Which Iranian artist in exile isn’t asked how their work relates to oppression, protest and war? How can creatives overcome colonial expectations of intelligibility? Opacity – questioning transparency’s supposed purity – becomes a technique of survival and a form of protection, as in the work of Chohreh Feyzdjou.
Even if the Iranian regime manages to stay in power, it will no longer have the means to achieve its hegemonic ambitions. The current war has brought Israel closer to its goal of becoming the centre of gravity in the Middle East.
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?
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.
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 culture war being waged by the Georgian Dream government on the country’s higher education system.
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?
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?
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?
Focus on the 20th-century Croatian poet and novelist Antun Šoljan: literary translation and political subversion; intertextuality and Socratic irony; Mediterranean humanism; a denim Homer.
Late capitalism and the commodification of calm; flotation tanks and the illusion of autonomy; emancipatory muteness in late 20th-century feminist fiction; performative silence in the work of Marina Abramović.
Speculative cartography and the rediscovery of suppressed urban histories; community resistance and the conservation of Checkpoint Charlie; solarpunk and slower, more communal forms of life.
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.
