During communism, extensive irrigation systems turned the regions along the Romanian Plain into major producers of fruit and vegetables. But when the infrastructure collapsed, so did the ecosystems built around it. Today, farmers are digging wells to deal with desertification: a risky strategy.
When a neighbourhood collapses into a warzone, from one day to the next, citizens become refugees. Securing safety and caring for those who remain creates a dual burden. Ukrainians, turning to their diaspora, have experienced both support and tension. Returning or remaining has become a political and deeply personal dilemma.
Turkey’s official history claims that the struggle for women’s rights was born alongside the Republic. The narrative according to which the founding fathers ‘granted’ rights to women was only challenged much later, with the discovery of a pre-republican feminist tradition.
Public trust in media is breaking down. Admittedly, in many countries there was no golden age to return to – distrust and uncertainty are a survival strategy. Mercy Abang, Péter Krekó and Lina Chawaf talk credibility, hidden agendas, and what professions they want their kids to avoid.
Radical reform is needed to make Europe’s agricultural sector financially sustainable and environmentally resilient. Yet Europe’s biggest farming lobby, together with the EPP, opposes any policy inimical to the interests of large landowners.
What happens when the space for youthful aspiration caves in? When circumstances are extreme, can solace still be found in a daydream, a creative thought beyond the everyday? And what role might contemplative words have in crisis?
Youth, culturally associated with the future, seems increasingly afflicted by uncertainty and crises. Can looking ahead be informed by past moments of transition? In 1960s Poland young people’s ‘futurological’ outlooks uncovered the microsocial ambivalences of technological progress, revealing cracks in mass communist ideology.
An outburst of syphillis is sweeping across Europe, and new HIV infections are also steadily rising. And yet, the public discourse seems to view sexually transmitted infections as a thing of the past. In this surprisingly light-hearted episode of Standard Time, medical doctors and a sex work activist talk screening, education, and stigma.
As the end of abundance becomes an everyday experience in Europe, we are thinking more closely about how our food reaches the table.
Conventional market-led solutions to water scarcity in the Arab Mediterranean, above all mega-projects such as dams, support state agendas and reinforce inequalities in access. Water wars are not inevitable but the result of bad management.
International humanitarian law forbids neither resistance nor self-defence. But it does set strict limitations on any party that engages in armed conflict. Both Hamas’s and Israel’s defiance of jus in bello is an assault on universal values.
Capitalism is no longer a shining beacon: once influential countries are on the verge of becoming third-world economies; developing powers no longer aspire to the West’s visions of progress. Could a viable alternative, avoiding complete environmental devastation, be found in relinquishing fixations on the past and utopian ideals?
Ageing gracefully? Why not age disgracefully instead! Four generations discuss the problem of age, and why women just aren’t allowed to enjoy their time of life, on the first episode of Eurozine’s new venture.
The Pianura Padana is home to a third of Italy’s population and generates nearly half of the national GDP. But over-exploitation, pollution and excessive land consumption are exacerbating the effects of climate change in this politically neglected region.
Marine Le Pen’s mainstreaming of the Rassemblement national involves cutting ties with radical elements and promoting defectors from other parties. The result is an incoherent mix of pragmatism, nationalist demagogy and even progressivism – and a party without a common culture.
Kitchen white goods – ubiquitous modern appliances revered for lightening household chores – are seen as a necessity. The fridge, in taking on bulky proportions, has transformed from basic food storage utility to luxury item. Has what was once practical, yet conceals greenhouse gases, become a guilty environmental consumer trap?