After four years on high-level alert, defence against invasion becomes a gruelling routine. But could the normalization of war in Ukraine be positive for long-term planning, the public good and the social contract? Literature and critical writing provide valuable perspectives.
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine is entering its fifth year. With peace negotiations at a standstill, traumatized communities face a tough question: What does it mean to memorialize a war when its end is nowhere in sight? War crime survivors from Yahidne are actively engaging in how their mass confinement is remembered.
Online influencers are using religion to give misogyny a virtuous veneer. How can society support boys and young men, labelled as incels and bombarded with digital hate, seek answers to questions on life and trauma without resorting to male stereotypes?
The anti-EU sentiment emerging from Central Europe today suggests that little remains of the ‘arch-Europeanism’ Milan Kundera once ascribed to the region. But was there something inherent to Kundera’s concept of Central Europe that explains the logic of contemporary Polish, Hungarian, Czech and Slovak nationalism?
AI-generated non-consensual porn is devastating the lives of girls and women. Online images sexualized at the click of a button reveal how unrealistic standard advice for women to exercise caution is. Regulation of AI products that enable sexual violence is a first step. But an ideological and intellectual shift on women’s freedom is needed.
A discussion with the historian Nancy L. Green on the historiography of migration from structuralism to intersectionality; the relevance of trajectories in an age of global movement; and walls, epistemologies and the limits of transnationalism.
Whether an Ivy League academic or a Patriot Front white nationalist, Curtis Yarvin will find your position too democratic. The once obscure blogger’s brand of postliberalism calls for a political system reboot popular with MAGA and Big Tech leaders. But does his eccentric mix of elitist, pseudo-religious and computational thought reflect chaos more than his desired order?
Arguments that ‘hate speech’ is ‘free speech’ abound. The far-right push to normalize offensive language in the name of protection is hypocritical and needs calling out. But is it also time for liberal free speech theory’s ‘marketplace of ideas’ to be reassessed?
Taking advantage of winter’s downtime to deal with coastal mass tourism seems astute, especially in Croatia where no one ever truly has a break from its impact.
Despite a semblance of calm, Maduro’s removal has unsettled the Venezuelan regime. Will Chavismo’s tried and tested combination of coercion and expectation management continue to delay the long-awaited rupture?
Against a backdrop of crime, corruption, inequality and sexual violence, Mexican novelists are returning to the tradition of the child narrator. Interviews with Fernanda Melchor, Luis Jorge Boone and Emiliano Monge.
The accumulative injustice of wars, political conflicts and environmental destruction can lead to ‘empathy fatigue’. Could altruistic behaviour, known for activating happiness hormones, be the antidote? And can culture nurture the necessary positive political emotions, while itself under attack from culture wars?
The atrocities committed by the Bosnian-Serb forces in 1995 prompted the West to finally intervene in Bosnia. Together with Croatian advances, NATO’s entry into the war set in motion a fundamentally new development.
While lasting peace between the Turkish state and the Kurds now seems a genuine possibility, Ankara’s assault on democracy continues. Sırrı Süreyya Önder, the longtime dissident who died last year, remains a symbol of hope.
Contemporary Moldovan novelists continue to thematize the struggle for linguistic, social and ethnic identity within the Soviet system. Taken together, their work forms a literature of post-totalitarian recovery.
What should European politicians be focusing on in the forthcoming year? Europe needs to adjust to an increasingly multipolar world order, under pressure from US retrenchment and threatened military withdrawal, Russian cyber and trench warfare, and China’s technological dominance.