Lefteast
Who chooses wars for us? What does it mean that somewhere is peace and somewhere is war? Is this still peace? What kind of peace? Whose peace? Is there really peace until there are wars? So what if wars no longer exist? How can we reach worlds without wars? Can we get there? We have to. Once upon a time there was a world of wars. There was.
How is the system of social redistribution related to trajectories of individual life? What can it mean to be a socialist today? How does race cognition work? What are the conceptual starting points for the idea of an entirely new political community? József Böröcz—Emeritus Professor of Sociology at Rutgers University—answered questions by András Borbély. The […]
Note from LeftEast Editors: Originally published by Second Cold War Observatory on May 6, 2024. Hungary’s current cycle of industrialization within electric vehicle (EV) and battery production chains may be seen as a typical case for third-country attempts to “hedge” geoeconomic competition (Camba and Epstein, 2023). Attempting to capitalize on its position at the Eastern periphery […]
Note from LeftEast Editors: Originally published by Second Cold War Observatory on May 2, 2024. Perhaps more than any other material, lithium has, in recent years, been increasingly presented as the silver bullet for the so-called twin transition—the digital and the green transitions. Lithium is essential to most conventional batteries used in diverse technologies, from phones […]
Note from LeftEast Editors: This article was originally published at The Second Cold War Observatory (SCWO) on April 25, 2024. In the wake of the Soviet collapse, investment in mega infrastructure has been pitched as the solution to Georgia’s development. Already in the 1990s, in the face of rapid deindustrialization and armed conflicts in the […]
The recent period in Tbilisi saw the streets being swept up in waves of demonstrations against the law on “transparency of foreign influence”. The oppositional media constantly regurgitates the idea that the youth of Georgia, Gen Z, unequivocally upholds protests. I have seen claims that this is a “Children’s revolution”, and that the demonstrations have […]
Note from LeftEast editors: This article is a slightly expanded and edited version of a text, which appeared first in Slovak in Kapital. We publish the English original with permission. The article appears within the framework of the East European Left Media Outlet (ELMO). “For capitalism migrant workers fill a labour shortage in an especially […]
Editorial note. On June 2, 2024, local elections were held in 88 cities and municipalities in Serbia, in addition to rerun elections in the City of Belgrade. The local elections in Belgrade were repeated because of serious irregularities in the December 2023 elections for local representatives to the City Council. Compared to December, this time […]
On May 28, the Parliament of Georgia has overcome a presidential veto over the controversial “foreign agents law.” Initiated by the ruling party Georgian Dream (GD) in March 2023, the law soon had to be withdrawn because of backlash. This year, however, the GD achieved their goal. The legislation introduces mandatory registration for any “non-entrepreneurial (non-commercial) […]
We co-wrote this article at the beginning of May. On May 28, the Georgian parliament overrode the presidential veto and finally adopted the Law Against Foreign Influence. Although written at an earlier stage of the protests, everything that happened since then has largely confirmed the conclusions we drew back then. Since early April, Tbilisi, the capital […]