Nitra is a small city of around 78,000 in western Slovakia, nestled at the foot of a castle-crowned hill. A walk down the main drag, Štefánikova Street, paints a picture seen across provincial former Habsburgia: there’s brand new infrastructure, shiny new buses but no jobs. Since December 2015 a small group of Christian refugees from Iraq have called this small town their home away from home.
While Moscow’s support of the Front National appears to be waning in advance of the French presidential elections, its ties with Austria’s far right have been cemented by a unique agreement. What does this say about Russian strategy in western Europe?
Britain’s vote to leave the Union and the advent of a US president who regards the EU as dysfunctional pose a major challenge to the remaining 27 members. Whether the EU continues to decline depends on whether Germany and France can strike a new bargain to strengthen the eurozone after their elections this year.
Under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey has returned to its ‘normal’ state of emergency, in which freedom of speech is punished and where minorities bear the brunt. Armenian journalist and publisher Rober Koptaş looks to persecuted writers of the past for examples of strength and resistance.
The “Kyiv Biennial 2015 – The School of Kyiv” was a profound consideration of Europe and Ukraine’s place in it. Developments since then, however, mean that Kiev is no longer the “city of Europe’s hope”, writes Kateryna Mishchenko.
You can, of course, ignore war. You can act like you don’t notice it, like it doesn’t affect you. You can stubbornly avoid looking in its direction. But then, ostentatiously ignoring it is also taking a stance, and not always a productive one.
Expressions of solidarity with refugees can conceal essentialism and condescension based on citizenship, class and religion. Governments’ flagrant neglect of responsibilities entailed by use of the ‘we’ reveals the aporias of a solidarity founded in national belonging, argues Suzana Milevska.
Controversies over Muslims refusing to shake hands with non-Muslims are typical of the conflicts affecting today’s multi-religious societies. Appeals to the law are not the answer: processes of social self-regulation need to take their course beyond formal authority, argues Miloš Vec.
The enfranchisement of migrants can overcome the democratic deficit, however ethno-nationalism’s xenophobic understanding of the political community requires a political, not a legal solution, argues social anthropologist Shalini Randeria.
Solidarity in liberal democracies is pluralistic, argues political scientist Ira Katznelson; it allows particularities of time and place while satisfying a widely held human interest. Democracy, too, takes a variety of forms and is best measured by historical standards.
There are few places where the new East-West conflict can be observed so clearly as in Kyiv. The weapons are money, networks and propaganda, writes Harald Neuber. He reports on the silent battle for hearts and minds that’s carried out in public but orchestrated from behind the scenes.
The far Right continues to capitalize on the extremes of the conflict in eastern Ukraine and the country’s deepening economic crisis, writes Kostas Zafeiropoulos, even as key elements at this end of the political spectrum regroup.
The real costs of increasing social inequality are plain for all to see in Ukraine, and not least in Kyiv’s superblocks. But here too, there is a resilience that has to be seen to be believed. Not content with TV reports and YouTube clips, Adeline Marquis pays one such superblock a visit.
Russian hackers were able to interfere in the US election because of public receptivity to anti-establishment messages. Investigative journalists Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan argue that distrust in traditional media provides fertile ground for Russian disinformation.
One of the legacies of the Maidan in Kyiv is a subcultural revolution that retains its momentum to this day, albeit under increasingly precarious circumstances. Luigi Spinola talks to the DJs, entrepreneurs and politicians who know the scene best.
The migration crisis has triggered a shift in politics away from an ethics of ultimate ends to an ethic of responsibility, the question of the ‘we’ to whom we owe solidarity reappearing in pre-political concepts like ethnicity and national culture.