Isabel Schäfer

Freelance

This paper has two purposes. First, it summarises the various papers presented at a Pluridisciplinary Conference on the Mediterranean treating the region from a variety of perspectives, a selection of which are published in this issue of History and Anthropology. Second, it attempts to explore some of the tensions between historians and anthropolog...

Im Prozess der Entfremdung zwischen der Mehrheitsgesellschaft und muslimischen Migranten können Menschen, die sich unterschiedlichen kulturellen Räumen zugehörig fühlen, stärker als Vermittler agieren.

This chapter looks at current trends on the Tunisian labor market and the challenge of skill mismatch.

This chapter explores three avenues for bridging the skill mismatch on the Tunisian labor market.

This chapter explains how essential youth employment is for sustainable human development, and argues for an integrated and holistic approach to employment, economics, education, and youth policies.

This chapter briefly analyzes the fragile political transition context in Tunisia after 2011 and how it delayed major economic reforms.

This chapter analyzes the various sets of structural causes for unemployment and skill mismatch, including economic, demographic, political and labor market policy causes.

This chapter analyzes—after a brief review of the Tunisian education system—the educational causes for youth unemployment and skill mismatch, including the so-called “massification” of the education system, the legacy of the authoritarian system, and the low level of public-private co-governance of vocational education. These features of the skill...

This chapter develops some reflections on the state of the art and various theoretical approaches, including political economy, democratic transition literature, labor market theory, labor market sociology, and development economics with regard to youth, unemployment, skill mismatch, and human development.

This book discusses youth unemployment in post-revolutionary Tunisia, paying particular attention to the so-called skill mismatch. Youth unemployment was one of the major factors triggering the Tunisian revolution, and continues to be a central socio-economic challenge. The Tunisian labour market is marked by a strong increase of higher education g...

France and Germany have traditionally pursued very different approaches to the Maghreb countries. This is hardly surprising given the very different roles that these two European powers have played historically in the region. In recent years, however, against the backdrop of an increasing transnationalisation of foreign policy challenges linked to...

Die Parteienlandschaft Tunesiens veränderte sich seit dem Sturz des autoritären Regimes von Präsident Ben Ali am 14. Januar 2011 erheblich. Formal seit der Unabhängigkeit 1956 ein Mehrparteiensystem, wurde Tunesien bis 2011 von einer Partei, die mehrfach ihren Namen wechselte, dominiert. Nach dem politischen Umbruch 2011 wurden die bisherige Regier...

The newly emerging Tunisian political system needs to be considered in the context of the current developments in the wider MENA region. In the international political and scientific debate on the “Arab Spring”, the Tunisian case has often been cited as a “model” of peaceful and successful transition. This paper, written by Isabel Schäfer, rather c...

The multipolar, dynamic and heterogeneous Mediterranean area is an object of analysis in different disciplines. The French historian Fernand Braudel developed one of the most comprehensive scientific approaches, defining the Mediterranean as a space of unity and coherence, with a long-term continuity (longue durée). Studies in political science, es...

31 Meilenstein der Mäßigung Drei Jahre nach dem Sturz von Ben Ali hat sich Tunesien am 26. Januar 2014 eine neue Verfassung gegeben. 1 Der Diskussionsprozess in der demokratisch gewählten Verfassungsgebenden Nationalversammlung über den Charakter des neuen politischen Systems und der Gesellschaftsordnung war steinig, die Debat-ten kontrovers. Vor a...

Von der Aufbruchstimmung des Arabischen Frühlings ist nicht mehr viel übrig, innen- und sicherheitspolitische Krisen prägen den Übergang zu einer wie auch immer ausgestalteten neuen Ordnung. Die Kluft zwischen islamistischen und säkularen, zwischen progressiven und gegenrevolutionären Kräften wächst.

The Arab unrests, sparked by the Tunisian revolution in January 2011, have not only drawn the interest of German foreign policy makers for the MENA region, but also of numerous institutions and organisations, as well as prompting new perceptions among the German public opinion and media. This is particularly true for the Maghreb region, and especia...

Résumé Dès le lancement du Processus de Barcelone en 1995, le Partenariat euro-méditerranéen s’était donné comme objectif de réduire le fossé politique, économique et culturel entre les deux rives de la Méditerranée. Quinze ans plus tard, du haut de la « forteresse Europe », nous regardons interloqués les sociétés arabes se soulever et s’emparer d’...

Due to the current revolutions and uprisings in the Southern and Eastern Mediterranean countries a paradigm shift is taking place in international relations. This contribution looks at the EU's responses and the impact of the changed regional context on the European Neighbourhood Policy and the Union for the Mediterranean.

The EU is a postmodern actor in international relations. The example of the EU's Mediterranean policy allows the analysis of the EU's common foreign policy to-wards a third region, with a special attention to the competing institutional frame-works and the interaction between the above and the below, between governmental and non-governmental actors...

This article examines how changing political realities have influenced the cultural dimension of the Euro‐Mediterranean Partnership. Although the European Union has shunned the notion of a conflict between civilizations in dealing with the Mediterranean to promote the “dialogues of cultures”, the way how it has done so has been beset with difficult...

France and Germany have recently experienced common approaches when confronted to regional crisis in the Middle East. Recent German activism suggests a closer Franco-German cooperation in order to develop solutions to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in the framework of the European Union. This hypothesis needs to be assessed by taking into consid...

The Barcelona Process and the Middle East Peace Process were conceived as two separate, but complementary processes. The past ten years have shown, that the implications of the two processes are stronger than expected. While the deterioration in the Middle East Conflict caused a stagnation of the regional political dialogue in the framework of the...

The Euro-Mediterranean Partnership was conceived as a global concept for cooperation between the European Union and the southern and eastern Mediterranean. An ambitious project, which awakened many hopes at the time, but which has also given rise to some contradictions, especially with regard to the objectives of the third chapter of the Barcelona...