What is the project about?
The wave of dissatisfaction with present political orders is sparking revolutionary actions, protest movements, and innovative forms of civic engagement across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). These actions offer valuable insights into the root causes of discontent and reveal emerging visions of new political arrangements desired by the protagonists. This project aims to explore these imaginaries through an in-depth qualitative analysis of MENA countries ranging from Iran to Tunisia. By attending to the heterogeneity of visions driving acts of resistance since 2019, it seeks to rethink how political transformations are conceived in political science and move beyond the narrow focus on the reform of political institutions. Furthermore, it will contrast the local visions with imaginaries of reform behind internationally sponsored democracy promotion programs to understand the potentials and limitations of external support for meaningful political change. Thus, the project will not only enhance our understanding of non-Western imaginaries of political transformation but also provide a critical reflection of policy practice.
What are our researchers currently working on?
Constitutional Imaginaries in Anti-Authoritarian Movements in the MENA – Tereza Jermanová (in progress)
Constitutions create opportunities to imagine collective futures and serve as tangible instruments for advancing political reform and protecting rights and freedoms. This is why opposition actors frequently focused on constitutional reform before and during the 2010–11 uprisings in the MENA region as well as during subsequent protest waves. Yet the failure of the constitutional reforms that followed the 2010–11 uprisings to produce meaningful political change may have diminished the perceived efficacy of constitutions as instruments of political transformation. This research explores whether constitutional imaginary retains its power in the region. Specifically, it asks whether opposition and civil society actors continue to frame their grievances against authoritarian regimes, their visions of change, and their concrete demands for reform in constitutional language.
EU Imaginaries of the MENA Environmental Futures – Jakub Koláček (in progress)
How does the environmental turn in EU policy affect the bloc’s longer-term relationship with the MENA region and its imaginaries of the region’s future? This article interrogates these questions through a detailed analysis of EU policy documents, initiatives, and financed projects, and situates them within the broader debate about the MENA environmental crisis and the impact of “green colonialism”.
European Imaginaries of the Syrian Future: Something old, something new, something borrowed – Jan Daniel (in progress)
Focusing on the EU’s and EU member states’ debates on the future of Syria and the role of the EU in the country, this part of the project seeks to understand the EU’s imaginaries of the Syrian state and society. Building on the theorization of imaginaries in foreign policy making, the research pays close attention to the long-term, underlying aspects of the EU’s imaginaries of Syria and its place in European foreign policy, as well as the abrupt (re)formulation of such imaginaries following the fall of the Assad regime.
Political Imaginaries of Syria’s non-Sunni communities in Post-Asad Syria – Anna Filipi (in progress)
This paper examines how Syria’s non-Sunni communities envision their place in the emerging political order and how they perceive the new authorities following the fall of the Asad regime in December 2024. The collapse of the regime opened a period of uncertainty, particularly for communities that had long navigated – and been instrumentalised by – a system that claimed to be their protector. Facing a rapidly shifting political landscape in which their status, safety, and political representation remain unresolved, these communities now articulate diverse and at times competing visions of Syria’s future. Drawing on reports, media articles, and interviews with members of these communities, this paper explores not only the forms of political participation and representation these communities aspire to, but what they hope for and fear from the emerging order – and how their experiences under the former regime and the uncertain beginnings of the new one shape these imaginaries. In doing so, it shifts attention from the better-documented structural constraints facing minorities toward their active role as political actors articulating visions of the state they wish to inhabit.
Imagining the End of The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: The Evidence from the UN General Debate (1946-2025) –
Tereza Plíštilová (in progress)
The research examines how the two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict functions as a collective political imaginary in international political discourse. Building on the concept of “zombie category,” the paper argues that the two-state scenario endures not because states genuinely anticipate its realization, but because no legitimate alternative exists. Bringing text-as-data approaches to the project, the analysis examines the UN General Debate Corpus (1946–2025), comprising 11,141 country statements from the full UN membership. Using keyword-based salience measures and LLM-assisted classification, it maps both what resolution endpoint states invoke and how they invoke it.
The International Politics of Infographics: Legibility, Humanization and Relatability of Visualising Palestine –
Jakub Záhora (in progress)
The first sub-project focuses on how historical and current developments in Palestine and Israel are understood, imagined, and conveyed visually. Via semiotic analysis of materials produced by Visualising Palestine, an organization seeking to intervene in public global debates on the topic, this research paper identifies mechanisms and strategies through which complex social and political processes are rendered legible and relatable to wide audiences.
Team members
Dr. Tereza Jermanová (Principal Investigator)
Dr. Jakub Záhora (Affiliate Researcher)
Funding
Four-year project (im)vision (2024-2028) is funded by PRIMUS research programme of Charles University.
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