Articles

Marina Akhmedova spent four days in the company of drug users in Yekaterinburg, central Russia, and was met with a picture of desperation, punctured by love, humanity and misplaced hope. Shortly after it was published, this harrowing piece of reportage journalism was banned in Russia.

John B. Cobb, Methodist theologian and longstanding critic of the of the political-economic establishment, talks to Kulturos barai editor Almantas Samalavicius about his communitarian and ecology-based critique of neoliberalism and the potential for world religions to inform an alternative.

“It’s not justice, it’s not equality, it’s not a warm bath.” In Riga to deliver the annual Isaiah Berlin lecture, Michael Ignatieff talks to Ieva Lesinska, editor of Rigas Laiks, about Berlin’s definition of freedom, politics and the freedom not to be political.

Ports as points of juncture in the globalized transport network, operating mechanisms of access and arrest; the oceans remapped by containerization, cargo-shipping setting the pace of world commerce; the new harbours as decontextualized zones, nautical memories recycled for heritage: Olivier Mongin outlines a social geography of the global maritime system.

The container is the universal unit of the global commodity society, facilitating the swift exchange of all kinds of product. Precarity, likewise, connotes a basic form of labour that submissively and flexibly adjusts to any form of employment and system of production.

In an excerpt from his acclaimed book The Slave Ship: A Human History, historian Marcus Rediker describes the deep-sea sailing ship as linchpin of the emergent transatlantic economic order and instrument of terror for slaves brought from Africa to the Americas. In a subsequent interview, he discusses the role played by European harbour cities in the slave trade and their responsibilities in reckoning with its moral legacy.

Too big to fail? Too crisis-hardened to go under? The collapse of the Soviet Union has something to teach Europe’s politicians if another leap from the unthinkable to the inevitable is to be avoided in the case of the EU, argues Ivan Krastev.

Bosnian novelist Alma Lazarevska remembers the siege of Sarajevo obliquely, as the background to a personal loss unconnected to the plight of the city. She thereby implicitly critiques the politicization of the siege, which is commemorated this year.

Legislation allowing the Olympic organisers to control the “association” of the games with approved products – required by the IOC as a condition of a successful bid – disadvantages the community stakeholders of major sporting events, argues Teresa Scassa.

The impact of open access publishing models on the developing world is uncertain, writes Jorge L. Contreras. Until “information philanthropy” is supplanted by self-sufficient, south-focused open-access journals, the potential of developing world scientists will not be fully realised.

At the moment of the Macedonian nation’s greatest victory, independence, “the name issue became the new symbol of our defeat”, regrets Denko Maleski. Predictably enough, those in Macedonia to benefit were the nationalist Right, thus confirming Greek fears.

Recent historiography emphasizing the egalitarian-democratic character of eighteenth-century piracy undermines Carl Schmitt’s quasi-legal distinction between the partisan and the pirate and reinstates the pirate as political actor within the emergent maritime state order, argues Dominique Weber.

The re-launch of a reconstructed eighteenth-century merchant ship was supposed to promote Sweden’s image as reliable trading partner with an immaculate past. But the failure throughout the project to acknowledge the colonial involvements of the ship’s former owner suggests a less complimentary story, writes Mikela Lundahl.

Gothenburg’s Franska tomten neighbourhood takes its name from a French warehouse established in the eighteenth-century through a colonial trade-off between the French and Swedish crowns. Today, the name’s origins are largely forgotten, writes Klas Rönnbäck.

London’s relationship to water and to the sea remains central to its role in the global economy and vital to a gamble in which the Olympics is a part, argues Anthony Iles. On the connections between shipping, logistics and the hi-speed, only apparently immaterial world of finance.

Walter Benjamin’s description of Naples as a “porous city” absorbent of heterogeneity applies equally to other harbour cities, write Jude Bloomfield and Franco Bianchini. On cultural hybridity, economies of informality and strategies of creativity in four European ports.