is contributing editor of Eurozine. As freelance journalist based in Athens and Milan, he covers Greece for various Italian media.
In the last decades, Greece has proven to be a resilient democracy that not even a devastating economic crisis could overturn. The current surveillance scandal and its political handling, however, raise the shadow of a traumatic past that no amount of file destruction could erase.
Cultural journalism plans for eternity: current events do inspire, but do not define our kind of publishing. In Eurozine’s archives, older articles rarely go forgotten, covered in the online equivalent of dust. Here’s a selection of the most read pieces in Eurozine over the past five years.
One year after the rigged presidential elections, protesters in Belarus are still demanding a democratic shift and respond with mutual solidarity to a repressive regime. But what does it take to keep on fighting when your cause falls out of the spotlight?
A Russian, a Turk and a Hungarian, all journalists, walk into a bar … well, an online talk, actually. Irina Borogan, Ece Temelkuran and György Kerényi spoke about censorship and repression, the impossibility of exile and the performance of care.
Not all standards may be inherently good. Cultural debate, when healthy, should question social norms. But what occurs when one person’s political correctness becomes another’s political weapon? And how can a positive position be struck in the battles over diversity and racism?
The urgency of the climate crisis demands individual ethics as much as a willingness to cooperate with power. But reconnecting humans with the natural world also forces us to revisit the promises of ever-growing efficiency and a culture of exploitation.
One year in and the pandemic has hit women particularly hard: decades’ of advancement in the workplace and academia are under threat; domestic violence has skyrocketed. And yet, in institutional politics, women seem to be growing in numbers and influence. This year’s International Women’s Day ‘challenge’ is one of recovery.
Just landed in Moscow after recovering from the Novichok poisoning of last August, Putin’s major political opponent Aleksej Navalny was immediately arrested. This selection of Eurozine reads helps understand why the Kremlin fears him and is cracking down on niches of free expression and rising civic activism.
On 17 December 2010, Tunisian fruit seller Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire in protest against the arrogance of the political authorities. Bouazizi’s suicide marked the beginning of the uprisings across the Arab world. A decade later, the consequences of the Arab Spring are still unfolding.
The poor handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, long-standing economic stagnation and the violent suppression of protests against electoral fraud have sparked in Belarus an unprecedented popular uprising, the final outcome of which is still uncertain. Who has kept the protest culture alive among a population often accused of political apathy? What has been the role of women in the opposition to Lukashenka? And what game is Russia playing?
Italian cities are ordinarily international tourism hotspots. Their economic recovery post-lockdown appears to depend on visitor numbers. And yet massified tourism brings its own pressures, undermining local housing provision. Alessio Giussani investigates the Italian city’s precarious situation, taking Airbnb’s impact as example.