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Cover for: Sex in colonial empires and its legacy in Europe today

Sex in colonial empires and its legacy in Europe today

An interview with Christelle Taraud

Feminist historian Christelle Taraud talks about the patriarchal system for regulating prostitution in France’s colonial empire, a system made by men for men to reserve indigenous women for their own use and control the ‘unruly’ sexuality of men from honour cultures. These issues are covered in ‘Sexe, race, et colonies’ (2018), co-edited by Taraud, which has proved controversial in France for its unsettling imagery.

Cover for: Made in the EU

Made in the EU

Why workers are fleeing Romania’s garment industry

‘Sweatshops’ are usually associated with labour outsourced to east- and south-east Asia, but they exist inside the EU too. Gruelling working conditions in Romania’s low-pay garment industry, which supplies clothes for mid-market and luxury retailers alike, force many people to go abroad in search of a real living wage.

Cover for: The price of dishonesty

Brexit is the price Britain is paying for the failure to hold an honest discussion about immigration, multiculturalism and Empire. But it would be a mistake to think that the UK’s problems are without equivalent elsewhere, writes Gary Younge.

Cover for: The European peace project

The description of the European Union as a ‘peace project’ recalls an important aspect of the genesis of post-war Europe. But a defence of Europe based on anti-fascism runs into dead ends – both conceptually and politically – if it sees European integration as a ‘post-national’ movement.

Cover for: Culture wars

A ‘kulturkampf’ is visible in new authoritarians’ power struggles, from rewriting history curricula in Russia, through the politics of Islamization in Turkey, to the total offensive on museums and theatres in Hungary. The consistent misrepresentation of cultures is a less spectacular but equally important means of silencing certain voices. A selection of reads on how political powers hijack culture through its institutions.

Cover for: European Utopias from below

European Utopias from below

1989 and the role of popular movements East and West

Dialogue between western European peace movements and human rights groups in the East made a crucial contribution to overcoming the division of the continent and laid the foundations for a global language of transnational civil society and humanitarianism. The argument that ’89 was all about ‘catching up’ with the West overlooks this history.

Cover for: Big Brother to the rescue

Big Brother to the rescue

Can artificial intelligence help in Ukraine’s fight against corruption?

The Ukrainian government has announced a scheme to use AI to fight corruption in the Verkhovna Rada, the country’s parliament. The technology, dubbed ‘Big Brother’, is supposed to detect MPs’ voting patterns and to flag anomalies. AI is used worldwide for a variety of anti-corruption purposes. So will it work here?

Cover for: Soviet Atlantis

Soviet Atlantis

A melancholic fantasy of the post-Soviet subject

On the Cape of Tarkhankut on the western shores of Crimea lies an underwater ‘graveyard’ of statues from the Soviet past. The museum is a metaphor for how cultural memories are formed in a shared unconscious traumatized by loss and unable to adjust to the new order of things, writes Ilya Kalinin.

Cover for: Changing places

Changing places

Notes for an essay film

After moving from Johannesburg (Jo’burg) to Gothenburg (Go’burg), filmmaker Jyoti Mistry struck up a friendship with someone who went the other way: Katarina Hedrén, who was adopted by a white Swedish family, and moved to South Africa as an adult. This deeply personal take on race shows how ‘colour-blindness’ denies that racial prejudice exists but robs people of colour of words to talk about the discrimination they face.

Cover for: This mess of troubled times

The processes set in motion by the disintegration of the socialist economy in eastern Europe eluded all analytical frameworks. It was a time of ‘wild thinking’, in which received ideas were reconsidered and values re-assessed. We are still living through this troubled era, writes the historian of the Soviet Union Karl Schlögel.

Cover for: A few loose sentences

In a politicized age, the scepticism and elegance that have traditionally characterized the art of the essay can seem extravagant. In the US in particular, there have been calls for essayists to trim their sails and position themselves explicitly. Does the new mood of engagement mean that the essay’s habitual rejection of dogmatism is passé?

Cover for: How climate changes humans

How climate changes humans

Contrasting reads from the Eurozine archive

The Anthropocene is a fashionable research topic these days, and the imminent climate crisis seems to have finally started to shake the conscience of people all over the world. Though it wasn’t always this way, contributors to Eurozine’s partner journals have been covering these issues long before they became hot news items – and they offer important perspectives for today’s reader.

Cover for: Insight mustn't be a luxury

The share economy, although originally built on the logic of mutual help, has been weaponized by monopolistic enterprises to foster precarity, gentrification and political deception. But this doesn’t mean that trading in goodwill was a bad idea in the first place. Eurozine is the proof itself.

Cover for: The war on rough sleeping

The war on rough sleeping

On the criminalization of homelessness in Hungary

The criminalization of homelessness was written into the Hungarian constitution in 2018. Punitive measures are not unique to the Orbán government. But only Hungary has outlawed ‘habitually staying in a public space’.

Cover for: The changing dilemmas of Ukrainian Orthodoxy

The January 2019 creation of an autocephalous Orthodox Church of Ukraine, independent of Russian religious and political power, has produced tensions at home and in the wider Orthodox world. Presented by the Poroshenko regime as a patriotic symbol, it has yet to establish itself as the dominant Ukrainian church. Moscow’s efforts to undermine the OCU have hindered its recognition globally, though the tide may be turning and the church’s future depends on how it meets these challenges.

Cover for: How modernity invented tradition

How modernity invented tradition

The self-presentation of the Russian avant-garde

The ‘discovery’ of Medieval icons after a 1913 exhibition marks a shift in the Russian avant-garde’s self-image. From now on, the path of western modernism would be abandoned in favour of a distinctively ‘Russian’ art. But in inventing a tradition for themselves, avant-gardists ‘rediscovered’ a sensibility that didn’t need unearthing.

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