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The neoliberalization of Albanian higher education

One of the last public strongholds to be taken and transformed along neoliberal lines has been higher education. First introduced in Chile, and afterwards in other Latin America countries, these reforms are about to be experimented on even in Albania. Coming from a Stalinist socialist past, since the nineties Albania has been one of the […]

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The Soma tragedy: Kadere karşı / Against Fate

Note from the LeftEast editors: this text is also published by the Southwest Initiative for the Study of Middle Eastern Conflict. My class yesterday began with something close to an apology from me for holding the class at all.  Times like this can make anyone engaged in intellectual work feel inadequate.  To some it seems […]

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The Bulgarian “creative class” and the reproduction of neoliberal ideology

Note from the LeftEast editors: this article has been published in cooperation with the Balkan web-portal Bilten.Org. It can be read in Serbo-Croatian here. The number of cognitive workers in Bulgaria has been on the rise over the last years with the newly outsourced contact/call/logistics centers, telecommunication firms and IT support and development. By the end […]

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Tsipras in Italy

by George Souvlis & Tania Toffanin The British historian Perry Anderson in an account[1] of the trajectory of the postwar Italian Left used this title, without a question mark, in order to criticize its political presence during the “Second Republic”. The epicenter of his criticism was the inability of the Italian Left to articulate an […]

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The “refugee”: Bulgaria’s apocalypse surplus. Is resistance possible? (part 2)

Note from the LeftEast editors: This text is the second part of last week’s article The “refugee”: Bulgaria’s apocalypse surplus. Having explored the restrictions for migrant mobility in and out of Bulgaria, the humiliating camping conditions for refugees in Bulgaria, and the complicity of the Bulgarian state in the production of such practices, in the present text Raya […]

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Procreation and Protest: Bulgarian Capitalism’s Children

  On November 12, 2013 a picture of a 15 year old girl, crying and agonizing in front of a Bulgarian police officer, was carried by social media and hit the international info exchange. She quickly became the poster girl of attempts to topple the BSP-led “left” government. It was a moving image of teenage […]

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Estonia: Not the neoliberal stronghold you’ve been sold

Estonia is not exactly the ideal place for anti-austerity movements these days. Its electorate overwhelmingly voted its center-right government back into power in 2011, right after three years of deep cuts, unemployment soaring from 4% to 16% and the sharpest drop in GDP in the entire European Union. To add insult to injury, the most […]

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The “refugee”: Bulgaria’s apocalypse surplus (part 1)

by Tsvetelina Hristova and Raya Apostolova In the summer of 2013, as a mass of people was fleeing the escalating conflict in Syria, Bulgaria experienced its first “real” push at the border. Or at least this is how media outlets and commentators attended to the thousands who were crossing the Turkish-Bulgarian border, forgetting that the […]

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Volodymyr Ishchenko: “For Ukrainians, as for any other people in the world, the main threat is capitalism.”

Note from the LeftEast editors: We publish the transcript of Volodymyr Ishchenko’s interview on This is Hell! radio station with Chuck Mertz from the 19th of April 2014, organized in cooperation between the Chicago-based radio station, AntidoteZine.Com, and LeftEast. This is the complete transcript of the interview, including the last two questions which Volodymyr answered […]

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How healthcare kills: lessons from neoliberal Bulgaria

    Nоte from the LeftEast editors: Тhis article has been published in collaboration with the new Balkan web-portal Bilten.org. The publication in Serbo-Croatian is to be found here.  In the last days of March 2014, a Bulgarian woman, Dobrinka Krumova, aged 26, died because neither private, nor public hospitals in Dupnitsa in South Bulgaria accepted her for […]