Spain’s communities, though autonomous, struggle with national cultural and economic hierarchy: Valencia calls for regional unity via federalism; Catalan tackles ‘ethnotypes’; and Basque defends its bid for reform.
On the geography of Israeli settler colonialism; queer perspectives on the war in Ukraine; the experiences of Afghan ‘returnees’; and the familiar pattern of UK Labourism.
The politics and psychology of locality: on reviving local communities as high-tech expands and diversifies; forming networks against entropy; the Tortoise Strategy for caring; and rewriting life scripts.
Questioning the canon of electronic music history: on feminist debate between integrating women composers and anti-mainstreaming; the Danish composer who wrote her place in the chronicles. Also, empathetic yet non-romantic environmental sound art in Finland.
The lurid past of French colonial expulsion and incarceration: of Algerians sent to French Guiana; Jews interned in camps termed ‘battalions’; and French colonized peoples replacing convicts as forced labour.
Reappraising Keynes and Hayek: cartoon figureheads on the frontlines of an ideological war; clearing the ground for an honest debate by debunking Keynesian and Hayekian myths; and the paradox of Hayek’s theory of markets as information networks.
Repression, murder, war: on the logic driving the Putin regime toward ever-greater excesses of violence. Featuring Yuri Andrukhovych on the Russian colonial empire – the only ever to have tried to reconquer a former possession. Also: articles on Navalny, and on what next for Georgia?
Rituals as collective practices: why rituals offer solutions to the problems of our rationalist age; an example of ritualism cum eco-activism; artivism and AIDS campaigning in the 90s; and how sorcery can save the planet.
The case for more embodied communication; on digitalisation and the privatisation of art; a balanced view of gaming; the historical roots of social polarisation in Turkey; and isolation in the films of Nuri Bilge Ceylan.
Why the Russian Federation is a de facto empire despite the 1993 constitution; why Putin’s imperial but anti-ideological variety of Russian nationalism dominates; why Chechnya remains an open wound on the body politic; and feeling the impact of the Putin regime’s clampdown on intellectual freedoms.
On Olympic ideals and real-world interests: who benefits from the IOC’s policy of apoliticism? Republican games: On France’s hope for a ‘new national narrative’. Capitalist games: ‘Faster, higher, stronger’ as the watchword of the global city.
On the space to the left of European social democracy: Eurocommunism’s continuing legacy; reflections on the rise and fall of Eurocommunism in the UK; and everyday communism in the Austrian city of Graz.
Historicizing Doomsday: how West German ’80s pop marketed angst; why the next generation doesn’t want to live fast and die young; whether we’ve really reached tipping point; an what ‘no future’ meant for early Christians.
In Merkur 900: how the myth of Islamic antisemitism serves the apologists of violence; what the concept of dictatorship conceals about democracies; and why Rainald Goetz is trying not to grow cynical with age.
Shame as political, historical and linguistic category: how shame came to be used to control women; why school is a place both of social mobility and social shame; and whether MeToo marked the end of shame as we knew it.
Artificial intelligence beyond good and evil: connectionist vs. symbolist logic and how to programme creativity; why the algorithmic gaze reproduces neocolonialism in the Middle East; technophobia and what sci fi gets wrong about robots.