Month: July 2014

Categories
Insert

Trapped in Europe’s Quagmire: The situation of asylum seekers and refugees in Bulgaria

Source: Border Monitoring Bulgaria

The new Bordermonitoring’s report on Bulgaria is now available for download in .pdf format. The making of the report was undertaken by four independent researchers and follows structural conditions in the country which place asylum-seekers and refugees in an extremely vulnerable position as well as their current precarious situation.

The themes covered in the report are as follows:

Push-backs and violence at the Bulgarian border From overcrowded camps to the production of homelessness Integration in flux: a path to exclusion in a state of chaos Xenophobia and racists assaults: institutions, far-right, street violence Asylum procedures: the legal experts’ opinion Europe’s most unwanted: restrictions on free movement

Bordermonitoring advises against the conduct of Dublin returns to Bulgaria until the country can ensure dignified treatment of all asylum-seekers and refuges on its territory.

Categories
All posts

Maidan: Democratic Movement or Nationalist Mobilization?

source: TabletMag

Introduction

It is conventional wisdom in the West to describe the ‘Maidan’ that brought to power the current regime in Kiev as an anti-authoritarian mass movement guided by democratic ‘European’ values [1]. While not denying the presence of such themes in the Maidan, I wish to argue that the Maidan was and is primarily a mobilization on behalf of a specific variant of Ukrainian nationalism. This article approaches from a broader perspective issues that I raised in April 2014 in my essay ‘Ukraine: Popular Uprising or Fascist Coup?’

Categories
Insert

Struggles in and over Public Space: Hungarian Heritage as a Homeless Free Zone

Source: CritCom, Council of European Studies, Columbia University

In November 2013, members of the organization The City Is for All (A Város Mindenkié, henceforth AVM) were forcibly removed from the Budapest General Assembly, after forming a singing, poem-reciting human chain in protest of the extension of criminalization of homeless people ‘to a major part of the city’ (AVM 2013). This came less than a month after AVM addressed a letter to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in an attempt to stop the use of heritage in this process of criminalization.

Categories
Insert Interviews

Ukraine’s Fractures. An interview with Volodymyr Ishchenko for New Left Review.

Since the start of the Maidan protests six months ago, Ukraine has been at the centre of a crisis which has exposed and deepened the fault-lines—geopolitical, historical, linguistic, cultural—that traverse the country. These divisions have grown through the entwinement of opposed political camps with the strategic ambitions of Russia and the West, the former bidding to maintain its grip over its ex-Soviet bailiwick even as the latter relentlessly expands its sphere of influence. The fall of Yanukovych at the hands of a pro-Western protest movement in February brought a surge of opposition in the east of the country, spilling into separatist agitation after Russia’s annexation of the Crimea in March.

Categories
All posts

How Not to Debate: My Reply to Agon Hamza (Part 1)

Containing a personal appeal to Agon Hamza and the Editorial Board of LeftEast 

Introduction

When I was informed that Agon Hamza was preparing a response to my critique of Slavoj Žižek’s views on the Balkans, I made an assumption that I now realise was naïve.

For I assumed that Hamza would engage in a constructive, evidence-based debate of the issues, a debate I hoped would be mutually beneficial. And I made this assumption because it was clear, as I showed by citing Hamza’s very own writings, that he and I agreed on a key theme of my critique – that is, our joint opposition to Žižek’s partition plan for the Balkans and, in particular, his plan for partitioning Kosovo between Kosovo and Serbia.

Categories
All posts

Housing poverty and (missing) housing policies in Hungary (part 1)

'Our fridge is Swedish, the coffee machine is German. Why not have an American kitchen_ 10 different home mortgage options'

Housing has recently become a hot topic in Hungarian public discourse. This increase in attention was caused by the alarming hardships caused by the steep increase in the interest on foreign currency (in which most mortgages taken in the 2000’s were taken) and the increasingly harsh, systematic, and overt criminalization of homeless people in the country. Nevertheless, in spite of the ever-growing pressure coming from local as well as international civil society, the government has not taken appropriate steps towards the viable solution of these pressing problems.