23.01.2023 Welcome at the Center for Conflict Studies, Mina Ibrahim!

Mina Ibrahim is an anthropologist and archivist from Cairo, Egypt, interested in linking ethnographic fieldwork with (absent) paper archives and oral history. After finishing his BA from the American University in Cairo (AUC), he earned his MA from Central European University (CEU) in Budapest, Hungary. In June 2022, he defended his doctoral dissertation at the University of Giessen that traced theologically and socially negated practices among Coptic Christians in Egypt. After publishing many articles, book chapters, and book reviews about the topic during his research, Mina turned his dissertation into a book with Palgrave Macmillan titled Identity, Marginalisation, and Activism, and Victimhood in Egypt: Misfits in the Coptic Christian Community.

In September 2018, Mina joined the MENA Prison Forum (MPF) as its project coordinator. Founded by Lokman Slim and Monika Borgmann as an initiative of UMAM Documentation & Research (UMAM D&R), MPF is a multidisciplinary forum addressing prison, detention, and carceral-related dynamics both within countries in the MENA region and across the region itself. The MPF project takes as its starting point the centrality of the prison, and in particular of the prison as a site of political incarceration, to the MENA region's political culture, future trajectory, identity, and mindset. In January 2023, Mina became the MPF project manager and concerned with connecting the work of the MPF to other regions.

In May 2021, Mina founded SARD for History and Social Research (Shubra’s Archive). Established while writing his dissertation, Shubra’s Archive grapples with the absence of communal hubs in Cairo’s neighbourhoods where their inhabitants can produce and share knowledge about their histories and everyday relationships.

In October 2022, Mina joined the Centre for Conflict Studies at Marburg University as a research associate to study human rights consciousness among Syrian refugees in Germany as part of the “Human Rights Crimes, Norms Entrepreneurs, and the Implementation of the Principle of Universal Jurisdiction in Germany”. This is one of the ten subprojects of the DFG research group Human Rights Discourses in the Migration Society (MeDiMi), which is headed by the Professorship of Public Law and European Law at the Justus Liebig University in Giessen. Mina’s work will be concerned with tracing and analysing the gaps and intersections between the recent trials of members of the Syrian regime in Germany, on one hand, and the everyday, vernacular meanings and understandings of justice, accountability, and human rights among Syrians who escaped their country following the 2011 uprisings and its brutal aftermath, on the other hand.