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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, […]

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Housing poverty and (missing) housing policies in Hungary (part 1)

Housing has recently become a hot topic in Hungarian public discourse. This increase in attention was caused by the alarming hardships caused by the steep increase in the interest on foreign currency (in which most mortgages taken in the 2000’s were taken) and the increasingly harsh, systematic, and overt criminalization of homeless people in the […]

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A response to Dragan Plavšić

I want to begin by thanking LeftEast for publishing Dragan Plavšić’s article “Did Somebody Say Ethnic Partition? A Critique of Žižek on Kosovo and the Balkans” (see parts [1], [2], [3], [4]) on the book that I co-authored with Slavoj Žižek. From Myth to Symptom: the case of Kosovo was published over a year and […]

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Did Somebody Say Ethnic Partition? A Critique of Žižek on Kosovo and the Balkans (Concluding Part 4)

Notes from the LeftEast editors: This is the second out of four parts of the article of Dragan Plavšić, which offers a critique of the recent book of Slavoy Zizek and Agon Hamza “ “From Myth to Symptom: The Case of Kosovo”. The first part of the article can be read here, the second here, and the third here. “Points […]

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Elections without Politics – the conjuncture in Kosovo

Note of the LeftEast editors: this article was published in cooperation with the Serbo-Croatian web-portal Bilten.Org – original source. The Republic of Kosovo never ceases to be the country of interesting developments. By interesting developments I mean those kinds of events which put the people in a state of perplexity and uneasiness. This was also […]

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Fashion brands violate labour laws in eastern Europe, NGO report finds

Source: The Guardian by Jennifer Rankin Research busts the myth that ‘Made in Europe’ means fair, says co-author; east is part of ‘cheap-labour sewing backyard’ Adidas, Primark and Zara are among a host of western brands accused of profiting from a supply chain that pays garment workers in easternEurope and Turkey poverty wages and tramples […]

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Did Somebody Say Ethnic Partition? A Critique of Žižek on Kosovo and the Balkans (Part 3)

Notes from the LeftEast editors: This is the second out of four parts of the article of Dragan Plavšić, which offers a critique of the recent book of Slavoy Zizek and Agon Hamza “ “From Myth to Symptom: The Case of Kosovo”. The first part of the article can be read here, and the second here, and the last […]