Lefteast
Note from LeftEast editors: This book symposium took place on 21 May 2021 as part of the online conference ‘Thirty Years of Capitalist Transformations in Central and Eastern Europe: Inequalities and Social Resistance’ organised by the Faculty of Sociology and Social Work, Babes-Bolyai University from Cluj-Napoca, Romania. Four books were presented at the panel: The […]
Note of LeftEast editors: On the eve of this fall’s parliamentary elections, the room for political manoeuvre before our Russian comrades (and all other opposition forces) has shrunk to a bare minimum. In these circumstances, engagement with other opposition forces in a broad front against the party-state appears the only option. Mikhail Lobanov’s parliamentary candidacy […]
Note from LeftEast editors: The article is an excerpt from an interview that originally appeared on The Wire Science on 22nd February 2021. Read the whole text written by Sidharth Singh here. Read also LeftEast’s interview with Alexandra Elbakyan from 2017 here. On December 24, 2020, the Delhi high court conducted its first hearing for the […]
The EU recovery plan is reinforcing an idea of welfare and economic reconstruction which reproduces patriarchal and racist hierarchies and exploitation, while some EU member states like Italy and Greece are already promoting measures – like divorce regulations and child allowances laws – that materially make Istanbul Convention void of any meaning. But women have not been silent in these months and are organizing their counterattack. During the last E.A.S.T. public assembly we started to discuss the multifaceted dimensions of these patriarchal attacks and the struggles we can build together towards a big transnational mobilization. This interview with Kalina Drenska, member of E.A.S.T. and LevFem (Bulgaria) is the first of a series of texts that wants to start from Istanbul Convention to explore ongoing fights against violence against women and lgbtqi+ people, in their connections with the struggles against racist and exploitative policies. Kalina talks about the stratified political meanings attributed in Bulgaria to Istanbul Convention and shows the links between attacks on women and lgbtqi+ people and the policies of cutbacks that lead many women to find better living and working conditions abroad. Furthermore, she unveils the hard pathways that feminist struggles must take – in Bulgaria and beyond – to overturn isolation and accumulate power on the transnational level.
Note from LeftEast editors: In June 2018 the Prespa Agreement on the Macedonia name dispute was signed, stipulating among other things the name change of the Republic of Macedonia into Republic of North Macedonia. Several months later, the Macedonian people refused to legitimize the Agreement. In September 2018 they boycotted the referendum on the country’s […]
This month, a Moroccan complainant who was pushed back by the Austrian border police won a case against this illegal return practice with the support of a group of activists and lawyers. The case was brought before the administrative court in Styria. This is an important verdict that sets a precedent for future transnational struggles against violence and torture of people on the move across Europe. […]
In spite of these traumatizing experiences at the Austrian border, Ayoub N. stated after being informed about the verdict: “After hearing that I won the case, I was very happy.I was confident that we would win the case, because it is a human case. It is a painful blow to the Austrian police.”
Push-Back Alarm Austria +43 1 345 1 444
89 organizations, collectives and groups, as well as 257 individuals from Romania and other countries demand to stop the eviction process of several Roma families from the modular houses built by Cluj-Napoca City Hall near the landfills in Pata Rât in 2010. Today, 6th of July 2021, we sent our Appeal together with the signatures […]
We ask: Does the oppression of Roma need to be told as part of another narrative in order to trigger empathy and solidarity? And why does the Czech society keep thinking of and treating its citizens of Roma origin as the Other? […] Anti-Roma racism must be promptly addressed, because, when it comes to Roma, the largest minority in Europe, justice is catching its last breath.
“The governance arrangements that have been in place in Bosnia-Herzegovina since Dayton, drawn up by a team of young United States lawyers, are at the centre of the problem. Somewhat successful as a peace agreement, albeit one that more or less froze the status quo and allowed the main ethno-nationalist political parties that had fuelled the conflict to continue business as usual, it makes governance of the state almost impossible. A recurring Bosnian joke is that everyone considers the constitution laid down in the agreement as unworkable but, of course, no one can agree on what to replace it with. “
Whatever the international players do or do not do, they should immediately stop penalizing the primary victims of the regime, the peoples of Iran. In addition to the endless suffering of innocent people, the only tangible outcome to be expected from the continued economic sanctions is the antagonizing of more and more ordinary Iranians, which is precisely what the fundamentalist regime aims to accomplish.