As the culture and the institutions of the Gutenberg Galaxy wane, Felix Stalder looks to commons, assemblies, swarms and weak networks as a basis for remaking society in a more inclusive and diverse way, which expands autonomy and solidarity at the same time.
At the beginning of February, violent protests swept through Bosnia-Herzegovina: demonstrators clashed with police and government buildings were set ablaze. But then, independent citizens’ assemblies began to be organized to formulate demands to be made to the government.
Solidarity, one of the European Union’s driving concepts, has been abandoned in the wake of the eurocrisis, writes Dominika Kasprowicz: allowing the populist radical Right to bring to bear their own concept of solidarity, based on an anti-establishment stance and nativism.
Following the war with Serbia in the late 1990s, a construction boom transformed Kosovo’s capital city. This has in turn transformed the rhythms of everyday life, writes ethnographer Karin Norman, as has an influx of rural migrants, UN and EU personnel and relief workers.
The case of Islamized Armenian survivors of the 1915 genocide and the narratives of their “Muslim” grandchildren pose significant challenges to Turkish national self-understanding and the official politics of genocide denial, writes Ayse Gül Altinay.
Some images of political events can be conjured without being reproduced. At the same time as arresting the viewer, writes Sharon Hayes, they give pause as to how political affiliation, political community and collective political horizons are formed.
There are two Europes, writes Volodymyr Yermolenko: a Europe of rules and regulations, and a Europe founded upon faith in the European idea. And of course, as recent events in Ukraine show, the European idea extends well beyond the formal frontiers of the European Union.
As the winter Olympics opened in Sochi amid controversy over Russia’s anti-gay laws, Tatiana Riabova and Oleg Riabov showed how official discourse in Russia brands “European sexual deviancy” a natural result of western democratic development; and Russia as the last bastion of “normalcy”.
A surge of state violence and the subsequent curtailment of citizens’ right to protest, combined with an expansion of the authorities’ right to use force: Kirill Rogov reveals how the “Putin doctrine” previously applied to protests in Russia brought Ukraine to the brink of civil war.
Aging is a common literary theme though overwhelmingly confined to male writing, writes Slavenka Drakulic. Does dementia provide a culturally acceptable, metaphorical replacement for women’s accounts of aging, and if so why?
Increased securitization and discrimination against migrants has neither reinforced the freedom, security and well-being of EU citizens nor curbed irregular migration, writes Eve Geddie. It’s time to change the European discourse on undocumented migrants.
Disputing the limits of free speech has played a defining role in Tunisia’s transition to democracy since the country’s first free elections in 2011. But, as Rory McCarthy reveals, there is more to the process than the polarized Islamist-secularist battle it is often presumed to be.
As the EU’s response to the Snowden leaks converges with European data protection reforms, new debates on privacy emerge at the European level: and the burning issue remains that of trust. Simon Garnett rounds up the latest developments to coincide with Data Protection Day 2014.
In an open letter directed to “friends and especially foreign journalists and editors”, renowned Ukrainian writer Yuri Andrukhovych states that it is those in Ukraine’s highest leadership that deserve to be labelled extremists, not the protestors on the streets. Yanukovych has brought the country to its limits and to stop protest now would be to live in a permanent prison.