Articles

Historian Aleksander Babich, a Russian-speaking Ukrainian, responds to Russia’s military intervention in Ukraine in this Facebook status update of 1 March 2014: and is forced to entertain the prospect of combatants burying one another in the common graves of their grandfathers.

Russia may have won Crimea but it has lost Ukraine, writes Vitaly Portnikov. At the same time, Ukraine has gained a whole world of sympathetic people who support the country in its fight for something that should in fact be just as much a necessity for Russia too: freedom.

The radical rightwing party Svoboda rose to prominence in Ukraine’s 2012 parliamentary elections as an alternative to the political establishment, writes Anton Shekhovtsov, expert on Ukrainian rightwing groups. But its role in Euromaidan may well amount to Svoboda’s swan song.

The main threat to the revolution comes not from Crimean separatism nor from far-right groups, writes Mykola Riabchuk. The biggest threat comes from within: from old habits and oldboy networks. New politicians are needed to avoid repeating the missed opportunities of 1991 and 2004.

Gender quotas were first discussed over thirty years ago; where they have been introduced, they have successfully offset structural discrimination against women. Evidence shows that nothing changes without gender quotas – so why do many countries still not operate them? Concentrating on the German situation, political scientist Beate Rössler re-states the case.

As the culture and the institutions of the Gutenberg Galaxy wane, Felix Stalder looks to commons, assemblies, swarms and weak networks as a basis for remaking society in a more inclusive and diverse way, which expands autonomy and solidarity at the same time.

At the beginning of February, violent protests swept through Bosnia-Herzegovina: demonstrators clashed with police and government buildings were set ablaze. But then, independent citizens’ assemblies began to be organized to formulate demands to be made to the government.

Solidarity, one of the European Union’s driving concepts, has been abandoned in the wake of the eurocrisis, writes Dominika Kasprowicz: allowing the populist radical Right to bring to bear their own concept of solidarity, based on an anti-establishment stance and nativism.

Following the war with Serbia in the late 1990s, a construction boom transformed Kosovo’s capital city. This has in turn transformed the rhythms of everyday life, writes ethnographer Karin Norman, as has an influx of rural migrants, UN and EU personnel and relief workers.

The case of Islamized Armenian survivors of the 1915 genocide and the narratives of their “Muslim” grandchildren pose significant challenges to Turkish national self-understanding and the official politics of genocide denial, writes Ayse Gül Altinay.

Some images of political events can be conjured without being reproduced. At the same time as arresting the viewer, writes Sharon Hayes, they give pause as to how political affiliation, political community and collective political horizons are formed.

There are two Europes, writes Volodymyr Yermolenko: a Europe of rules and regulations, and a Europe founded upon faith in the European idea. And of course, as recent events in Ukraine show, the European idea extends well beyond the formal frontiers of the European Union.

As the winter Olympics opened in Sochi amid controversy over Russia’s anti-gay laws, Tatiana Riabova and Oleg Riabov showed how official discourse in Russia brands “European sexual deviancy” a natural result of western democratic development; and Russia as the last bastion of “normalcy”.

A surge of state violence and the subsequent curtailment of citizens’ right to protest, combined with an expansion of the authorities’ right to use force: Kirill Rogov reveals how the “Putin doctrine” previously applied to protests in Russia brought Ukraine to the brink of civil war.

Aging is a common literary theme though overwhelmingly confined to male writing, writes Slavenka Drakulic. Does dementia provide a culturally acceptable, metaphorical replacement for women’s accounts of aging, and if so why?