The pandemic and the volatility of international politics have given an upper hand to Russian intelligence services interested in spreading disinformation. Georgia has become a test field for new cyber warfare since the 2008 war and offers invaluable lessons on what to expect.
Articles
Physical fear and the dread of disappointment have been the dominant emotions whenever elections have come around in Belarus in the past two-and-a-half decades. This time is no different. And yet something has changed.
Delete your profile, not people
Comment on cancel culture
Social media users can be forgiven for feeling dissatisfied. ‘Old media’ news, based on the perpetual celebrity comeback, has hit a conceptual impasse with new cancel culture. Geert Lovink calls for the renewal of social networking tools giving users a constructive voice.
Incident
Or three short essays on solidarity
In the absence of civic traditions and positive social capital, society often organises itself along mafia-style norms. Post-communist Ukrainian society is a prime example. Yet grass-roots civic networks also operate as an alternative. Mykola Riabchuk investigates the sociology clash between these two state-nation building projects.
Recommended topics
On 9 August, presidential elections will take place in Belarus. As on all previous occasions during the past two and a half decades, the regime has disabled the democratic opposition. This time, however, the protests are unprecedented in their size, confidence and breadth of appeal. Has there been a political awakening in the country?
What can the history of the soil tell us about modernity and its ills? An experiment in urban gardening sets Kate Brown thinking about the consequences of the western world’s perennial misuse of the land – and how to return life to today’s extinct terrains.
Instead of looking at populists’ lies, it’s worth taking a look at the few truths they rely on: voters do recognize that liberal democracies have not worked in their favour. Can we ever shake off the demagogues and assimilate the genuine, if disruptive, energies of populism into a responsive democratic process? Relying on mere chance could be a way to renew representation.
Roma communities never got a break
Roma Holocaust Memorial Day 2020
Violence against Roma is part of the European normality. It took over seven decades for Europe to acknowledge the genocide of Roma in WWII, and the communities still don’t have the means to heal among permanent attacks and persecution, with racist sentiment on the rise.
Eurozine review
The subaltern in global labour history
Historein 19 (2020)
Greek journal ‘Historein’ looks at new research in comparative global labour. Including articles on gendered perceptions of labour in India pre and post independence; the exclusion of women from histories of IT; and what the Romanian car industry between 1968 and ’73 tells us about socialism’s role in the globalizing economy.
Sociology and colonialism
Mittelweg 36 3/2020
Mittelweg 36 dedicates an issue to sociologist George Steinmetz, winner of the 2020 Siegfried Landshut prize. Including articles on three 20th-century French sociologists whose work was both invested in and independent of French colonialism; and on the critical potential of German historicist sociology as alternative to default positivism.
Growing old in a sick world
Cogito 98 (2020)
The pandemic has exposed Turkey’s blindness to its own aging population. On the humiliation of confinement experienced by the over-65s; the demographics of a society that has not noticed it has aged; and the psychological violence done by lockdown to vulnerable groups.
Focal points
Like sustenance and sex, society can’t be reproduced without shelter. That is why today’s housing crisis is so central. Contributions to this focal point look at both the winners and the losers of the crisis: the people profiting from the financialization of housing and those reimagining the right to the city.
The technoliberationism that accompanied the early days of the web now belongs to myth. Deleting Facebook is the new rebellion. Surveillance capitalism is the buzzword. Regulating is radical. Technology critique today starts with Big Tech’s power.
Disinformation is not the cause of illiberalism but its medium. The great majority of it is home grown. Thinking about ‘what to do’ about disinformation means understanding information as a public good. Abandoning a purely reactive strategy will stand democracies in better stead.
When the Cold War came to a sudden end thirty years ago, the two halves of Europe declared in unison their intention to overcome the legacy of division. Today, the hopes and ambitions of those heady days may seem unrealistic. But is talk of a new East–West divide justified?
Eurozine Network
Eurozine monitors upcoming funding opportunities on the international level relevant to cultural journalists, such as translation funds, mobility grants and project funding.