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.
Articles
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.
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.
Recommended topics
Precarity inflames tensions in Kenya. Youth-led demonstrations from 2024 and 2025 rallied against government corruption, hiked living costs and police brutality. With more than two thirds under 30, commentators portray young Africans as either a threat or a neoliberal dividend. But people-centred, environmental aspirations could be the proffered new wave.
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.
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
Palestine: A future to rebuild
Esprit 6/2026
Palestinian historiography as struggle against erasure; a film about narrative and loss; Standing Together; debate as the first step to a renewed political imagination.
Disability histories
L’Homme 1/2026
The demonisation of mental illness; eugenics, disability and gender; age and (in)ability in socialist Bulgaria; family values and the identitarian right.
Narrative Apocalypse
Mittelweg 36 2/2026
End-times narratives and the end of narrative: storytelling as story-selling; zombie fiction for Derrideans; resisting teleology.
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.
