About

Vision

The blog of the Swiss Society Middle East and Islamic Cultures (SGMOIK) was launched in 2020 by journalist Monika Bolliger and anthropologist Emanuel Schaeublin. Its aim is to highlight the diversity and rich­ness of academic research conducted in Switzer­land on the Middle East and on Islam. Researchers are supported by experienced journalists in turning their research findings into texts that are accessible and engaging for a broad audience. There is strong demand for this kind of journalistic mentoring, as this type of writing is rarely taught in academia.

Selected texts are also published in collabo­ration with online plat­forms such as Geschichte der Gegenwart, Orient XXI und Gender Campus. Once a year, the texts are published in the journal Almanach, accompanied by an editorial. Each article is assigned a Digital Object Identifier (DOI), which helps ensure its long-­term accessi­bility and discover­ability through search engines.

Since its beginnings, the project has been supported by the Swiss Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences (SAGW), the Universities of Basel, Bern, Zurich and Fribourg, as well as the Arditi Foundation. This funding is necessary to remunerate the journalists involved in the mentoring programme; the work of the editorial committee is carried out entirely on a voluntary basis.

Submit a text proposal

The SGMOIK blog is open to all researchers from Master’s level onwards who are affiliated with a Swiss university or higher education insti­tution, or who are working on a topic related to Switzer­land. Articles should be based on recent or ongoing research on Islam and/or the MENA region. In their final form, articles should be between 1,500 and 2,000 words long.

Please send us a working title and a short summary (150–300 words) addressing the following points:

• What is the topic of the article?
• What is its main argument or what are its main ideas?
• What study or research do the findings draw on?
• When do you expect to be able to submit a first draft? (Please note that texts should not yet have been written before the mentoring begins, so that their develop­ment can be fully supported as part of the mentoring programme.)

The SGMOIK editorial committee reviews the proposals and agrees on a publi­cation schedule in consul­tation with the mentors and authors.

Coordination and mentoring

Helene Aecherli (coordinating editor)

Of Swiss-Swedish descent, Helene Aecherli is a freelance journalist and moderator as well as a reporter for annabelle, Switzerland's most renowned women's magazine. After studying English, Nordic and German languages at the University of Zurich and in the US, she started her journalistic career at the Luzerner Zeitung and soon moved on to national weekly newspapers and magazines. For years she has been focusing her work on gender and human rights issues as well as socio-political developments in countries of the Middle East. In 2019, she was elected Reporter of the Year.

www.helene-aecherli.ch

Meret Michel (journalistic mentoring German and English)

Meret Michel grew up in Bern and studied political science at the University of Zurich. She learnt to write whilst working for local newspapers in Zurich and Hamburg, and later at the Reutlingen School of Journalism. Since 2017, she has been working as a freelance reporter in the Middle East, focusing on Syria, Lebanon and Iraq. Her articles were published in the Wochenzeitung, NZZ am Sonntag, Republik, SRF Kontext, Die Zeit and Greenpeace Magazin. She was awarded the real21 Prize and has been nominated twice for the Zurich Journalism Prize in the emerging talent category. Her book «Beirut – Splitter einer Weltstadt» was published in October 2025.

www.meretmichel.ch/

Emmanuel Haddad (journalistic mentoring French)

The Franco-Lebanese journalist currently works as a reporter for the Lebanese daily newspaper L’Orient-Le Jour in Beirut, having spent ten years working as a freelance journalist across the Middle East and North Africa. His work has been published in French media outlets such as Le Monde Diplomatique and Les Jours, as well as in the Swiss newspaper Le Courrier.

http://emmanuelhaddad.com/