Articles

Despite public interest, Croatian politics is too fractious and self-centred to engage in serious debate about state surveillance, while data protection and digital rights are concepts yet to enter the mainstream, writes Miljenka Buljevic of Booksa.

In Germany there has been heavy public criticism of the NSA. Yet the German government has failed to investigate the affair and has been quick to demand greater surveillance powers after the Paris attacks, writes Daniel Leisegang of Blätter.

The Belgian government has held back from demanding greater surveillance powers after the terrorist attacks; how long liberal protections withstand rightwing pressure remains to be seen, writes Thomas Lemaigre of La Revue nouvelle.

Despite residual hostility to state surveillance, the Polish response to the NSA affair both at the political and public levels was strongly pro-American. Will campaigning be able to change mainstream indifference to privacy issues? Anna Wójcik of Res Publica Nowa reports.

In Estonia, digital optimism combines with free market scepticism about the regulation of the Internet. As a result, privacy concerns have been sidelined, while the activities of the security services remain obscure, writes Ann Väljataga of Vikerkaar.

Friendship enables us to relax the rules of privacy we need in other types of social relationship. When friendship goes online, however, controlling privacy becomes more problematic. Are social networks causing a change in friendship as such, and if so, should we be concerned?

The smart city industry is continually conquering new terrain. But as the global rollout of the digital electricity and gas meter (smart meter) proceeds apace, Elke Rauth discerns a project that shows disdain for the private sphere and puts the intelligence of governments and city-dwellers to the test.

ArtLeaks founders Corina Apostol and Dmitry Vilensky discuss what lies ahead for the grassroots organization, in terms of revealing and resisting the toxic symptoms of neoliberalism in the cultural sector; not to mention creating a better (art)world.

As scholars, historians must discover the truth about the past, writes Volodymyr Sklokin. But following the Ukrainian intellectual community’s transformation after 1991, Ukrainian historians have also begun to find their feet as intellectuals responsible for sustaining a public sphere.

The reconstruction of deliberately destroyed public and religious buildings in Mostar has raised many questions and controversies. Arna Mackic embarks on a search for a new open architectural language that might encourage encounters between people, liberated from the burden of politics or ethnicity.

Before the Lebanese Civil War, Martyrs’ Square featured among Beirut’s most dynamic civic spaces. Over two decades after the war ended, the city centre’s reconstruction has all but cut the square adrift from civic life. However, Rania Sassine insists on its potential as a Lebanese laboratory of urban identity.

Swedish author and scholar Michael Azar weaves together a patchwork of narratives in which people matter just as much as the places in which they live; a practice that provides the key to the long overdue task of fashioning cities in accordance with human needs and hardships.

The triumph of the principle of competition among and within European member states has generated a continuous aggravation of disparities, writes Etienne Balibar. Not that the French philosopher allows this to stop him stubbornly envisioning a Europe other than that of bankers, technocrats and political profiteers.

Imogen Tyler looks at how the manufacture of an asylum invasion complex within the public sphere aided the passing of UK legislation that reconstituted the refugee as a “national abject”. That is, as a (likely bogus) asylum-seeker subject to destitution, detention and exclusion.

Greece doesn’t just need debt relief, it deserves it. Of this much Thomas Fazi is convinced. After all, most of the bail out money has gone to banks and creditors, which irrefutably puts to shame the claim that European taxpayers’ money was used to save Greece and the other reckless countries of the periphery.