About Me

My name is Antonio Francisco Rando Casermeiro, though people usually call me Antonio, Toni, Nico or, as my schoolmates say, "Rando." I am currently a master's tutor at UNIR and a secondary-school teacher. I teach, or have taught, Spanish, politics and history (where I can discuss with my students some of my favorite topics, such as populism... it is a privilege to be on the front line with young people and understand how they think about issues that directly affect today's democracy). I have also taught Spanish at the VHS centers in Cologne and Erft-Rhein. I have lived in Cologne since 2013. In my work at secondary schools, whenever the topic calls for it, I have the opportunity to discuss several of the issues covered in this blog. I teach Politics, European Law, Political Economy, Geography, History, and Practical Philosophy, which combines law and civic education. Since I was young, I have always had a strong interest in international relations and history. In this field, I pay special attention to Eastern Europe - whether post-Soviet or not - with a particular focus on the Balkans and the former Yugoslavia. At the age of 13 or 14, around 1989, I regularly followed the news about the fall of the Iron Curtain, the dissolution of the Soviet Union and, a little later, Yugoslavia. Today, our family encyclopedia still preserves the hand-drawn redistribution of borders on maps from the late 1980s. I studied law and history at the University of Malaga. Law did not interest me much at first, except for a bit of criminal law and, above all, public international law and international relations. History was always my first vocation. Later, I presented my licentiate thesis (the old tesina, between a master's and a doctoral thesis, later recognized for me as a master's degree in Germany) at the University of Granada on the foreign relations of the Byzantine Empire. Because of this, I gladly became a Byzantinist and, indirectly, somewhat of an Ottomanist for a time. This work confirmed and revealed to me the crucial importance of the fascinating Byzantine civilization, a subject that is often overlooked in the curricula of most secondary schools and faculties. Armed with this Byzantine background, and after stays at the Thrace Ethnological Museum in Alexandroupolis (Greece), Bulgaria and Serbia, the next step was to begin my doctoral dissertation, which I completed in 2022. It focuses on Byzantine international relations, especially with the Balkans and Serbia. I do not leave aside the crucial Yugoslav period, of which I am a great admirer (including the basketball that was played in that country). For now, I continue writing articles on my subjects and try to dedicate myself fully to them in academia or journalism, whether narrative or more analytical (although I do not consider myself a journalist). In the same way, I am sometimes drawn to the airwaves and take part in the occasional podcast as a guest, usually to discuss issues related to this blog's topics. As for my work experience, I began as a legal advisor in immigration matters in the first years of the 21st century and in Cologne in the mid-2010s. I also worked in immigrant integration as a social educator and Spanish teacher in centers for minors and immigrants. In my teaching career, I have taught tourism law, EU law, geography, art, Latin and, of course, Spanish.