“By the time we respond to conflict, it’s too late”
In this conversation with Barbara Mittelhammer, Sussan Tahmasebi traces the current regional crisis in the Middle East back to its structural roots. She offers a sharp assessment of the EU’s potential but also its inconsistencies, from its failure to act on its own declared values on human rights to the backlash against feminist and civil society organisations who spoke up against what human rights organisations, scholars and the UN inquiry commission have qualified as the genocide in Gaza. Beyond critique, Tahmasebi makes a concrete case for what meaningful European engagement would look like: principled, addressing political and economic grievances, and grounded in the experience of civil society actors who have been working in these contexts for decades. Her message: Europe has to rethink how it relates to the region and its people.