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Bulgaria: Call for international solidarity against anti-LGBTI+ law

Statement on the adoption of an anti-LGBTI+ law in Bulgaria by Levfem, a socialist feminist organization based in Bulgaria Conservative and far-right forces scored a huge victory on Wednesday, 7 August. In Bulgaria, MPs from all political parties voted in favor of banning the “propaganda” of sexual orientation and gender identity in schools. Few MPs […]

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Rebuilding Socialism and Sovereignty in Serbia: An Interview with Marko Crnobrnja / Sopo Japaridze

Ever since the fall of socialism, Serbia has had virtually no left-wing parties. The legacy of the workers’ struggle and radical politics, reaching to the 1870s, had been up to that point upheld by the League of Communists of Serbia, a national branch of the ruling party of Yugoslavia. In 1990 the League became the […]

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Roma Holocaust Remembrance: The Complicit Silence of History’s Bystanders and the Persistence of Anti-Roma Racism

August 2nd is known in a number of European countries as Roma Holocaust Memorial Day. It is a significant day in history because 80 years ago on the night of August 2nd, 1944 the Nazis killed the more than 4,200 Roma and Sinti incarcerated in the Auschwitz II-Birkenau concentration camp in gas chambers, effectively liquidating […]

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Popular Uprisings and Gang Violence: Understanding the Struggle in Contemporary Haiti

Editorial note: In late May, at the same time as violent police crackdowns on protests around the elections and the high cost of living in Kenya, hundreds of Kenyan police officers landed in Haiti to ostensibly quell gang violence and restore order. The authors of this dialogue paint a complex picture of the situation beyond […]

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Today’s Uzbekistan and the Left: an Interview with three Uzbek Comrades

Editorial note: Following 25 years of Islam Karimov’s rule, on December 14, 2016, Shavkat Mirziyoyev became the second President of post-Soviet Uzbekistan. Though Mirziyoyev had been Karimov’s prime minister for thirteen years, his ascent to the presidency marked a sharp turn in the Uzbekistan’s political economy, away from the statism of the Karimov era, when […]

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Who Chooses Wars for Us?

Who chooses wars for us? What does it mean that somewhere is peace and somewhere is war? Is this still peace? What kind of peace? Whose peace? Is there really peace until there are wars? So what if wars no longer exist? How can we reach worlds without wars? Can we get there? We have to. Once upon a time there was a world of wars. There was.

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Society–Instead of Apartheid. Interview with sociologist József Böröcz, by András Borbély

How is the system of social redistribution related to trajectories of individual life? What can it mean to be a socialist today? How does race cognition work? What are the conceptual starting points for the idea of an entirely new political community? József Böröcz—Emeritus Professor of Sociology at Rutgers University—answered questions by András Borbély. The […]

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Hungary’s Reindustrialization: Hedging Geopolitical Conflicts?

Note from LeftEast Editors: Originally published by Second Cold War Observatory on May 6, 2024. Hungary’s current cycle of industrialization within electric vehicle (EV) and battery production chains may be seen as a typical case for third-country attempts to “hedge” geoeconomic competition (Camba and Epstein, 2023). Attempting to capitalize on its position at the Eastern periphery […]

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Mining Lithium in Europe’s(Semi)Periphery and The Making of an Extractivist Frontier

Note from LeftEast Editors: Originally published by Second Cold War Observatory on May 2, 2024. Perhaps more than any other material, lithium has, in recent years, been increasingly presented as the silver bullet for the so-called twin transition—the digital and the green transitions. Lithium is essential to most conventional batteries used in diverse technologies, from phones […]

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Failed Infrastructure and the Promise of Development in Georgia

Note from LeftEast Editors:  This article was originally published at The Second Cold War Observatory (SCWO) on April 25, 2024. In the wake of the Soviet collapse, investment in mega infrastructure has been pitched as the solution to Georgia’s development. Already in the 1990s, in the face of rapid deindustrialization and armed conflicts in the […]