Radical Islamism benefits from the silence of moderate Muslims who see no reason why their faith implies a responsibility to condemn its violence. But Islamism also stands to gain from the blurring of boundaries between genuine Islamophobia and criticism of Islam where it departs from democratic norms.
What causes the stark generational difference in people’s understanding of Soviet times? Is it only personal nostalgia, or maybe another set of expectations? Why didn’t the lifting of the Iron Curtain bring down the wall between East and West? Kinga Anna Gajda examines the perspectives offered in the Eurozine anthology ‘The Legacy of Division. East and West after 1989’.
The recent souring in Irish attitudes to England stems from dislike of the politics of Brexit, not a reawakening of national hostility. Ireland has been forced to choose, and has chosen Europe. A new sense of its importance in the Union may even ease regrets at losing a major neoliberal ally.
The European Green Deal proposes that art-science collaborations pull us out of environmental crises. But doesn’t invoking an early 20th century movement just reflect modernist shortcomings – the very inequalities a green transition is supposed to redress?
Physical violence and political repression continue to torment Belarusian streets. Ongoing activism incurs a heavy, emotional toll. Could solace and stamina be found in literature, metaphysical reflections on the question of evil?
English is the language that makes communication between speakers of different languages less difficult and more inclusive than any other. With the enlargement process it became the lingua franca of the EU. Brexit will not change this – on the contrary, the UK’s departure is an occasion for Europeans to confidently reclaim a continental hybrid.
From climate change to political corruption and authoritarianism, leaders of protest movements share a common dilemma: how to achieve impact when existing parties and institutions cannot be trusted?
According to AstraZeneca, the EU is demanding preferential treatment in the supply of the coronavirus vaccine. And according to the EU, restrictions on the export of the vaccine are all about accountability. There are reasons to be sceptical about both claims.
Masturbation became an important medical and moral issue around 1712, Thomas Laqueur argues. Increasingly viewed by Enlightenment thinkers as a pathology of the solitude of an unmoored mind, the private practice was quickly linked with feelings of shame and guilt, with implications for self and society that would last for centuries.
The film of Putin’s Palace is above all a story of monumental corruption. Yet it is also a story about the Russian leader’s warped historical imagination. Despite the residence’s imperial pretensions, its secrecy speaks volumes about the cultural chasm between Putin and the Romanovs.
Extractivism and its impacts seem to be globalization’s end game. Industrial capitalism plunders natural resources, wreaking havoc on biomes and the lives of Indigenous peoples – then moves on. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing speaks about the ‘friction’ between dynamic groups that can ultimately bring regeneration.
Just landed in Moscow after recovering from the Novichok poisoning of last August, Putin’s major political opponent Aleksej Navalny was immediately arrested. This selection of Eurozine reads helps understand why the Kremlin fears him and is cracking down on niches of free expression and rising civic activism.
Trump wasn’t an aberration: he only renewed the US nation’s bitter, uncivil war over whether a clear majority of its people want to forge a republic of equals. The challenge for Biden will be to assert his ‘American ideal’ over the competing vision that Trump has left behind.
Critics of the German Federal Constitutional Court’s controversial ECB ruling in May 2020 claimed it had hindered EU integration and undermined rule of law. But although the ruling was applauded by Eurosceptics, it was anything but anti-European, argues the Court’s former president.
Amateur photographers offered a range of alternative windows on life in the USSR undercutting the dogmas of socialist realist aesthetics. Bohdan Shumylovych places the Kharkiv School of Photography under Lacan’s psychoanalytic ‘cultural gaze’.
The roll-out of COVID-19 vaccines gives much-needed hope. But if the drug industry keeps being devoted exclusively to profit, inequality and mistrust will cost lives in poorer countries, and eventually also in the wealthy western world.