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2024 Georgia Elections: Popular Support for Georgian Dream Amid Fraud Allegations

Note from LeftEast editors: Between October and November of this year, four countries of the wider Black Sea region—Moldova and Georgia, Bulgaria and Romania—will have held elections with almost no left-wing alternatives on the ballot. With the following article, originally published in Jacobin, we open a series of analyses from the region that challenge the simplified coverage […]

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Yesterday Srebrenica, Today Gaza 

Note from LeftEast editors: This article was originally published by dVERSIA on October 9, 2024, and is republished as part of a collaboration within ELMO – The Eastern European Left Media Outlet. Instigated by Germany and Rwanda, the United Nations recently brought to the fore the question of the Bosnian genocide denial and proposed recognizing the mass […]

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“A Critical Referendum on the Nation”?: Georgia’s Elections in the Context of Post-Soviet Peripheralization

Note from Lefteast editors: This article was originally published on Jacobin. In Georgia’s capital Tbilisi, billboards for fast-food chains and home-improvement stores have given way to politics. Slogans for parties vying for votes in Saturday’s parliamentary elections are everywhere. Media is no different—pro-government and opposition outlets are each scrutinizing daily events with palpable confidence that […]

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From Soviet to Post-Soviet Ukraine, and Back

Note from LeftEast editors: This review is simultaneously published on Jacobin. Toward the Abyss is an important corrective to the predominantly ethnicity- and personality-centered analyses of Ukraine. Ishchenko advances a class analysis of both Putinism and Ukrainian society. Based on his sociological research, he points out that a class divide is more important in understanding the […]

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On Zionist colonialism and Israel/Palestine

Note from LeftEast editors: An earlier version of this essay originally appeared in Romanian in the Queers for Palestine. Statements, essays and poems[Queerș pentru Palestina. Luări de poziție, eseuri și poeme] collected by the Pink Bloc/Blocul Roz in Romania and published at the Free Pages/Pagini Libere collective in December 2023.[i] Nada Elia, a Palestinian writer, […]

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An interview with LINKS candidates: “We have to fight together for a just international system”

“We aim to balance a Utopian vision of a radically different system with realistic steps to improve life”, state the LINKS candidates at the upcoming Austrian parliamentary elections. Note from LeftEast editors. This is a reprint of an interview which was originally published at Mašina. The article appears within the framework of the East European […]

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Letter of Support for Aleksandar Matković

An increasing number of concerned intellectuals and activists have signed an open letter in support of Aleksandar Matković, who has been receiving death threats for his research on and opposition to the Rio Tinto lithium mining project in Serbia’s Jadar Valley. Temporarily defeated in 2022, when the courts cancelled it, the project is being once […]

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Submission, Defiance, and Emancipation? Two Decades of the EU’s Eastern Periphery

In 1989, the post-communist elites in the four Central European states of Czechia, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia had a supposedly innocent ambition. They wanted to escape from the captivity of the Russian ‘East’ back to the civilized ‘West’, where they sought political and economic equality. Milan Kundera put it best in his 1983 essay on […]

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Congratulations to LeftEast Editors Olena Lyubchenko and Volodymyr Ishchenko, Recipients of the Daniel Singer Prize!

Today’s program of the Socialism 2024 conference, an annual event that takes place in Chicago, will feature an award ceremony of the Daniel Singer Prize for the best article devoted to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. LeftEast is proud that two of the awardees, the runners-up Volodymyr Ischenko and Olena Lyubchenko, are our editors. If you […]

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From “Returning to Europe” to “Occupying Brussels”: The EU was crucial to Viktor Orbán’s rise — now, he wants to remake it in his own image

The article was originally published by Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung here. It is reproduced with permission.  In the past decade, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has emerged as one of Europe’s most important — and controversial — politicians: no small feat for the leader of a country whose economic or strategic importance on both European and global […]