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openDemocracy offers in-depth news analysis and commentary from a pro-Democracy, pro-Human Rights perspective.

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50.50 – Towards democratic debate

A global debate without the female half of humanity is neither global nor democratic. With this in mind, openDemocracy‘s 50.50 initiative is building a series of editorial projects designed to make openDemocracy a current affairs forum which is written, read and used equally by women and men.

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Associate's Articles

Until 1991, Ukraine had largely failed to establish a narrative for itself in the world. Peter Pomerantsev shows how, thereafter, a new literature emerged that made contemporary Ukrainian writers Europe’s grittier Latin Americans, mixing magical realism with domestic abuse, folklore and mafia.

Though homosexuality was decriminalized in Russia in 1993, an increasingly restrictive legal climate and widespread intolerance continue to hamper the lives of gay men and women. Nonetheless, LGBT networks continue to develop support systems of their own.

In an unpublished, semi-autobiographical novel, Sergey Khazov draws on his experience of growing up gay in Russia. Extracts.

Power rotation, listening to the people, tolerance of dissent, recruitment of elites and experimentation: the truth is that, in all of these respects, China is more democratic than Russia. And China’s decision making is undoubtedly superior too, argues Ivan Krastev.

If the concept of global human rights is to endure, a new and more political, transnational and adaptable movement must emerge, argues Stephen Hopgood. Only then might bottom-up democratic norms replace top-down authoritative rules.

Kerem Öktem explains why the occupation of Gezi Park in Istanbul’s Taksim Square quickly turned into an enormous eruption of protest; the key factors being increasingly uninhibited neoliberal development, the government’s conservative zeal and a troubled foreign policy.

On Wednesday 22 May 2013, British soldier Drummer Lee Rigby was killed in broad daylight in the street near a military barracks in Woolwich, south-east London. Professor of peace studies Paul Rogers insists that there is a connection between this shocking murder and “remote-control” attacks by western states. Recognizing this connection is crucial if we are to avoid such extreme violence in the future.

As the Bulgarian post-communist transition faces its moment of crisis and the government resigns, the political class and the economic model it oversaw are the subject of deep dissatisfaction. Dimitar Bechev outlines what went wrong, and what can be expected of Bulgaria’s spring of anger.

Marina Akhmedova spent four days in the company of drug users in Yekaterinburg, central Russia, and was met with a picture of desperation, punctured by love, humanity and misplaced hope. Shortly after it was published, this harrowing piece of reportage journalism was banned in Russia.

Denunciation of Günter Grass’s poem “What must be said” typifies a fundamentalist understanding of antisemitism that operates outside the realm of fact, argues Antony Lerman. If the poem is so heinous, what response would ever be appropriate to genuine antisemitism?

In keeping with its “big society” scheme, the British Conservative Party’s recently revealed alternative to New Labour’s “state-sponsored multiculturalism” replaces top-down cohesion projects with community activities promoting “mainstream British values”. The centrepiece of the new policy? “The Big Lunch”, where neighbours get together for a meal on the weekend of the Queen’s diamond jubilee. Ali Rattansi sees the initiative as the latest in a line of equally ill-founded attempts across Europe to blame multiculturalist policies for social fracture.

While democracy evaporates on a national level, it doesn’t reappear anywhere else, least of all in Europe. Maintaining the democratic nature of our societies depends on the rules of the game we impose on ourselves at the European level, argues José Ignacio Torreblanca.

Freemarket disregard for the elementary moral truths of debt and obligation is to blame for the current crisis, says Roger Scruton. But the call for a return to economic morality is no endorsement of the financial fictions of the social democratic state.

Can Europe really break apart? Yes, of course it can, writes José Ignacio Torreblanca. Few times in the past has the European project been so questioned and its disgraces so publicly exposed as now. It’s time to stop looking the other way.

Behind the recent attacks on multiculturalism is a false public memory of stable mutuality disrupted by the arrival of people of other cultures, writes Markha Valenta. A row over the absence of non-white characters in the English detective series “Midsomer Murders” says a lot about our fantasies of “home”.