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From Ukraine with Comparison: Emerging Notes on Belarus

We share here notes by LeftEast contributing editor Volodymyr Ishchenko on Belarus from  August 10th (Part 1) and 19th (Part 2),  2020. Part 1: SOME QUICK COMPARATIVE NOTES ON BELARUS (August 10, 2020) 1. Both Lukashenka and Tsikhanouskaia claim ~80% voters. The official results look suspicious as they are improbably stable. Lukashenka gets ~80% of […]

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Partisans or Workers? Figures of Belarusian Protest and Their Prospects

Although Belarus is often referred to as a repressive state, the familiar ‘Parisian arsenal’ of tear gas canisters, water cannons, rubber bullets, and stun grenades was used here on a mass scale for the first time. Western technologies of violence were complemented by traditional post-Soviet police brutality: beating and detention of random people, torture, humiliation, and sometimes threats of rape in jail, the hunting down of journalists, etc.

None of the opposition leaders joined the crowd or made radical statements. The opposition movement turned out to be on the whole amorphous, without clear leadership at the top and any leaders from below. At the same time, the ruling elite showed no signs of a split, the security apparatus and the bureaucracy generally remained loyal, although there have been signs of hesitation at the lower and regional levels (with several state media journalists and police officers resigning).

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Mass protest in Serbia and an attempt of state-led demobilisation

Note from LeftEast editors: This article originally appeared in Dversia on 07.10.2020. “Tear gas, rubber bullets, and batons against bare-handed youth! Dad, this is for you who died and there was no respirator! (..) This is for you and for my newborn son! There were no respirators in the Zemun hospital while they (the National […]

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Broken Windows and Broken People: the Cost of Class Order

Engels once said that the way a capitalist city is organized tends to hide production’s ugliest and most dangerous surplus: poverty. And where it cannot be hidden, it has to be attacked. Could this help explain why the state often seems to be at its most violent when the smallest sums are at stake? In […]

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Universalize The Struggle

This article was originally published on the website Balkan Stories. I know some people will certainly misunderstand the text below, but as someone who campaigned on the issue, who received numerous anonymous threats while working at the University in Sarajevo for „spreading gayness and being an atheist“, I am offering an analyses and my opinion […]

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Anti-Roma Riots in the Heart of Bulgaria: Racists against Inequality?

We are publishing this article in cooperation with the Serbo-Croatian web portal Bilten. In the “Offenders in Gabrovo!” Facebook group, natives of the eponymous Central Bulgarian town comment upon all sorts of irregularities: they lambaste the owner of a car parked on the wrong side of the street, mobilize to replace a broken lamp post, […]

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The poor pays principle in Bulgaria

Note from LeftEast editors: The article was originally published on dversia.net in Bulgarian on the 25.02.2019 On January 30 there were dangerously high levels of air pollution in the capital reported, three times higher than the norm. In its latest air quality report, the European Court of Auditors points out that Bulgaria is at the […]

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Manifesto of the CEU Radical Student Collective

Note from the LeftEast editors: The Central European University – a private University in Budapest founded by George Soros’s Open Society Foundation – has attracted the attention of the world media with its strife against the Victor Orban government in Hungary. A struggle over its right to remain in the country ensued in early 2017 […]

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What is Rotten with Serbia’s Mass Protests?

The end of 2018 and the beginning of 2019 was marked by a wave of mass anti-government protests in Belgrade. The direct cause for the first protest held on December 8th was the attack on the leader of the Serbian Left, Borko Stefanović, ahead of a forum of the newly formed coalition of the opposition […]

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Protesting the “slave law” in Hungary: The erosion of illiberal hegemony?

This post is published with the permission of FocaalBlog, the blog of Focaal: Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology.                     In recent weeks, Hungary has again made international headlines. This time, it was a popular movement born out of resistance to the latest rewriting of the labor code—which […]