Lefteast
Mary N. Taylor I’ve just come back to New York from Sofia, Bulgaria, where there have been daily protests gatherings and marches, punctuated by chants of “step down” and, less frequently, yet consistently, “red garbage” and “mafia out of parliament”, accompanied by the sound of a three whistle march step. A general assembly has met […]
Since mid-June, public spaces of downtown Sofia have been constantly in use by protesters against the current Bulgarian government. In this short paper, I offer a critical geographical reading of how these daily demonstrations have been orchestrated in the urban milieu, and how these performances strengthen, or in some cases weaken political and economic claims […]
Maryia Ivanceva in The Guardian about the Bulgarian protests.
JULY 20-24, 2013 Social Center Xaspel, Sofia 8 Madrid rd. (house in the inner courtyard) 20th of July, Saturday 08:45 – 09:10 Mary Taylor Opening Panel: The rise of the Entrepreneurial City in the East After 1989: Neoliberalization, Gentrification and Resistances Chair: Mary Taylor 10:00 – 10:20 Daniel Saric The Right to the City Movement […]
The debates concerning the present and future of China—an “emerging” power—always leave me unconvinced. Some argue that China has chosen, once and for all, the “capitalist road” and intends even to accelerate its integration into contemporary capitalist globalization. They are quite pleased with this and hope only that this “return to normality” (capitalism being the […]
Since 2010, Orbán Viktor’s government symbolically announced an anticolonial war against Western capital. At the same time, it carried out major transformations in the 1989 system of political democracy, and started a campaign of economic centralization. Due to these, Hungary came under the spotlight of international discussions, as a model impersonating the fate of democracy […]
A text by Mariya Petkova about the current protests in Bulgaria: It did not take much for the Bulgarian public to take to the streets demanding the fall of its new government after the disaster of an election it witnessed in May. Bulgarian voters had already punished political parties with a largely fragmented vote which […]
Thursday, June 13, Ankara I am waiting through an intense thunderstorm outside, periodically reading facebook posts from my students gathered in Ankara’s Kuğulu (Swan) Park, which has been the capital’s version of Istanbul’s Gezi Park, and from some at Gezi Park itself. Erdoğan has announced that “this will be over within 24 hours” and has […]
Here’s a declaration of solidarity with the people of Croatia from the part of the Fourth Republic, Hungary. “The 4K! is in solidarity with Croatian workers. Croatian workers, small and middle entrepreneurs will face similar problems we have seen in the last nine years of EU membership. (…) We, the people of East European countries […]
Interviewers: Raia Apostolova and Mathias Fiedler On June 22 a group of migrants declared a hunger strike in Munich, Germany. The strike struck at the heart of the European Empire which in the last decades has been the source of the migration policies responsible for the production and further reinforcement of the European Apartheid […]