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EU graffiti wall

For both Russia and Ukraine, the conflict in eastern Ukraine marks the beginning of a painful process of emancipation from a pre-modern imagined community of eastern Slavs. A process, writes Mykola Riabchuk, from which modern civic national identities must emerge.

New Humanist cover

Who is Eleni Haifa?

On information technology and human character

Virginia Woolf’s famous line – “on or about December 1910, human character changed” – haunts the present. For sometime during the 2000s, writes Paul Mason, a combination of technology, broken economic life-chances and increased personal freedom changed human character all over again.

Film still of

Poland's controversial Oscar

Is "Ida" really anti-Polish and anti-Semitic?

Pawel Pawlikowski’s film Ida may have won this year’s Oscar for best foreign language film; however, it is far from universally well-received in Poland. While some fear it will resurrect anti-Polish stereotypes, others accuse it of anti-Semitism, writes Filip Mazurczak.

NSA radomes on Teufelsberg, Germany

In Germany there has been heavy public criticism of the NSA. Yet the German government has failed to investigate the affair and has been quick to demand greater surveillance powers after the Paris attacks, writes Daniel Leisegang of Blätter.

street graffiti showing an eye

The Belgian government has held back from demanding greater surveillance powers after the terrorist attacks; how long liberal protections withstand rightwing pressure remains to be seen, writes Thomas Lemaigre of La Revue nouvelle.

Anti-ACTA protest

Despite residual hostility to state surveillance, the Polish response to the NSA affair both at the political and public levels was strongly pro-American. Will campaigning be able to change mainstream indifference to privacy issues? Anna Wójcik of Res Publica Nowa reports.

Andrus Ansip

In Estonia, digital optimism combines with free market scepticism about the regulation of the Internet. As a result, privacy concerns have been sidelined, while the activities of the security services remain obscure, writes Ann Väljataga of Vikerkaar.

Cover for: What is there to lose?

What is there to lose?

Privacy in offline and online friendships

Friendship enables us to relax the rules of privacy we need in other types of social relationship. When friendship goes online, however, controlling privacy becomes more problematic. Are social networks causing a change in friendship as such, and if so, should we be concerned?

NSA Headquarter

Following the Charlie Hebdo attacks, French public opinion is firmly in favour of giving greater surveillance powers to the state. Measures focus on online radicalization, including outsourcing surveillance to service providers and fellow citizens, writes Alice Béja of Esprit.

Cover for: Privacy as a human right

Privacy as a human right

Edward Snowden and the control of power

The Snowden revelations revealed just how far some states had departed from the guarantees of privacy enshrined in the human and civil rights agreements of the post-war era. The European Union can play the central role in setting enforceable data protection standards internationally, however resisting the logic of surveillance also depends on pressure from society, writes Peter Schaar.

Radome in Yorkshire

The UK government tried to rush through a “Snoopers’ Charter” after Paris and is playing the security card in the run-up to the May elections. Yet parochialism and complacency obstruct real progress in digital rights, writes Vicky Baker of Index on Censorship.

Anti-ACTA activists in Zagreb

Despite public interest, Croatian politics is too fractious and self-centred to engage in serious debate about state surveillance, while data protection and digital rights are concepts yet to enter the mainstream, writes Miljenka Buljevic of Booksa.

Cover for: Smart tales of the city

The smart city industry is continually conquering new terrain. But as the global rollout of the digital electricity and gas meter (smart meter) proceeds apace, Elke Rauth discerns a project that shows disdain for the private sphere and puts the intelligence of governments and city-dwellers to the test.

Cover for: Turning public

Turning public

Historians and public intellectuals in post-Soviet Ukraine

As scholars, historians must discover the truth about the past, writes Volodymyr Sklokin. But following the Ukrainian intellectual community’s transformation after 1991, Ukrainian historians have also begun to find their feet as intellectuals responsible for sustaining a public sphere.

Destroyed gymnasium in Mostar

Immortal moments

A jump into the water

The reconstruction of deliberately destroyed public and religious buildings in Mostar has raised many questions and controversies. Arna Mackic embarks on a search for a new open architectural language that might encourage encounters between people, liberated from the burden of politics or ethnicity.

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