When citizens are the targets of direct military action, humanity suffers alongside those under fire. First-hand insights of travelling to Ukraine’s war zones are reminders of just how close Russia’s ongoing war is.
Articles
Women sentenced to time behind bars is on the rise under Putin. While male convicts are being offered their freedom to fight on the front line against Ukraine, even mothers with underage children aren’t being pardoned. For those incarcerated for anti-war activism or poverty-related crimes, solidarity campaigns provide crucial lifelines.
Talking with atheists and religious minorities explodes the myth of a homogenous Islamic Republic of Iran. But secular views remain otherwise concealed – some parents hiding their convictions even from children, who may not understand the need to lie for their safety.
After being forced to leave Croatia in 1992 following her criticism of the nationalist regime, the writer and feminist Slavenka Drakulić set out to explain her homeland to a western public. She will be remembered for the moral wisdom and humanity running throughout her work.
Recommended topics
A staggering reversal of assumptions
Interview with Adam Tooze
Which world power’s energy ‘strategy’ will determine our planetary future? Will America’s fossil fuel isolationism be the defining factor, exacerbated by its incoherent war in the Middle East, tipping global oil supplies into chaos? Or will China’s new-level efficiency in rolling out affordable renewable energy products set the bar?
Darwin may have convincingly described the origin of species, but he was careful to avoid theorizing on life itself. Bold contemporaries meanwhile publicly pitted spontaneous generation, inspired by ‘the recipe for mice‘, with exhaustive experiments on broth. While Pasteur’s persistence was rewarded, the origin of life remains mysterious to this day.
Contemporary India cinema depicts everyday lives improvizing ways to overcome a divided society. A Hindu wearing a burqa to meet her Muslim lover becomes symbolic of personal contact surpassing fears of authority – a theme reflective of other cultures where religion and tradition take divisive roles.
Winner of the prestigious Yuri Shevelov Prize for ‘Hemingway Knows Nothing’ at age twenty-five, Ukrainian soldier and writer Artur Dron’s relationships with literature and religion have already been tested to the max. In an interview with cultural journal ‘The Ukrainians’, he shares his honest reflections on defining moments that strip back the superfluous.
Eurozine review
Memory over ideology
Kultūros Barai 5/2026
An optimistic take on AI aesthetics; the destruction of Vilnius during the Soviet Union; the arrested development of Lithuanian urban culture; searching for a father killed in 1941.
Living language
Atlas 2/2026
In the 50th issue of Atlas: a cautionary tale about the manosphere; gentrification myths; a meditation on authority, power and cultural ownership; freedom despite war.
The present state
Fronesis 90–91 (2026)
Contradictions and possibilities of the state: neo-neoliberalism versus state capitalism; census-taking and the state imagination; the politicization of childbearing; James C. Scott’s anarchist squint.
Focal points
Cultural reflections on contemporary warfare: from sanctions, human rights abuses and peace negotiations to recruitment, rearmament, autonomous weapons and civil protection mechanisms.
An ongoing series in Eurozine discussing questions raised by the 7 October Hamas attacks and Israel’s devastating war on Gaza. The series offers a sample of articles published in the wider Eurozine network and represents diverse perspectives, above all Palestinian and Israeli.
Post-revolutionary Ukrainian society displays a unique mix of hope, enthusiasm, social creativity, collective trauma of war, radicalism and disillusionment. With the Maidan becoming history, the focal point ‘Ukraine in European Dialogue’ explores the new challenges facing the young democracy, its place in Europe, and the lessons it might offer for the future of the European project.
Inspired by a lecture that Clifford Geertz delivered in 1995 at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, this focal point engages with ‘deep diversity’, ‘a sense of dispersion, of particularity, of complexity and of uncenteredness’ rather than unified world order. It follows the launch of a research programme of the same name at the institute in January 2023.
