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The Imprisonment of Kumar Gunaratnam

Political Background Sri Lanka is a middle-sized island with a multinational and multilingual society. The majority population is the Sinhala community, along with whom Tamil, Muslim, Burgher and Malay minorities exist, scattered in the low and high lands. A civil war erupted in the mid-80s as Tamil militant groups started a movement for a separate […]

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‘Tyrants across the world know now they can maintain power through mass slaughter.’ Interview with Leila al-Shami for Open Left

by Gabriel Levy and Ilya Matveev Leila al-Shami, co-author of Burning Country, a writer who has worked with human rights movements in Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East, gave this interview to Ilya Matveev and Gabriel Levy on 29 November for OpenLeft (before the fall of Aleppo to the government forces). It sheds some light […]

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Empathy or Solidarity: A Word of Advice from Turkey on How to Survive the Trumpocalypse

This article by Justus Links was first published on the portal OpenDemocracy. From the distance spanned by social media, since the presidential election, I have observed friends, colleagues, and acquaintances in North America in a state of trauma. Physical illnesses are spreading and anxiety is intense. Some who are educators feel that their courses cannot […]

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József Böröcz: “An incapacity to see ourselves as part of the whole world, and the insistence to see ourselves as part of Europe”

This interview with József Böröcz, professor of sociology at Rutgers University, was conducted by Ágnes Gagyi and Gergő Pulay in 2012. In a way, it is a dense summary of the conceptual perspective which had informed the new wave of  intellectual left emerging in the region – including LeftEast – especially in regard to Eastern […]

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David Harvey: “There is no way you can change the world without changing your ideas!”

Note from LeftEast Editors: The original interview was conducted by Istanbul-based Imre Azem and Gaye Günay as part of a documentary movie project on global finance. It was first published in Turkish in the December 2016 issue of Express Magazine, Turkey. It includes an in-depth analysis of the mobilization possibilities that the left has today, within the […]

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The “Pronto” scandal: Wire-tapping senior officials in Kosovo

This article is published in collaboration with the regional portal Bilten. It’s been a month since one of the main portals in Kosovo, “Insajderi”, began publishing a series of tapped telephone conversations among senior political officials in Kosovo. This was the biggest scandal of its kind since the liberation of the country and the reaction […]

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“A Spark in the Dark”- new left party Levica determined to enter Macedonia’s Parliament?!

For a decade now, Macedonia has been systematically devastated by the deeply criminal rightwing populist Gruevski regime, which has demolished the rule of law, media, democracy in the country and has put the commons in the Party’s private possession resulting in rising poverty and unemployment, and a huge exodus of young people in particular. Following two waves of […]

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Capital’s paradise: the rise of global illiberalism

Donald Trump’s election has rightly been acknowledged as a milestone in the political history of the 21st century. He joins an illustrious group of world leaders with a shared distrust towards ideals of liberty, equality and fairness who subscribe to the political ethos of authoritarianism and who are not afraid to use fear mongering, popular […]

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Austrian Presidential Elections: From tragedy to farce and back again?

It seems that when Karl Marx spoke about historical events always happening twice, once as a tragedy, the second time as a farce,[1] he thought about Austria in regard to the farce. Indeed, the eleven month long election campaign was not free of farce. From the candidacy of a rather shrill and eccentric real estate […]

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The Waste Commodity Chains

This article is published in collaboration with the regional portal Bilten. We are habituated to think that polluting things such as garbage normally fall on minorities to deal with in order to keep them as far from us as possible. Thus, conveniently the most “polluting” social classes are tasked with the organization of garbage. For […]