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All posts Interviews Solidarity Call

“They have the technology, they have the weapons, they have the money, they have everything. What do we have? We have solidarity!” Lessons from the Rojava Revolution

An interview with a representative from the Academy of Democratic Modernity by Stoyo Tetevenski, LevFem What is the Academy of Democratic Modernity? The perspective of Democratic Modernity is coming from the Kurdish movement as an alternative system to Capitalist Modernity. It was developed by Abdullah Öcalan. The aim of the Academy of Democratic Modernity is […]

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All posts Interviews

Privatization of Healthcare in Georgia and Its Disastrous Social Consequences: Interview with Beka Natsvlishvili

Note from LeftEast editors. We reached out to one of the authors of a recent and timely study “Social Consequences of Privatization of Healthcare” written by Beka Natsvlishvili, Nodar Kapanadze, and Sopo Japaridze (Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, Tbilisi Office, October 2022). Another coauthor of the study and LeftEast editorial board member Sopo Japaridze translated the text from Georgian. […]

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Calling Fascism by Its Name: The Rise of the Radical Right and Organizing Leftist Resistance in Romania

Note from LeftEast editors: This text was originally published in Courrier des Balkans (CdB), in two parts. The interview was conducted and translated to French by Florentin Cassonnet, a CdB correspondent in Bucharest. The current text is a slightly edited version of the original interview. Courrier des Balkans: You recently organized a seminar about fascism […]

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All posts ELMO series: CEE housing movements resisting neoliberal urban transformations

How to Turn the Locus of Deprivation to a Place Called Home: A Discussion on the Main Housing Struggles in CEE

Note from LeftEast editors. This article is a report of the closing panel discussion of the multilingual ELMO series CEE housing movements resisting neoliberal urban transformations. All articles from the ELMO series, as well as the introduction, are available here in English. At the end of each English language article you can find links to CEE […]

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Local Communities, a Yugoslav Take on Direct Democracy

Over the last decade, the notion of participatory democracy has become increasingly fashionable in mainstream politics. The 2008 financial crisis brought out in the open the disconnect between political elites and their constituencies that plagues contemporary representative democracies. Across Europe and the Americas, the inability to overturn neo-liberal policies and austerity measures through the electoral […]

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The Russian Invasion of Ukraine Should Forever Change How Sanctions Are Approached

After it invaded Ukraine, Russia became the most heavily sanctioned country in the world. This has provoked a new wave of discussion about the effectiveness of sanctions as a tool of political influence. Many commenters have pointed out that sanctions rarely achieve their goals, and, as Daniel W. Drezner points out, the sanctions currently imposed […]

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Anatomy of a Social Murder: The Çorlu Train Massacre

This article reads like Garcia Marquez’s 1981 Chronicle of a Death Foretold. The dead this time is not Santiago Nasar but the passengers of a train that crosses Turkey’s European part and the murderer—not the Vicario twins, but the state-led liberalization of Turkish Railways, one of the crowning achievements of the AKP government. The Çorlu […]

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Playing First League: Fuck the 1000 Euros

This article is part three of a series by Ivana Perić. The first article, about the bankruptcy of FC Inter from Zaprešić, can be found here. The second article, about the problems and perspectives in women’s football in Croatia, can be found here. This article originally appeared in Radnicka Prava. The English translation is published […]

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All posts Protests Solidarity Call

Labor Protest and Education in an Illiberal Regime

Note from LeftEast editors: Problems stemming from deteriorating working conditions and low salaries for teachers in Hungarian public education have been accumulating over the years, a process which intensified further during the Covid-19 crisis. Such a development resulted in an acute shortage of teachers as well as an alarming situation in public education, and occurred […]

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Dmitrii Furman’s Imitation Democracy: an Excerpt

Note from LeftEast editors: In November 2022, Verso will publish an English-language translation of Dmitrii Furman’s Imitation Democracy: the Development of Russia’s Post-Soviet Political System (forward by Keith Gessen; afterword by Tony Wood), one of the most insightful and prophetic texts written at the end of Putin’s first decade in power. LeftEast is delighted to […]