Struggle in the street was combined with otherworldly utopias in the low budget, small circulation architectural magazines of the 1960s and 1970s. Free of the constraints of finance and convention, the genre served as an international platform for experimental design and discourse and was instrumental in the progress of architectural modernity.
Ord&Bild, Sweden’s oldest cultural journal, first appeared in 1892. Speaking at the 125th anniversary event in Gothenburg on 4 November 2017, long-time contributor Sven-Eric Liedman recalls Ord&Bild’s programme and personnel between the counter-cultural revolution of the 60s and the neoliberal revolution of the 1980s.
The Lebanese journal ‘Mawaqif’, published in various incarnations between 1968 and 1994, was one of the leading cultural journals of the Arab World. Its seventy-four issues reflect the intellectual upheavals brought by the Six-Day War, the Lebanese Civil War, and the Iranian Revolution, as well as far-reaching processes of modernization in Arab literary culture.
In ‘The Road to Unfreedom’, historian Timothy Snyder traces the intellectual roots of modern authoritarianism in Russia and how its influence has spread, not least in the West. In the following exchange, three east-central European scholars, brought together by ‘Razpotja’, critique Snyder’s new book – and Snyder responds.
From its libertarian origins to the big-data economy of the present, the internet has always oscillated between openness and control, liberty and domination, free-to-use and free enterprise. A brief chronology of the internet reveals a dynamic of power relationships that will continue to define how we interact with online technologies.
As traditional associations are replaced by social media, new forms of solidarity emerge. Looking at Japan, Carl Cassegård compares otaku culture and the protest movements since Fukushima to understand the ambiguities and potential of individualized mobilization.
In order to stem onward migration, the EU now pours billions of euros into the Horn of Africa and other regions, thereby blurring the lines between humanitarian aid and border control. Reporting from eastern Sudan, Caitlin L. Chandler describes the human cost of this policy, as previously permeable border zones become impassable or more dangerous.
The hunt for the person or people who ordered the murder of investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia in Malta last October appears to be making little progress. Caroline Muscat reports that the government there instead seems concerned with burnishing the country’s image.
Despite falling numbers of immigrants, the hardline border policy of Italy’s ‘government of change’ remains popular. The decision to close Italian ports to NGOs working in the Mediterranean and the delegation of rescue operations to the Libyan Coast Guard are having increasingly lethal effects. How long can the Italian public continue to ignore a humanitarian crisis?
