Lefteast
A year after the left-green political platform Zagreb je Naš/Možemo! won the local elections in Zagreb, Paul Stubbs[1] reflects on the key achievements, constraints, and shortcomings of the new administration.
“The governance arrangements that have been in place in Bosnia-Herzegovina since Dayton, drawn up by a team of young United States lawyers, are at the centre of the problem. Somewhat successful as a peace agreement, albeit one that more or less froze the status quo and allowed the main ethno-nationalist political parties that had fuelled the conflict to continue business as usual, it makes governance of the state almost impossible. A recurring Bosnian joke is that everyone considers the constitution laid down in the agreement as unworkable but, of course, no one can agree on what to replace it with. “
Note from LeftEast editors: this post was first commissioned by French Left publication Contretemps, and you can read it on their website in the translation of Celine Cantat. To update the discussion on Zagreb je Naš/Možemo!, in the local elections held on 16 May 2021, the left-green coalition won 40.8% of the votes and 23 […]
With local elections due to be held in Croatia on 16 May 2021, a left-green political platform Zagreb je Naš (Zagreb is Ours – henceforth ZjN) stands on the brink of a historic achievement.[1] Its candidate for mayor, Tomislav Tomašević, holds a strong lead in the race and is predicted to defeat by a large […]
A lecture given by Paul Stubbs to the Open Learning Initiative of the Central European University on the 16th of May looking at the various ways through which social policy as a technical discipline ignores political economy. “The articulation of modes of governmentality that combine heteronormative familialism, repatriarchialization, nationalism, ethnicized demographic renewal and anti‐immigrant sentiments […]
During the last six months or so, I have paid more attention to the idea of a Universal Basic Income (UBI) as a potential central element of a future-oriented social protection system, implementable on a scale from the local to the global and all points in-between. Although this demands a separate text, I continue to […]
This is a revised version of a talk given by the author at the Workshop ‘Dialoguing Between the Posts 2.0: (im)possible dialogue between the progressive forces of the ‘posts’’, Belgrade, Serbia 15 June 2019. He expresses his gratitude to workshop participants for their comments, and to Čarna Brković, Konstantin Kilibarda and Christian Axboe Neilsen for […]