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Small protests in Azerbaijan mirror larger social tensions

LeftEast would like to gratefully acknowledge OpenDemocracy for allowing it to reprint this article by Najmin Kamilsoy. In an online survey conducted in Azerbaijan last year, shortly after the 2020 Karabakh War, the majority of respondents, 79%, expressed optimism about the future of the country. This dominant public attitude mirrored the ruling elite’s triumphant post-war rhetoric, […]

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Rio Linglong: Eco Uprising in Serbia

Note from LeftEast editors: We translate this article by Nenad Glišić, which appeared in Bilten on November 24, 2021. It is the first text in a series of interventions LeftEast will publish on developments Serbia since last week. The article was republished as part of a cooperation between Eastern European leftist media platforms in ELMO (Eastern European Left […]

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The Politics of Avoidable Covid-19 Deaths in Romania

Note from LeftEast editors: We reprint this article, which appeared in the Black Box East section of the Berliner Gazette in German on November 23, 2021. Since the beginning of November, Romania’s infection rates dropped significantly compared to the previous month. The number of people in ICUs and the death rate remain however, high. Its medical […]

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Afghanistan and Its Challenge to Feminism

Note from LeftEast editors: We reprint the online version of an article that appeared in New Politics on November 17, 2021. The article will be also appearing in the Winter 2022 print issue of New Politics. The Taliban’s takeover of power after the United States’ brutal twenty-year imperialist occupation is a catastrophe for women not […]

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All posts Theory

Russia as vanguard: Authoritarian neoliberalism and surveillance capitalism

This article takes up the problem of Russian neoliberalism – how to understand the relationship between the social state and neoliberal economic reforms/governmentality (which often seem contradictory). In turn, this relationship tells us about the alignment of state, digital governance, and capital interests in Russia. Based on long term ethnographic participant observation, my research has […]

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Forced labour in supply chains: missing links between industrial and sexual labour

Note from LeftEast editors. As the issue of forced labour is gaining increasing attention in Eastern Europe, we repost Rutvica Andrijasevic’s text, originally published by Migration Mobilities Bristol on September 14 2021, to draw attention on the importance of the transnational supply chain perspective.  I was in the midst of fieldwork researching the working conditions […]

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Humanitarian disaster on the Belarusian-Polish border: a crisis against a backdrop of geopolitical conflict

A few thousand migrants piled up on the Polish border were enough to create one of the worst crises between Belarus and the EU. A reactionary “game” against a background of growing geopolitical tensions. This article originally appeared in French in Revolutionpermanente.fr on Nov. 12. Since last August, the eastern borders of the European Union […]

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Foreign workers in Zrenjanin forced to live in extremely poor accomodation

We repost Marko Miletić’s article published by Mašina. In Serbia, near Zrenjanin, local journalists recently found out that about 500 workers from Vietnam were hired to build the Linglong tire factory in that town. These migrant workers were housed in barracks, under inhuman circumstances, lacking heating, warm clothes, and potable water. Suspecting that these construction workers […]

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UK sponsors deregulation of labor rights in Ukraine

Proposed labour reforms, which the British Foreign Office has consulted on, could reduce Ukrainians’ rights at work. LeftEast is grateful to openDemocracy for the permission to reprint this article. The UK is supporting the deregulation of labour rights in Ukraine, openDemocracy reports today. Documents seen by openDemocracy show the British Foreign Office has advised the […]

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All posts ELMO Series: Gig Work in CEE’s Platform Economy

Platform work in East-Central Europe: reporting and organising in an emerging field

Note from LeftEast editors: This is the report on the online roundtable that ELMO – Eastern European Left Media Outlet organized on June 28, 2021. Researchers, journalists, activists and artists were invited to discuss reporting and researching platform-based gig work in the CEE region, as well as organizing in this emerging field. It was the […]