LefteastA rare interview with Dilar Dirik, taken by Ivaylo Stefanov for Babylonia Magazine during the 5th edition of the international festival B-Fest (May 2016). Dirik analyzes the relations in Rojava between the grassroots structures (communes and councils) and the local political parties, comparing the Kurdish democratic autonomy with Catalonia of 36-39 and the contemporary communities […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
On August 16, 2016, Erdoğan regime’s attack on the media and press since the July 15 abortive coup took a different turn by the closure of the daily Özgür Gündem on court orders, and the storming of its Istanbul headquarters by special operations police. The quarter-of-a-century-long history of Özgür Gündem represents all there is to […]