Poland’s predominantly state-owned forests cover a third of the country’s territory and are heavily endowed with national mythology. Anthropologist Agata Agnieszka Konczal explores connections between Poland’s forests and collective memory, and the role of Polish foresters as ‘guardians of the nation’.
The city of Matera will be a European Capital of Culture in 2019. At the heart of a deprived area that was once a byword for southern Italian poverty, it has undergone major changes since 1945, thanks to government intervention and growing tourism. Mariavaleria Mininni looks at how its prospects continue to change.
Russian theatre director Kirill Serebrennikov, arrested in August 2017 for alleged fraud, is the victim of the cultural backlash following Putin’s re-election in 2012, writes Marina Davydova. His case is a lens through which to understand Russia’s problems.
Between post-human globalization and nationalist withdrawal, the ecological question pushes us towards the earthly ground. Traditionally rejected as reactionary, ‘the question of belonging to a particular soil’ has suddenly become urgent for the Left. An interview with Bruno Latour (1947–2022).
The implicit link between immigration and crime has found its way into the political mainstream in Europe, write lawyers Laetitia Sanchez Incera and Maria Vittoria Salvatori. Safeguarding the individual becomes a challenge to the ‘politics of fear’.
Democrats have forgotten whatever promises they made to listen to their opponents, establishment Republicans have been left aghast, and not even Trump’s core support has seen much in the way of reward. As Trump’s star begins to wane, the polarization will increase, predicts George Blecher.
Rapid advances in machine learning have prompted much debate about the sinister implications of ‘black-box’ algorithms. Yet fears about the opacity of computer code are as old as software itself, writes Kathrin Passig. Indeed, black boxes are all around us, not just inside our computers…
This year’s International Holocaust Remembrance Day (27 January) was marked by a row over a new Polish law that would criminalize any suggestion that Poland was responsible for Nazi atrocities. In a prescient speech delivered just days earlier, historian Ferenc Laczó observes that the Europeanization of Holocaust remembrance still has a long way to go.
Following the first wave of the #MeToo movement, a new phase of reflection has set in. Here, four authors and journal editors from the US and Europe assess #MeToo’s achievements and potential, but also its limitations in changing a culture of sexual harassment.
After controversy at last year’s book fairs in Gothenburg and Frankfurt over the participation of far-right publishers and the question of who was – and who should be – allowed to attend, ‘Index on Censorship’ asks four thinkers and decision-makers to explain their stance on the issue.
Throughout its recent political upheavals, Ukraine has looked to Europe as a beacon of liberal democracy. Yet Europe has been unwilling to reciprocate, as it did with other countries in the socialist bloc. This has held back not only Ukrainian development, argues Andrii Portnov.
A battle for the future shape of Russia’s education system is under way. Not only is the Kremlin increasing its control over what it considers the correct version of the country’s history, there are also signs of a gradual ideological turn towards promoting the glorification of Joseph Stalin.
Social media platforms have changed the way that people mobilise and act collectively. But as Kateryna Iakovlenko discovers in the context of war-affected Ukraine, the visual record created by apps like Instagram are forcing researchers to reconsider what constitutes an objective record, a subjective perspective – or possibly both.
Hostility to Catalan regional autonomy from Spain’s conservative People’s Party since 2010 is what has catalysed the current secession debate, argues Nora Räthzel. Moderate defenders of the democratic process are now squeezed between hard-line independentistas and far-right defenders of ‘the unity of the Spanish nation’.
The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia closed at the end of 2017 after 24 years in operation. It made a major contribution to the rise of global justice, writes political theorist Peter Verovšek. But did the tribunal do anything to promote reconciliation in former Yugoslavia?
From the Mediterranean to the Baltic, nationalists in numerous European states are looking to build on the advances they made in 2017. The present surge in nationalism is a threat to the EU itself – but it could have been anticipated, writes Slavenka Drakulić.