Articles

The idea of what employment really means, in the UK and elsewhere in the industrialised world, has undergone radical change. Now some thinkers are questioning whether it should exist at all, writes Rhian E Jones.

This year marks 100 years since the momentous revolutions in Russia in 1917. The Russian government’s stance on the anniversary is deeply ambivalent, but 2017 offers Ukraine a chance to explore its own centenary of (short-lived) independence, as well as other parts of its national story, as Tatiana Zhurzhenko explains.

Britain’s imperial cultural residue has always expressed itself through reluctance about Europe, coupled with an obsession with the idea of British international leadership. With Brexit, Britain’s ‘go-it-alone’ syndrome has returned with a vengeance, writes Anne Deighton.

Social media providers are currently faced with a dilemma: to take on an editorial role or respond to the demands of their investors. The revolt against fake news is part of a defence mechanism on the part of elites and poses a problem that we are far from resolving.

For all their importance, human rights have become ineffectual in the face of market fundamentalism, writes historian Samuel Moyn. In order to confront material inequality, human rights must overcome their individualist and anti-statist origins.

Is an independent artistic statement at all possible in today’s Russia? Political scientist Sergei A. Medvedev ponders the fate of art and artists in a country where most cultural production is heavily state-dependent, and where artists and writers in the provinces are under especially strict supervision.

The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia has found Bosnian Serb military leader Ratko Mladić guilty of genocide for his part in the 1995 massacre at Srebrenica, among other atrocities. Slavenka Drakulić reflects on a photograph from the first days of the Bosnian conflict, and what it tells us about the nature of evil.

The ‘Irish slaves meme’– assertions that Irish immigrants to the US were once slaves – has been mobilized by the alt-right to promote a white nationalist agenda based on claims of victimhood. Yet its popularity cannot simply be blamed on the online propaganda of white supremacist groups, argues Bryan Fanning.

Understanding Brexit means understanding the history of English exceptionalism, writes Maurice Earls, editor of ‘Dublin Review of Books’. Anti-Catholicism, maritime expansionism, wartime heroism: the myth of splendid isolation is the common thread. With a hard Brexit looming, however, England may yet come around to the benefits of team-play.

The days when Soviet citizens had only three or four TV channels to choose from are long gone. Today, Russians have hundreds of options. So why, asks Maxim Trudolyubov, do they still choose just one?

The situation in Catalonia is unresolved. The Spanish region’s autonomy has been revoked, pending a new regional election in December. Meanwhile, the region’s now-ex-president, Carles Puigdemont, is in Belgium, where he styles himself ‘head of a government in exile’. Daniel Gascón examines where all this leaves the rights of Catalonia’s residents.

One of Russia’s most significant contemporary writers, Sergei Lebedev, describes the work of Gulag researcher Yuri Dmitriev in a place that both men know well: the far North. Eurozine presents Lebedev’s essay for the first time in English, translated by Antonina W. Bouis.

‘Russian memory politics represses both the utopia and the violence. It wants neither to know about the perpetrators nor to commemorate the victims.’ The editors of Eurozine partner journal ‘Osteuropa’ reflect on the political meaning of Russia’s official commemoration of 1917.

Kazakhstan consistently sides with Russia in global affairs and supports many of its integration initiatives in the former Soviet space. However, following the annexation of Crimea in 2014 the fear that Kazakhstan’s ethnic Russian regions might share the peninsula’s fate has returned.

What does the Bolshevik revolution, whose 100th anniversary falls this week, mean for Russia? Historian Orlando Figes speaks to the editor of Eurozine partner journal ‘Letras Libres’, Daniel Gascón, about some of its key themes – and explains that Russia has yet to come to terms with the consequences of 1917.