While secularism brings significant advantages, it can be pushed to harmful extremes and in some cases used to disguise racism. But religion, too, is not exempt from that.
Articles
Elected in 2022 on a wave of popular hope, Colombia’s leftwing leader Gustavo Petro has failed to negotiate peace with the country’s armed groups and embarked on a ruinous tariff war with Donald Trump. A portrait of the president hampered by his own revolutionary nostalgia.
While Lula has managed to stabilize the Brazilian economy and restore some key social programs, these gains remain fragile under the weight of fiscal conservatism, an uncooperative legislature, and a political environment saturated by disinformation.
Writing on the wall, writing on the water
Notes towards a reservoirian aesthetic
Engineered flooding displaces communities, eradicating the landmarks of family histories. When little remains, narratives about who controls water provide telling pointers – feature films raise complex questions about industrialization, linguistic minorities, and matriarchy versus youthful masculinity.
Recommended topics
A constrained mother tongue is resilient in recalled memory. Those who no longer speak Belarusian tenderly piece together often painful cultural threads, processing trauma to keep their ‘mova’ alive.
Since the Belavezha Accords were signed in 1991, revanchist politicians and cultural commentators in Russia have lamented the former Soviet Union’s disintegration. Revisiting provocative statements and legislative scheming from the 1990s shows how incremental manoeuvres paved the way for Putin’s colonialist drive disguised as integration.
Forget aliens. Astrobiologists, in search of life on other planets, need first establish what constitutes life on Earth. Should definitions stretch to ‘degrees of life’ – the ‘more’ and ‘less’ alive – like decomposition and viruses? And how many ‘Earth twins’ would it take before enough evolutionary beginnings might reveal life’s mysteries?
“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
Crises past and present
Vikerkaar 6/2025
Vikerkaar on why grey rhinos are riskier than black swans when it comes to epochal crises; how the Estonian government averted a crisis of state by crushing fascism in 1934; and why Estonia’s AI enthusiasm may provoke a crisis of education.
Moral truth
De Nederlandse Boekengids 8–9/2025
Thirty years on from the Srebrenica massacre, how The Netherlands has failed to acknowledge the ‘moral truth’ of the victims. Also: perspectives on the fascism debate; and why society needs a conversation about dying.
Borders and empire
Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie 193 (2025)
Borders and boundaries in the Soviet order: How the rhetoric of borderlessness hid imperial practices. Also: filmmaker Andrei Konchalovsky and the metaphysics of oil; and Andrei Sinyavsky’s literature of delinquency.
Focal points
The European Parliament elections on 9 June are a referendum on EU policy since 2019. Will voters give Europe the green light for further progress, or pull the brakes? A new Eurozine series measures the political atmosphere in the EU and its neighbourhoods at this crucial moment.
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.
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.
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.