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Uprooting Injustice: Exposing Georgia’s Housing Crisis and Predatory Lending

Interview with Vako Natsvlishvili from the political movement “Khma”. In this insightful interview, Vako, a member of the “Khma” movement, sheds light on the housing crisis in Georgia and the challenges faced by anti-eviction activists in the country. The recent incident involving the eviction of a family has sparked public outrage, leading to the arrest […]

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Free to Hate: How Media Liberalization Enabled Right-Wing Populism in Post-1989 Bulgaria (a book extract)

Free to Hate examines Bulgaria’s highly mediated populist right in light of the political and economic transformations of media institutions after 1989. The book highlights the negative effects of the abandonment of the cultural and educational features of socialist media and the complete shift toward entertainment and advertising in the 1990s. It also traces how the subjugation of state media to the new elites and the overhaul of the journalistic labor market secured the hegemony of anti-communism, which is the ideology that the populist right feeds on. A significant portion of Free to Hate examines the monopolization of the Bulgarian media market by the Western media giants WAZ and News Corporation, as it discusses the open colonization of Bulgarian media by individual capitalists who use it to denigrate one another. In sum, Free to Hate explains how these structural transformations of media institutions benefited the populist right and offers an inside view and in-depth analysis of the populist right’s own media outlets.

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Interviews

The Alternative University: Lessons from Bolivarian Venezuela: An Interview with Mariya Ivancheva

Note from LeftEast editors: An early version of this interview on the monograph The Alternative University: Lessons from Bolivarian Venezuela (Stanford University Press, 2023) appeared in the journal Educational Philosophy and Theory, and in Bulgarian at the pages of our kindred ELMO member platform dVERSIA. We publish the pre-print with some modification. The book explores […]

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Trade Unions Block Arms Exports to Israel: International Workers’ Solidarity

LeftEast publishes an English translation of this article from the Croatian portian Radnička Prava thanks to our cooperation within the framework of the East European Left Media Outlet (ELMO). Originally published on November 27, 2023. Around the world, trade unions and workers are refusing to participate in the production and transportation of arms intended for […]

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We Asked: How is Suppression of Palestinian Solidarity Unfolding in Hungary? (an Interview with Soma Ábrahám Kiss and Bernáth Lackó)

Most political parties and other actors of the political landscape, significant or niche, openly support the Israeli narrative and there are barely any public figures that condemn the oppression of anti-war protests and opinions in public statements, unless they are asked directly to do so.  On Hungary’s political palette, it is mainly the small and marginal leftist organisations that support peace or the Palestinian people.

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Sexual Harrassment Is a Trade Union Issue of Strategic Importance

Note from LeftEast Editors: This interview was published in Croatian by Radnička Prava. LeftEast, publishes an English version here thanks to our cooperation with Hungarian portal Mérce within the framework of the East European Left Media Outlet (ELMO). Sexual harassment is almost completely normalized in the party industry – night clubs, bars, restaurants and concert […]

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The Revolution against the Odds: an Interview on Rojava with Anya Rebrii and Liza Shishko (Part II: Survival against the Odds)

If Part I of this interview dealt with the complexities of the revolutionary process taking place in Rojava, here, Anya Rebrii and Liza Shishko discuss the autonomous region’s geopolitical precarity. Remember Rojava? There was a time not long ago, when not only leftist outlets but mainstream media, too, were offering extensive coverage of this most […]

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The Revolution against the Odds: an Interview on Rojava with Anya Rebrii and Liza Shishko (Part I: The Messiness of the Revolutionary Process)

Remember Rojava? There was a time not long ago, when not only leftist outlets but mainstream media, too, were offering extensive coverage of this most democratic and inspiring of political projects in the Middle East. The last time it flashed in the news globally was in early 2019, during Turkey’s third invasion of the region, […]

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The Poverty of Cultural History: Decolonization, Race, and Politics In Post-Socialist Studies

Every year the Association for Slavic, Eastern European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) holds its annual conference. This year, between two and four thousand people attended, and there were over 200 panels, round tables, and virtual presentations that brought together international and interdisciplinary scholars from across generations covering everything from History to Anthropology, Sociology, and Literary […]

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Suffocating the academic and student solidarity movement for Palestinian liberation in Finnish higher education (Part 3)

We share this piece by Anaïs Duong-Pedica on the obstacles faced by the student solidarity movement for Palestinian liberation in Finland, originally published by Raster.fi. We find that it complements the reports we have been collecting from leftist activists in various locations in Europe, aiming to alert the activist communities across our region to the oppression […]