Whether to protect women or to enforce public morality, criminalization of sex work won’t make it go away. Online platforms for advertising sexual services are indeed exploitative, but they also offer sex workers safety and independence.
Articles
How is the lexicon of war chosen? And can the target of this speech, the perpetual ‘other’ use those very words to their own emancipation?
Istanbul’s water reserves are drying up: increasingly severe droughts, intense urban development and the growing population all have their impact. With no miracle cure in sight, environmental science looks for proven ways to reduce water loss in times of scarcity.
Mutualism, massive and the city to come
Jungle pirate radio in 1990s London
In the 1990s Britain was under Thatcherite continuity rule. But radio waves were appearing that carried fragments of the future: weekend broadcasts of a new kind of music – Jungle – were being illegally beamed across the city from improvised studios in empty flats, via aerials on tower block rooftops.
Recommended topics
Arbitrary lines
The idea of Europe – and its consequences
The myth of European exceptionalism no longer holds: the continent’s boundaries are arbitrary, its heritage mixed and controversial, and unfit for a unified identity to hold it together. If we give up the commonplaces that have proven insufficient, what can then define and unify this peninsula of peninsulas? True democratic dissent, Ferenc Laczó argues.
Losing ground and doubling down
Police violence on increase in Turkey
The covid crisis has hit Turkey hard and made its mark on the government’s approval ratings. The country already has the highest number of police officers per capita in Europe and the regime is clamping down on dissent with increasing force – be it Pride marches or women’s protests for the Istanbul Convention.
The polemic intention of the ‘German catechism’ argument – that Holocaust memory serves a quasi-theological function and is therefore policed – has distracted from the empirical claims on which it rests. So how strong is the evidence of continuity between the colonial and the Nazi genocides? And does a direct connection need to be established in order to justify reconsideration of the ‘singularity theory’?
A pencil for your land
Ngũgĩ and Achebe on colonial public school
Oppressed people who retaliate are up against the privileged and powerful. Fighting back often places them outside the system. But what happens when the suppressors’ tools are turned on themselves? Can a colonial education – the underhand offer of ‘a pencil for land’ — be turned into an emancipatory counter movement?
Eurozine review
150 years Paris Commune
dérive 84 (2021)
‘dérive’ celebrates the Paris Commune as act of neighbourhood solidarity, including legacies of the revolt and colonialist Communards. Also: Hong Kong’s ’97 generation.
War – what is it good for?
Vikerkaar 7–8/2021
‘Vikerkaar’ on the overlooked aspects of war – from the long-term impact on veterans to conflicts that rarely receive widespread coverage but cause no fewer casualties.
Merkel’s failures
Blätter für deutsche under internationale Politk 9/2021
Head in the sand, reactive, apolitical: in ‘Blätter’, a damning verdict on Merkel’s reign. Also: Jürgen Habermas on the lockdown debate and Bernd Greiner on the end of the War on Terror.
Focal points
Traditionally, a young woman used to be presented with a bundle of goods to send her off with to adult life. Today’s bottom drawers aren’t necessarily tied to marriages, nor are they strictly material. Yet, the bundle one leaves the house with is as important as ever. In this focal point, we take stock of the notions our foremothers presented us with: women’s ideas and achievements that define our understanding of power, gender and violence, bodies, connection and agency.
The focal point presents the findings of the project ‘Eurasia in Global Dialogue’ being carried out at the Institute for Human Sciences, Vienna (IWM). The focal point is an extension of the earlier focal point, ‘Russia in Global Dialogue’ that ran in Eurozine and at the IWM from 2012–2018.
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.
Is the term ‘fascism’ applicable to an authoritarian politician like Trump? Does the label ‘anti-fascist’ gloss over crucial controversies surrounding the term? And is Weimar a useful comparison when thinking about anti-democratic tendencies in the US, in the EU and globally? A new focal point in collaboration with Public Seminar.
Eurozine Network
Eurozine monitors upcoming funding opportunities on the international level relevant to cultural journalists, such as translation funds, mobility grants and project funding.