Words are under siege in Turkey and journalism has been taken hostage, writes Süreyyya Evren. When this era ends, he doesn’t know how long society will need to recover. But for now, it’s all about virtual private networks, among other forms of resistance.
Brazil may have been a favourite to win the 2014 FIFA World Cup. But the tournament failed to be the host country’s promised game-changer, writes Tom Hennigan. As triumphs of the tropical modernist movement continue to be swamped by new development, the dismal quality of urban life remains a sore point.
Following the massive bailouts, stimulus spending and quantitative easing of recent years, everyone breathed a sigh of relief and went back to sleep, says Richard Heinberg. But the coming global energy crisis will likely provide the jolt that wakes everyone up again.
The Internet and the World Wide Web were designed with a combination of academic, public service and even countercultural values, says Astra Taylor. So why do we accept that corporate values should now take precedent? Introducing the “people’s platform”.
In a text based on her presentation at Eurozine’s Oslo conference on the making of the public sphere, Pelin Tan explains how artist-run platforms are generating unique forms of solidarity, translocal networks and various types of transversal knowledge and alternative pedagogies. In so doing, Tan makes the case for a language that remains faithful to the project of rebuilding a collective consciousness.
A film critic without a film festival is no film critic at all, insists Matic Majcen, film editor for the Slovenian journal “Dialogi”. To be completely alone with the film and one’s opinion of it is a unique experience in a film world where advertising and promotion are becoming increasingly invasive.
Only a mixture of bottom-up and top-down measures can avoid a nationalist cycle of disintegration now, argues Mary Kaldor. This means opening up the public sphere, especially at local and transnational levels, at the same time as creating a framework for a civilizing globalization.
Those who wish to pass off World War I as a just war against German militarism should remember that at the heart of the global imperialist network stood not Germany but Britain, writes Kenan Malik. And that behind imperialist expansion lay venomous racism.
The EU’s response to the NSA scandal, a recent landmark European Court of Justice ruling and the European Parliament’s rejection of ACTA: all developments, argue Amandine Scherrer and Jef Huysmans, that show the EU remains key to achieving an Internet commons.
It’ll be a long haul, but it can be done. Having systematically charted the careers of the people who drove Ukraine to the brink of destruction, Sergii Leshchenko grapples with the question of how to shake Ukraine free of the oligarchs’ grip.
In her firsthand account of events in Kyiv between 18 and 20 February, Oksana Forostyna conveys the intensity of the struggle that led to former president Viktor Yanukovych’s exit. And how the Maidan became a space where protesters from all sorts of backgrounds worked and fought together.
Whether in its Asian forms, or under the Anglo-American model or the post-dictatorship democracies of Latin America, capital may employ women but doesn’t emancipate them, writes Beatrix Campbell. Given today’s global neoliberal neo-patriarchy, it will take a gender revolution to change this.
It’s no longer about nature in the city but the urbanization of nature itself, write Erik Swyngedouw and Maria Kaika. Welcome to the cyborg city, in which human and non-human inhabitants are globally linked through the circulation of water, energy, fat, chemicals and viruses, among others.
If the patrolling of borders unites European peoples more solidly than European “universal values”, what hope for the European Union? Nadia Urbinati argues that issues raised by the coming European elections go to the very heart of the pact that defined the post-war democratic rebirth.
A common currency should remain a central component of international co-operation and redistribution, argues Chris Hann. But European debates on the compatibility of capitalism and democracy must be radically reframed if the currency, and the structures underpinning it, are to succeed.
We can dream of a cosmopolitan Europe. But to realize the dream, writes Obrad Savic, we must have the conviction to share the same history, the same past and the same future with “others”, outside of Europe. An argument for transforming the people of Europe into a European world people.