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Politics of the Left beyond Resistance: Reflections and Visions from our 2017 encounter in Skopje

Report by: Mary N. Taylor, Mariya Ivancheva, Adela Gjorgjioska, Veda Popovici  Over the last seven years, members of the LeftEast collective have co-organised  encounters in collaboration with other collectives and comrades in the Eastern and Southern peripheries of Europe. This year, our late summer encounter took place in the Macedonian capital Skopje, hosted by Social […]

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Premature Postcolonialists: the Afro-Asian Writers Association and Soviet Engagement with Africa

 This article post is part of the online forum of the African-American Intellectual History Society, “Black October,” devoted on the Russian Revolution and the African Diaspora W. E. B. Du Bois and others with hands linked and raised at the Afro-Asian Writers Conference in Tashkent in October 1958. W. E. B. Du Bois Papers (MS 312). […]

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Albania and China: the reemergence of an old friendship?

  Note from the LeftEast editors: this piece has been published in cooperation with the Serbo-Croatian Left portal Bilten.Org. Nobody could have expected before the sixties that a tiny and a large country, 7000 thousands kilometers apart, the Popular Republic of Albania and the People’s Republic of China would forge a strong political alliance based […]

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Interviews

Referendum Interrupted: Has Catalonia a future?

The following interview, which was completed just prior to Catalonia’s declaration of independence, was conducted by Griselda Qosja with drs. Jaume Castan Pinos and Alexis Vahlas. In a 2012 piece for the Huffington Post, the writer Nannette Vonnegut recalled that living with her father, Kurt Vonnegut, was like living with an elephant “that was trying […]

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Friends and Foes. Traditional and Alt-Right in Romania

This article is published in collaboration with Bilten: a regional online portal.  The proposal for a referendum to amend the constitution in order to inscribe the definition of family as the union between a woman and a man is dividing opinion in Romania and it represents a platform for the affirmation of a Romanian version […]

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Maribor Uprisings (2017): Duncan Ranslem Interviews Director Maple Razsa

This article was first published in the Brooklyn Rail IN CONVERSATION MAPLE RAZSA with Duncan Ranslem Maple Razsa is Professor of Global Studies at Colby College. He has studied and participated in alter-globalization movements across Europe, paying particular attention to how video is produced, distributed, and consumed in activist practice. Video, he has written, enables […]

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The importance of being Alexander Nikolov, or what is eating the Bulgarian middle class?

Note from the LeftEast editors: a longer version of this piece was first published in Bulgarian by web portal Baricada. Over the last week, the major media outlets in Bulgaria, and especially the liberal press, were taken over by a seemingly small-scale scandal: an online celebrity called Alexander Nikolov tricked tens of people with the […]

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Bakur Rising: Democratic Autonomy in Kurdistan

Note from the editors: This article was originally published in ROAR magazine here. Bakur Rising: Democratic Autonomy in Kurdistan By Nazan Üstündağ Illustration by David Istvan Photo by Uygar Önder Simsek / MOKU In recent years, following the collapse of the peace process between the Turkish state and the Kurdish freedom movement, the struggle for […]

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The Romanian Pension System Between Low Wages and Demographic Fears

This article has been published in collaboration with the Bilten regional platform. The illusion of the “private vs. public” opposition A flurry of irate opinions, fuming comments, and angry analyses have emerged in Romania’s liberal press once the Social-Democratic Prime-Minister, Mihai Tudose, announced in late August, under rather vague terms, his Cabinet’s intentions to reform the […]

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From historical affinities to effective solidarities: Israel and Eastern Europe

  In a column in Ha’aretz last year, historian and journalist Ofri Ilany pointed out to his Israeli audience a number of affinities between Israel and Eastern Europe, ranging from the culinary to the political (Hebrew). As an antidote to the Western-oriented provincialism of the Israeli liberal sphere, Ilany’s intervention was welcome, but building effective […]