipation, or possibly in their rise to dominance. Based on field research in the Indian city of Mumbai, this paper outlines the ways in which the study of this temporal dimension can provide key insights into the spatial, cultural, political and social implications of globalisation in Asian cities. At the same time, it further addresses rural-urban connections, networks and how these interact and intersect with global flows. To this effect, it maps the politics of rural-urban transitions and traces how they in turn give shape to the social agency of marginalised groups and classes in ways that are expressed in these groups’ uses of public space., Entgegen manchen in den Urban Studies weit verbreiteten Perspektiven, die die Rolle des Kapitals bei der Bestimmung des sozialen Raums und urbaner sozialer Prozesse in den Mittelpunkt stellen, wendet sich eine wachsende Anzahl von Forschern Foucaults Begriff der Heterotopie zu. Er dient dazu, Räume zu erklären, die mehrere Bedeutungs- und Sinnebenen aufweisen und in vielfacher Beziehung zu anderen physischen Orten und sozialen Räumen stehen. Das vorliegende Working Paper stützt sich auf Studien zur Entwicklung von städtischem Raum in Indien und setzt diese in Bezug zu größeren Demokratisierungsprozessen, sozialen Konflikten und Emanzipationsbewegungen. Der Begriff Heterotopie verdeutlicht, dass schicht- und nichtschichtspezifische Akteure, Gruppen und Institutionen bei der Definition urbaner Visionen sowie bei der Bestimmung urbaner räumlicher Prozesse und der damit verbundenen sozialen Prozesse stärker als Handelnde in Erscheinung treten. Verschiedene Gruppen und einzelne Akteure benutzen und entwickeln die Stadt zu unterschiedlichen sozialen, politischen und ökonomischen Zwecken. Sie betrachten die Stadt als ein Ereignis im spezifischen Verlauf ihrer jeweiligen Kämpfe um Mobilität und gesellschaftliche Emanzipation, fallweise auch ihres Aufstiegs an die Macht. Ausgehend von Feldforschung im indischen Mumbai wird herausgearbeitet, wie die Untersuchung dieser zeitlichen Dimension wichtige Einblicke in die räumlichen, kulturellen, politischen und sozialen Auswirkungen der Globalisierung in den Städten Asiens eröffnen kann. Darüber hinaus werden die Beziehungen und Netzwerke zwischen dem ländlichen und dem städtischen Raum angesprochen und deren Berührungspunkte und Wechselbeziehungen mit globalen Strömen beschrieben. Dazu wird anhand der Politik des Übergangs vom ruralen zum urbanen Raum aufgezeigt, wie diese Politik das soziale Handeln marginalisierter Gruppen und Schichten und deren Nutzung des öffentlichen Raums prägt.

This essay is the first stage in a larger project that investigates an inter-imperial history of knowledge production through the prism of Baḥrī's activities and networks at various imperial sites in the Dutch, British and German empires as well as the French imperial nation-state. In this essay, I begin by asking how we can tell the history of the nationalist, journalist, author and traveller Yūnis Baḥrī (ca. 1901-1979) - once known in Arab-speaking populations from Europe across the Middle East to South East Asia as the "Iraqi traveller" (Arabic al-sāʾiḥ al-ʿirāqī) - by acknowledging his inter-imperial life and activities. Taking the archives of the German Foreign Office as examples, I seek to render these inter-imperial coordinates of his life visible. Previous research on Baḥrī has neglected these inter-imperial connections. Due to this reduction, Baḥrī's case could be described as a dualistic story of "Middle Eastern-German" relations. Thus, he could be a symbol for an ideological proximity of Arab nationalists and National Socialism. In this essay, I want to move away from the civilizational lens underlying such arguments by developing a broader methodological outlook. If Baḥrī's story forms part of the historical relationship between Arab nationalists and National Socialism, it is also an element of wider inter-imperial histories. To bring out these histories requires reading practices of the archives that do not follow civilizational or national logics. I therefore take what the archives of the German Foreign Office tell about Baḥrī as a starting point to tease out how his activities transgress civilizational historio graphical frameworks. In conclusion, I explain how the conceptual shift involved in my argument leads to a both broader and denser account of the politics that governed Baḥrī's life and other actors like him.

Studies on urban transformation in the Arab Gulf have thus far predominantly dealt with the city as a space of financial investment. Only recently they began to pay attention to contestations of urban space. Cultural initiatives in Kuwait, as this article argues, present and foster new forms to reclaiming urban space. They not only demand, but also engage in practices according to which citizens have a say in how the space which they inhabit is re-formed and re-shaped.I analyse two such initiatives - one which organises walking tours of Kuwait City and another which creates an urban garden in a public park. In so doing, I outline the social and cultural fields, which contain partially overlapping actors and networks, in which these initiatives are situated and analyse the entrepreneurial frameworks and practices - from "social entrepreneurship" to "commons" - in which they are articulated. In their attempt to construct participatory spaces the initiatives have never the less been targeted towards a certain strata of Kuwait's society, first and foremost, middle class Kuwaitis with a cosmopolitan outlook.

This paper discusses the ways in which a revolution inspired by Islam emerged in the few decades in West Africa, mainly through the intervention of Salafi actors, institutions, and reform practices. Salafism as an Islamic discourse became popular in the region at the end of the 20th century as Islam acquired a renewed interest and became a potent discourse, restructuring from within, formulating new political agendas and mobilising for social change and radical reconfigurations of social order. The paper calls for attention to context, noting the varieties of Salafism, while problematising the views promoters of this Islamic trend have expressed in relation to state institutions, in particular the secular school system. Emphasising the role of the Salafi preacher, the paper argues that Salafism has had a crucial impact not only on the religious, but also on the public spheres. A social and political critique, Salafism proves a major challenge while it promotes alternative moral and political orders including a Jihadi regime.

"A growing body of anthropological research has turned to study Islam as a discursive tradition that informs the attempts of Muslims to live pious and moral lives, the aff ects and emotions they cultivate and the challenges they pose to a liberal secular ideology. While this turn has provided direction for a number of innovative studies, it appears to stop short of some key questions regarding everyday religious and moral practice, notably the ambivalence, the inconsistencies and the openness of people’s lives that never fi t into the framework of a single tradition. In short, there is too much Islam in the anthropology of Islam. To fi nd ways to account for both the ambivalence of people’s everyday lives and the often perfectionist ideals of good life, society and self they articulate, I argue that we may have to talk a little less about traditions, discourses and powers and a little more about the existential and pragmatic sensibilities of living a life in a complex and often troubling world. By broadening our focus to include the concerns, practice and experience of everyday life in its various moments and directions, we may eventually also be better able to make sense of the signifi cance of a grand scheme like Islam in it." [author's abstract]

"The interdisciplinary field of memory studies has tended in recent years to diverge into two directions: on the one hand, the study of memorials, monuments, rituals and commemorations, adapting theories of space, construed through notions of 'collective memory' and 'affective memory'; and on the other hand, a psychoanalytic model of translation between 'traumatic memory' and 'narrative memory', dominated by an approach to the value of narrative as cure. While these approaches often cross over into each other, generating compelling insights, they tend to be informed by what we could call a presentist approach to memory. This tends to position the present, however embattled, as a potentially stabilising recovery of the past. Having learned and adapted much from both approaches, I nevertheless regard my work with memory as a slight departure. Preoccupied with works of cultural production, mainly film and literature, arising out of the sixteen-year civil war in Lebanon, I am concerned more with a fragmenting force of memory situated as an irresolvable, irreconcilable, productive tension between what comes to be re-covered as present and past, i.e., neither from the vantage point of 'the' present nor from that of »the« past. My current research develops and applies this notion of memory." (author´s abstract)

"The aim of this paper is to remember Petra Heidrich, a friend and colleague of Annemarie Hafner, who died much too soon. Special attention is given to Petra Heidrich’s scientific work, which can be subsumed under the theme of »Agrarian and Peasant Studies and Transformation of Traditional Social Structures and Reform Movements in the 19th and 20th Centuries in India«. At the same time, the paper seeks to honour the contribution Petra Heidrich made to the prosperity of the ZMO during its founding stages and initial positioning. Starting from these memories, Annemarie Hafner tries to develop conceptual suggestions on how, from today’s viewpoint, the research field of agrarian and peasant studies can be revived, as they currently lie fallow in the landscape of German social historical research, and in particular, within South Asian Studies." (author´s abstract)

"Scholarship on the Indian Ocean is generally comparative in its approach. In this paper, we draw from our research experiences on the Swahili and Gujarati coasts in order to discuss some of the epistemological consequences of comparison for the ways in which East Africa and Western India have been understood. We critically examine the frames and terms of comparison in the work of the historian Thomas Metcalf and the anthropologists A.H.J. Prins, Helene Basu and David F. Pocock. We suggest that the personal journeys of scholars, as well as the sources they use, have profoundly influenced the ways in which they have been able to write and problematize their own material." (author´s abstract)

"This paper reflects on the issues that were brought to the Roundtable on Hermeneutics and Translocality held at the ZMO in 2006. I review the successive ways in which I have drawn on the hermeneutic philosophical tradition as an anthropologist, emphasing the ethical dimension. Translocality heightens the hermeneutic problem but does not radically change it; it may entail recognizing that everything is always already pretranslated. In reflecting on the task and means of anthropology, I briefly juxtapose Gadamer’s admirable deference or modesty to Ricoeur’s dialectic of appropriation and distanciation and to what Cavell calls the arrogation of voice." [author´s abstract]