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“The Movement Cannot Afford to Stop Now”: On the Student Protests in Serbia

Note from LeftEast editors: This article was originally published on Counterfire on February 4, 2025. On January 28, the ongoing mass protest movement in Serbia brought down the country’s government, inaugurating the biggest challenge to the more than decade-old rule of the authoritarian president, Aleksandar Vučić. The basic chronology of events is now well-known to […]

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‘’Baron helmsmen, don’t spread lies’’: A miners’ strike brings attention to Armenia’s industrial exploitation problem

LeftEast has kept the author of this article anonymous to protect them. From January 31st to February 10th, workers at the Zangezur Copper-Molybdenum Combine (ZCMC) in southern Armenia, the country’s largest mining company and its biggest taxpayer, went on a wildcat strike to protest what they described as inhumane and unsafe working conditions and unfairly […]

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The Student Revolt in Serbia: Vučić’s Nemesis?

Serbia has been shaken in recent months by student-led protests. What began as an isolated demonstration to honour the dead and demand accountability after a railway station canopy collapsed in Novi Sad has quickly evolved into a mass movement that is presenting Aleksandar Vučić with his most severe test yet. LeftEast thanks the Centre for […]

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JAVIER MILEI 2025

January 2025 begins year two of Javier Milei’s four-year presidential term. The first ‘Rothbardian’, ‘paleolibertarian’, ‘anarchocapitalist’ president ever. What do these terms mean and what can this radical Argentine political experiment teach the world? ‘Rothbardian’? ‘Paleolibertarian’? ‘Anarchocapitalist’? That’s a lot of deviant terminology to unpack. These labels place Javier Milei’s curious dogma at the extreme […]

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The European Union: A Note on Theory and Practice

The UK and European Union  Recent opinion polls show an apparent majority preference for UK re entry to the European Union. But after recent history, the UK’s attempts to “reset” its EU relationship are not as straightforward as they seem. For starters, there is a total absence of UK political leadership or strategy on what […]

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The Revolutionary Writer Who Still Screams: Sa’edi’s Legacy, Monarchist Desecration, and the Israeli Flag

In a shocking act that has gone viral, a male monarchist desecrated the grave of Gholam-Hossein Sa’edi (the pen name: Gohar Morad), the iconic Iranian leftist writer, by urinating on it in Paris’s Père Lachaise Cemetery. Draped in an Israeli flag, the individual symbolically weaponized Sa’edi’s final resting place—a site sacred to Iranian exiles and […]

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Left parties after leaderless revolutions and populism

Originally published in Turkish in Ayrıntı Dergi: a Quarterly of Socialist Politics and Culture, and translated with the help of Tilbe Akan. Since the 1970s, the world left has gradually lost its claim to represent the total liberation of humanity from capitalism and imperialism. At first, the left was drawn into the path of taming […]

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Volodymyr Ishchenko: “In case of disintegrating state institutions and a failing economy, Ukrainian nationalists will have strong opportunities to establish their power”

Sasha Yaropolskaya and Philippe Alcoy interviewed LeftEast editor Volodymyr Ishchenko, a Ukrainian sociologist who was an activist and participant in several left-wing initiatives in Ukraine before moving to Germany in 2019. Ishchenko currently works at Berlin’s Freie Universität, continuing his research into the Ukrainian revolutions, the left, and the political violence of the far right, […]

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Serbian Authorities Abandon Plans to Criminalize Activism—For Now

Note from LeftEast editors: In recent years, the Serbian government has grown increasingly repressive, enacting measures aimed at stifling dissent and tightening control over citizens’ rights. Most recently, activist Ivan Bjelić has been detained in Novi Sad during a protest following the deadly accident at the Novi Sad Railway station on 1st of November and […]

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Collective Statement by the Caucasus Feminist Anti-War Movement against Azerbaijan’s Authoritarianism, COP29 and Green Capitalism, Wars, and Regional Slide into Authoritarianism

Caucasus Feminist Anti-War Movement—C-FAM is an emerging movement of feminist and anti-war/peace activists from Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia. Unified in our defiance, C-FAM originated from a powerful solidarity action to confront the greenwashing practices at COP29 taking place in Azerbaijan on November 2024, one of the largest events in our region in recent times. Our movement embodies […]