Here are some of the Eurozine Team’s personal favourites from this year’s publishing: reflecting on racial conflicts and gender relations, digging into urban soil and organizing tenants, being tired of video conferences and, inevitably, reckoning with death.
The poor handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, long-standing economic stagnation and the violent suppression of protests against electoral fraud have sparked in Belarus an unprecedented popular uprising, the final outcome of which is still uncertain. Who has kept the protest culture alive among a population often accused of political apathy? What has been the role of women in the opposition to Lukashenka? And what game is Russia playing?
Post-Socialist baggage is sometimes still blamed for Hungarians’ support for an illiberal supermajority. But can a society be expected to democratize when its social institutions have been subjected to decades of attrition?
Whose rules determine how space is used or shared? Whose identity does a room express? The home is the place where power relations are established and contested. Ingrid Ruudi looks at how modern living space has shaped and been shaped by gender roles in Estonia.
Beware interpreting Ukraine’s current political landscape with traditional European values, says Volodymyr Yermolenko: Kremlin-backed zoopolitics, upholding the survival of the fittest, uses liberal discourse against the democratic world.
It took a while for even the faculty to realize that the Istanbul Şehir University has effectively been closed down. It had stood its ground against Erdoğan’s interventions for years, but the pandemic served as the perfect opportunity for a swift and silent takeover. Now the same can happen to any of the other independent universities in Turkey.
The events of 1989 unleashed a world of discovery. Economic determinism was replaced by imitation of the West. Was that process authentically spontaneous or were eastern Europeans staging a script they did not write? Either way, imitation created a crisis of identity, the consequences of which are still unfolding.
The city of Donetsk’s call for independence from Ukraine is a pivotal issue in war-torn Donbas. Its role as regional centre, at the core of the Donbas Coal Basin, upholds its weighty position. But environmental protests in Mariupol, says Yulia Abibok, show how local identity is split, perhaps irrevocably.
Trump’s TikTok deal was a concession to Silicon Valley and a victory for cronyism. Security concerns about TikTok are well founded, but an escalation of digital-economic hostilities will not favour US tech companies and could spell the end of the open internet.
Liberals who give credence to claims about a lack of free speech on campus would do well to recall that campaigns against no-platforming have long served the far-right’s exploitation of the university’s ethos of open debate. Instances of overreach do not add up to a free speech crisis.
Global heating, environmental collapse and increasing global scarcity: no wonder the politics of perpetual advancement are failing to convince. Progressives must brace themselves for the return of some of their most detested ideas. But dismissing the nostalgists as reactionary can no longer be their response.
The sex-party scandal around Fidesz MEP József Szájer has brought undeniable entertainment. But this is far from being a case of hypocrisy meeting its comeuppance. Orbán’s grey eminence fell from grace and into ridicule, but will not be held accountable for his much darker deeds.
The patriarchal culture entrenched in Belarusian political life has come to seem archaic to a large section of the country’s population. Combining traditional and feminist values, Tsikhanouskaya, Kalesnikava and Tsapkala have lent this sea-change form and expression.
Staying home may reduce COVID-19 infection but is not the safest place for all – women with violent partners are more at risk of abuse during lockdown. And solidarity is crucial. Atreyee Sen addresses the critical situation in India, where women are also being attacked in institutions and when forced to migrate.
The influential Czech-born editor Antonín Liehm was a pioneer of East-West intellectual exchange and an early advocate of the ‘European public sphere’. In 2009 he gave a memorable keynote at the 22nd European Meeting of cultural journals in Vilnius.
How do political interventions work in the troubled world of central eastern European journalism, arts and academia? Can professionals avoid self-censorship, or how do they decide what circumstances not to put up with? Watch our Budapest debates.