Lefteast
LeftEast’s Konstantin Kilibarda interviews Haig Aivaizian of the Gulf Labour working group about the ’52 Weeks of Gulf Labour’ campaign. The campaign uses artistic interventions to shine a light on the labour practices underpinning recent projects like the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi. LE: What motivated you to start the ’52 Weeks of Gulf Labour’ project? HA: […]
Serbia held early parliamentary elections on 16 March 2014. The results were an apparently spectacular victory for the outgoing ruling coalition, and the Serbian Progressive Party above all, which secured 48.35 percent of votes cast, or 158 out of 250 seats. The Progressives’ erstwhile allies, the Socialist Party of Serbia, won 13.49 percent or 44 […]
Note from the LeftEast editors: this article has been published in collaboration with the new Balkan web-portal Bilten.org. Original publication in Serbo-Croatian is to be found here. With approaching parliamentary and presidential elections in Macedonia this April a ‘new political situation’ is emerging. After almost nine years of total dominance by the current governing coalition […]
RAMPA DE GUNOI (THE LANDFILL) People looking for sources of income and cheep living conditions settled down right near the landfill starting with the end of 1960s and carried on informal labour (waste selection) since then. Today approximately 250 persons are living within this neglected and life threatening territory in 50 improvised barracks. They were […]
James Robertson recounts the history of Kosovo, before and after the breakup of the ex-Yugoslavia, and assesses the accuracy of Russia’s comparisons to Crimea. published in Socialist Worker, March 27, 2014 THE EVENTS in Crimea over the past few weeks, culminating in the territory–a peninsula on the Black Sea off southern Ukraine–being annexed to Russia […]
I think it’s worth pausing, and reflecting on the fact that the EU has applied sanctions. Well. Don’t make the EU angry. You wouldn’t like them when they get angry. Raaaahhhrr! EU SMASH! And yet – and yet – Russia continues to ‘defy the international community’. Such rare valour. Such nose-thumbery. Such bare-faced insouciance. I […]
Imagine a country that once was considered the last stronghold of Stalinist socialism. A country that after the velvet revolution quickly became the apt pupil of the IMF, was one of the first to implement neoliberal reforms, and was also considered in the early nineties by none other than the IMF to be the ideal […]
We have heard terrifying stories from the revolution in Ukraine: anarchists participating in anti-government street-fighting behind nationalist banners, anarchist slogans and historical figures appropriated by fascists, a dystopia in which familiar movements and strategies reappear with our enemies at the helm. This text is a clumsy first attempt to identify the important questions for anarchists […]
by Jennifer J. Carroll Outside the sphere of Russian propaganda, the Kremlin’s assertion that the Ukrainian crisis is fueled by radical nationalists and fascist provocateurs is widely understood as fabricated. Putin’s claims that radicals and extremists control Ukraine’s parliament and that Russian nationals face physical threats are categorically false, and even the US Department of […]
Note from the editorial board of LeftEast: an earlier version was published on the All the Russias’ Blog of NYU’s Jordan Center: http://jordanrussiacenter.org/news/dangerous-liaisons-ukraine-western-slavists/ Writing in the middle of a crisis is always dangerous. Analysis, predictions, recommendations can be proven dramatically wrong within a matter of days. I write these lines as the main author of […]