The sharp drop in support for Ukraine in Italy has less to do with the traditionally Russia-friendly economic policy of the Italian right, and more with the anti-US sentiment rooted in the political culture of the Italian left, which now articulates itself as pacifism.
Articles
Our dear friends in Moscow
An interview with Irina Borogan and Andrei Soldatov
Putin’s crack-down on dissent at the beginning of his third term was a watershed moment for Russian journalism. While the majority of critical reporters were forced to leave, those that remained morphed into regime propagandists. How to explain their political subservience?
Whether billionaires or bankrupts, Americans who pursue excess risk isolation: the national obsession with amassing dollars leaves tycoons alienated and destitute socialites pitied. D. H. Lawrence’s short story of fanatical money-making points to the hallucination of riches bringing love and happiness.
As propagandists of a patriarchal order, tradwives perpetrate harm. But harm is being enacted on tradwives too. So why do some feminists see tradwifery as self-empowerment?
Recommended topics
While civilizational rhetoric in the West reflects a sense of threat, globally it is recognition-seeking. Common to all civilizationalisms, however, is a blurring of the distinction between authoritarianism and democracy.
The glorification of storytelling to define who we are or save the planet induces aversion in some: philosopher Byung-Chul Han calls the obsession ‘story-selling’. Do digitally packaged stories restrict how we perceive our often rambling, fragmentary lives? Could alternatives be found in open, porous and incomplete narratives, even when confronting death?
Democracy in the US is under threat from within. Racial nationalism – a throwback to unresolved tensions from the American Civil War – has found new impetus under Trump, forcing civic nationalism into a corner. Will the immutable longevity of the American Constitution be its paradoxical undoing? And how might the US recover from its emerging dictatorship?
“Come Together” is founded on the principles of partnership and peer-to-peer learning among individuals within community media organizations situated in six different countries. Instead of generating entirely new knowledge, the initiative aims to unearth and leverage the existing wisdom residing within these organizations to foster innovative approaches.
Eurozine review
Truth, trust & tricksters
Index on Censorship 3/2025
How AI is changing the nature of censorship; artificial intelligence versus historical truth; revisiting the UK government’s response to 7/7; missing Palestinians from this year’s Berlin Biennale.
Bankrupt
Wespennest 189 (2025)
Bankruptcy in nineteenth-century parables of capitalism; billionaires, bankruptcy and the American obsession with money; and why the refusal to accept the end makes life worse.
Spending time with the dead
Ord&Bild 2-3/2025
Parables of violence; memories of dictatorship; perversions of memory: Ord&Bild samples contemporary Latin American literature and photography.
Focal points
Post-revolutionary Ukrainian society displays a unique mix of hope, enthusiasm, social creativity, collective trauma of war, radicalism and disillusionment. With the Maidan becoming history, the focal point ‘Ukraine in European Dialogue’ explores the new challenges facing the young democracy, its place in Europe, and the lessons it might offer for the future of the European project.
Inspired by a lecture that Clifford Geertz delivered in 1995 at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, this focal point engages with ‘deep diversity’, ‘a sense of dispersion, of particularity, of complexity and of uncenteredness’ rather than unified world order. It follows the launch of a research programme of the same name at the institute in January 2023.
Food and water systems under pressure: as the end of abundance becomes an everyday experience in Europe, we are thinking more closely about how our food reaches the table.
Some observers, recalling the disasters of the 1920s and 30s, are suggesting that an anti-democratic counterrevolution on a global scale has begun. But is the writing really on the wall? Or does declinism prevent us from recognizing moments of democratic renewal?
Eurozine Network
Eurozine monitors upcoming funding opportunities on the international level relevant to cultural journalists, such as translation funds, mobility grants and project funding.