This article first appeared in Serbo-Croatian on the web journal Bilten. East-Central Europe and the Balkans experienced a period of exceptionally cold and snowy weather in January 2017. Flights and shipping services were suspended in some areas, there was major disruption to power supplies and other essential infrastructure, and there were a number of deaths due […]
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Romania: Two Elephants in the Room
Cultural worker, researcher and activist Nebojša Milikić (Belgrade) sat down with Romanian political scientist and International Relations scholar Ovidiu Gherasim-Proca to discuss the ideological confusion and deflected promise of anti-corruption politics in an era of faltering neoliberalism. Against President Klaus Iohannis’s contention that Social Democratic Party corruption was “the elephant in the room,” Milikić and Gherasim-Proca assess the […]
On International Women’s Day most women in Eastern Europe merely receive some flowers and words of gratitude for the work they have done for the family. We asked 21 journalists in 21 countries to introduce us to a remarkable woman from their country. For the article, see: von n-ost Border Crossing Journalism.
This interview was conducted on Radio Svoboda and published in Russian on Jan. 27, 2017. It was translated in English for LeftEast by Evgeni V. Pavlov. “Insurrection of the masses does not require a justification. And what took place was indeed an insurrection and not a conspiracy. We openly forged the will of the masses for […]
The political temperature has been exponentially rising in Macedonia for some time now. It reached boiling point on March 1st when President Ivanov refused to grant SDSM (Social Democratic Union of Macedonia) the mandate to form a government. Neither the governing right-wing populist VMRO-DPMNE, nor the opposition party SDSM managed to obtain the majority necessary […]
Great Albanian Oil Robbery
This piece originally appeared on the Serbo-Croatian language portal, Bilten. It is reproduced here with generous permission from their editors. The last time I wrote about the oil industry in Albania was the spring of 2015. An enormous eruption of natural gas and oil occurred near the village of Patos-Marinzë, in southern Albania, where the […]
The following article was originally published in Serbo-Croatian on the online platform Bilten. It is republished here with that site’s kind permission. A recent minor event sums up eloquently the current relationship between Romania and the Republic of Moldova and, more than that, allows us to understand the complex historical, geopolitical and psychological relationship between the two […]
The following article was originally published in Serbo-Croatian by the online platform, Bilten. Its English version is published here with the site’s kind permission. Around mid-December 2016 a news piece announced that a monument to the Cyrillic alphabet is to be erected in Antarctica. It is a joint Bulgarian-Mongolian project. The news about the monument raised […]
Serbia faces a set of regular presidential elections this year – but also the prospect of its third parliamentary election in four years. The latter possibility confirms those analyses that have posited the instability of Serbian politics in spite of the appearance of stability, following the ruling coalition winning almost half the votes cast in both previous elections. […]
Many LeftEast readers–especially among the scientists; students of the humanities are more familiar with LibGen–have no doubt come across or used Sci-hub. It is a project that saves many scientists and students from the domination of corporations owning the property rights of scientific literature. It provides easy and free access to tens of millions of […]