Articles

The convergence of online policing and security with customer profiling and traffic filtering means that rights of privacy need to be seen in connection with freedom of communication and information. The principle of net neutrality serves this composite claim, explains the director of European Digital Rights Joe McNamee.

The US is exerting heavy pressure on the EU in its negotiations on the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) to waive legislation placing restrictions on data-sharing with third countries. The Trade in Services Agreement (TiSA), which would succeed the GATS agreement, goes even further in hollowing out EU privacy law. To abandon localized data protection arrangements in the EU would be to surrender fundamental rights to economic interest. Political scientist Ralf Bendrath explains.

The worldwide spying operation is about more than security and counter-terrorism; rather, it is a part of a broader strategy aimed at controlling global information, writes political scientist Elmar Altvater. Opposition needs to grasp the geological significance of the planetary data theft.

“The Old Turkey is behind us, and its doors are now closed”, said Recep Tayyip Erdogan this summer, standing before a banner that read, “On the Road to the New Turkey”. A month later he was president. But what now? Kaya Genç wonders if in fact two countries continue to live alongside one another.

Go out to your local bookshop, advises Enda O’Doherty, and get in close with those Books You Haven’t Read, the Books To Read Next Summer and The Books To Fill Out Those Small Gaps That Are Still There On Your Shelves. Don’t come away empty-handed. They may not be there forever.

Nothing short of dramatic social transformation can eliminate the legal, economic and political basis for cults of gender difference and male privilege; and thus end the violence. So says Anne Marie Goetz, arguing that international solidarities are of crucial importance to the struggle.

Endemic male violence against women, and the militarization of the dominant form of masculinity in our culture: surely these things are not unrelated, writes London-based feminist Cynthia Cockburn. A plea for a culture of equality, co-operation and peace.

Russia’s anti-westernism and territorial revanchism have intensified. A case of deferred post-imperial syndrome linked to the collapse of the USSR? Maybe, says Kirill Rogov. But this alone hardly explains why associated policies are now apparently met with such widespread domestic popularity.

Carl Henrik Fredriksson remembers a no-nonsense European bridge-builder.

Every day, people risk their lives on epic journeys across the Saharan desert and the Mediterranean Sea, in search of safety and a better life: often only to be confronted with the buttresses of Fortress Europe. Eurozine presents highlights from Stories without borders, the exhibition series first displayed in Conversano, Italy from 11 September to 5 October 2014.

A journey in which there is no stereotypical marginality but that is full of humanity, balanced between the existential difficulty and the joy of living: this is the journey that viewers of Emiliano Mancuso’s work embark upon, writes Renata Ferri.

Over the past 14 years, about 17,000 immigrants have perished in the Mediterranean, trying to overcome the material and virtual walls that surround the European Union today. That’s 60 times the number of people who lost their lives attempting to cross the Berlin Wall in 28 years.

In 2013, the seemingly hopeless task of bringing art to the provinces finally started to bear fruit in Luhansk, eastern Ukraine. One year on, the activists, artists, journalists and writers responsible are exiles in their own country, writes Konstantin Skorkin.

The region is bustling with brilliant young minds in the world of arts and ideas. Anna Wójcik reports on a new project that profiles the most innovative among them: the culture challengers who, in the way that the intelligentsia once did, pick up and run with the key transformational ideas of our times.