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Housing poverty and (missing) housing policies in Hungary: A radical re-imagination of housing is what we need (part 2)

Note from the LeftEast editors: the first part of Mariann Dosa’s text on the housing policies in Hungary can be read here. Any housing policies that prioritize equity need to be based on broadly accessible public housing, because it is the only way forward that transcends the structure of neoliberal capitalism and hence, offers radical […]

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Serbia’s Sleepwalkers

In the post-Yugoslav transition space, we have never – until now – found ourselves in a situation in which a single party has managed to win an absolute majority in parliamentary elections. But this is exactly what has happened in the recent elections in Serbia, where a faction that split from the ultra-right Serbian Radical […]

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A groundbreaking result: Slovenia’s United Left Coalition gets 6 seats in Parliament

Dear all, dear comrades, dear friends, dear (new) new Left, We have broken the vicious circle of anticommunism in the post-Yugoslav context. What follows is a slightly longer piece on the campaign to give you a a sense of the historic results! On the electoral campaign of United Left Coalition (ULC) As you can imagine, […]

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Anti-corruption, another name for economic abuse

Note from the LeftEast editors: this article was published in cooperation with the web-portal Bilten.Org During May and June 2014, Romania was invaded by high-ranking officials: the US Vice President, the head of Pentagon, the head of CIA, the head of NATO, American senators, all having only one message: fight corruption! After which they added […]

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An apology to Dragan Plavsic

Dear Dragan Plavsic, We extend our apology for publishing a text by Agon Hamza that contained a defamatory statement against you. We did that because we did not want to dismiss Agon Hamza’s point of view. We deeply regret that our publishing his text has had the effect of furthering his defamatory statement. Sincerely, LeftEast […]

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Trapped in Europe’s Quagmire: The situation of asylum seekers and refugees in Bulgaria

The new Bordermonitoring’s report on Bulgaria is now available for download in .pdf format. The making of the report was undertaken by four independent researchers and follows structural conditions in the country which place asylum-seekers and refugees in an extremely vulnerable position as well as their current precarious situation. The themes covered in the report […]

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Maidan: Democratic Movement or Nationalist Mobilization?

Introduction It is conventional wisdom in the West to describe the ‘Maidan’ that brought to power the current regime in Kiev as an anti-authoritarian mass movement guided by democratic ‘European’ values [1]. While not denying the presence of such themes in the Maidan, I wish to argue that the Maidan was and is primarily a […]

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Struggles in and over Public Space: Hungarian Heritage as a Homeless Free Zone

Source: CritCom, Council of European Studies, Columbia University In November 2013, members of the organization The City Is for All (A Város Mindenkié, henceforth AVM) were forcibly removed from the Budapest General Assembly, after forming a singing, poem-reciting human chain in protest of the extension of criminalization of homeless people ‘to a major part of […]

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Ukraine’s Fractures. An interview with Volodymyr Ishchenko for New Left Review.

Since the start of the Maidan protests six months ago, Ukraine has been at the centre of a crisis which has exposed and deepened the fault-lines—geopolitical, historical, linguistic, cultural—that traverse the country. These divisions have grown through the entwinement of opposed political camps with the strategic ambitions of Russia and the West, the former bidding […]

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How Not to Debate: My Reply to Agon Hamza (Part 1)

Containing a personal appeal to Agon Hamza and the Editorial Board of LeftEast  Introduction When I was informed that Agon Hamza was preparing a response to my critique of Slavoj Žižek’s views on the Balkans, I made an assumption that I now realise was naïve. For I assumed that Hamza would engage in a constructive, […]