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Precarious employment and the role of trade unions in post-socialist Central Europe

Since the outbreak of the global economic crisis in 2008, precarious employment has increasingly become the focus of attention for socially responsive international organizations and critical scholars and activists. Precarious employment has found its place at the centre of employment and social policy debates. Common in the conceptualization of precarious employment is the “lack of […]

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Banning the Veil in Bulgaria

Note from the LeftEast editors: this article has been published in collaboration with the Serbo-Croat web portal Bilten. Last April Pazardzhik, a Bulgarian town with a population of about 70,000, banned Muslim women from wearing veils. Pazardzhik was followed by Stara Zagora, and proposals for introducing similar prohibitions were made in over a third of […]

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The rural-urban divide in Kosovo

Note from the editors: The following piece was originally published in Croatian on the online platform Bilten A general analysis We can freely say that a key characteristic of Kosovo’s history is that it has had no cities – in the literal sense of the word that was used in medieval Europe. A characteristic of […]

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On Czech Marxism: An interview with Ivan Landa and Jan Mervart

LeftEast’s James Robertson speaks with Czech scholars Ivan Landa and Jan Mervart about their current project collating and translating some of the key texts from the history of Czech Marxism. Robertson: Both of you are currently involved in publishing a series of English translations of works by Czech (and Slovak?) Marxists. Can you say a […]

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Housing and class (trans)formation in Romania

The following piece was originally published in Croatian on the online platform Bilten. The article provides an overview on the political economy of housing in Romania as a key driver of the formation of capitalism after the dismantlement of socialist industries and related residential urban systems. It discusses statistical data and information on legislation at […]

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Turkey: Academics for Peace: Urgent Call for Solidarity

Urgent Call for Solidarity! Members of “Academics for Peace” and Education and Science Workers Union (Eğitim-SEN) have been removed from their positions in public higher education institutions permanently! In January 2016, 2,218 scholars from Turkey signed a petition titled “We will not be a party to this crime,” also known as the Peace Petition. Since […]

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New faces of fascism: the changing nature of right wing policies in Slovenia

Editor’s note: We publish this text in collaboration with the regional portal Bilten following last Saturday’s (27 August) aggressive attack on Akc Metelkova, the autonomous cultural and social center in Ljubljana, Slovenia, by an organised group of neo-nazis. According to the center’s statement “the attackers shouted out fascist slogans, started to throw rocks, bottles and fireworks, and then cowardly […]

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Bulgaria’s Refugee-Hunters

Note from LeftEast editors: This article is published in collaboration with the regional portalBilten. On the 8th of June, 2016 the ZDF broadcast a news report about a paramilitary group, the self-proclaimed Bulgarian Military Union “Vasil Levski”. The piece was shot during a regular “migrant-hunting” operation of the unit in a forest near the border […]

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Turkey: the Political Balance of Forces in Three Interviews

The full version was published in Serbian on Masina. The attempted coup of July 15th caught me in Istanbul. What that night of adrenaline, shocking and confusing news, the sounds of machine-gun fire and low-flying military aircraft left me with was a desire to better understand what happened. Being so close to the Bosphorus bridges—a site of […]

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Sofia: the European Center of Information Outsourcing

Note from LeftEast editors: This article is published in collaboration with the regional portal Bilten. Slogans about the “knowledge economy”, “innovation”, “entrepreneurship”, “creativity”, and the “post-industrial” and “information” society are widespread in the EU, and Bulgaria makes no exception. Information technologies are posed as the universal solution to all social ills, a panaceia able to […]