When NATO intervened in the Yugoslav wars on 24 March 1999, depleted uranium weaponry punctured Serbian targets across the region, leaving permanent contamination behind. Populists, whose victim narrative gained ground, now position nuclear as the solution to energy dependency. But how can public fear and security be one and the same?
Articles
Change the directors, cut the funding, rewrite the narrative: from Washington to Warsaw, mnemonic warriors are deploying the same techniques to weaponize history. How museums have become key arenas in the culture wars.
While Trump’s violence has never been purely rhetorical, few anticipated his appetite for the use of military force since returning to power. Do Americans share their president’s growing bellicosity? And what if they decide they don’t?
Quackery with a university logo: the failed attempt to introduce pseudoscience onto the curriculum of Georgia’s flagship technical university was a bizarre episode in a wider cultural war being waged by the Georgian Dream government on the country’s higher education system.
Recommended topics
The German government’s decision to reinstate national service has hit resistance. Young activists, aligning climate protection and peace, are turning to pacifist groups. Ex-conscripts, now elderly, embody lessons of the nation’s past. Will following the lead of Scandinavian and Baltic countries, prioritizing civil defence, shift public opinion?
The untold risks of war
Interview with Mary Kaldor
Warring parties that benefit from violence and extortion – targeting civilians, looting, smuggling and abducting, pushing identity politics – are averse to resolution. How can diplomatic peace negotiations move beyond discussions about territory and improve the lives of war victims? And how can objective threats be identified in times of escalating conflict?
Recent statements by the presidents of FIFA, UEFA and the IOC indicate that the resolve to exclude Russia from international sport is crumbling. The justifications for this change of heart are disingenuous. Russia consistently uses successful athletes to legitimize its full-scale war against Ukraine.
Giving a big tech boss the job of cutting US government spending unleashed an onslaught of hacking and dehumanizing tactics. Now that the obliteration of institutional data – linked to losses of jobs, USAID projects and lives – has been normalized, where does that leave digitization’s legitimacy and America’s once significant soft power?
Eurozine review
Life and LARP
A2 3/2026
Live action role-playing in the Czech Republic: on the evolution of a not-so-niche cultural phenomenon; auto-drama and the thrill of borrowed life; military reenactments; the LARPization of politics.
Religion, revolution and rewilding
New Humanist Spring 2026
The therapists helping people break from organized religion; how far-right Christian influencers are luring men into misogyny; the dignity and defiance of Belarusian women; rewilding and its perils.
Literature in dark times
Ord & Bild 4/2025
War writing and the breakdown of the ability to narrate; defending democracy versus defending territory; Hollywood and 9/11; Charlotte Delbo’s theatre of survival.
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 attacks and their devastating aftermath. The series offers a sample of articles published in the wider Eurozine network and represent diverse perspectives, including above all those of Palestinians.
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.
