Lefteast
Note from the LeftEast editors: this article has been published in collaboration with the Serbo-Croat web portal Bilten. Last April Pazardzhik, a Bulgarian town with a population of about 70,000, banned Muslim women from wearing veils. Pazardzhik was followed by Stara Zagora, and proposals for introducing similar prohibitions were made in over a third of […]
Note from LeftEast editors: This article is published in collaboration with the regional portalBilten. On the 8th of June, 2016 the ZDF broadcast a news report about a paramilitary group, the self-proclaimed Bulgarian Military Union “Vasil Levski”. The piece was shot during a regular “migrant-hunting” operation of the unit in a forest near the border […]
Note from LeftEast editors: This article is published in collaboration with the regional portal Bilten. Slogans about the “knowledge economy”, “innovation”, “entrepreneurship”, “creativity”, and the “post-industrial” and “information” society are widespread in the EU, and Bulgaria makes no exception. Information technologies are posed as the universal solution to all social ills, a panaceia able to […]
Note from the LeftEast editors: this article has been published in collaboration with the Serbo-Croat web portal Bilten.Org In the past few years, particularly after the 2007-8 world food price crisis, there has been a lot of attention to the global expansion of large-scale acquisitions of farmland, or what is usually referred to as land […]
Note from the LeftEast editors: This is an interview with Jock Palfreeman, an Australian citizen and prisoner in Blugaria, who is the founder of the Bulgarian Prisoners’ Association. In 2007 Jock was convicted for the murder of Bulgarian Andrei Monov although claimed that he was trying to help two Roma people that were attacked by a group […]
We are grateful to Bilten, where this article will appear in BCS. — “Common sites of memory are not sites of common memory”, prof. Lilyana Deyanova (Obektiv, October 2012) — A few years ago, the Bulgarian sociologist Andrei Raitchev observed that with the establishment of a broad consensus among all parties on the necessity for liberal pro-market […]
Note from the LeftEast editors: a Bulgarian version of this text first appeared on the pages of Kultura weekly newspaper. Christina Grozeva and Peter Valchanov’s The Lesson (2014) is probably the first feature film that explains the Bulgarian winter of discontent in 2013. It tells the story of a “normal” week in the life Nadezhda (Margarita […]
Note from the LeftEast editors: This article appeared originally on Antidote Zine and has been reprinted with the kind permission of the author. The images portray scenes in Serbia and Macedonia, December 2015, captured by unnamed photographers; please inquire before reprinting: antidote [at] riseup . net Q. Perhaps twenty years old, probably younger. Kabul, Afghanistan. At the […]
Note of the LeftEast editors: the articles is published in co-operation with the Serbo-Croatian web portal Bilten.Org. Bulgaria’s political scene is notorious for its volatility: parties come and go, sometimes sweeping to power months after being formed; cabinets seldom last a full term in office. Amid this flux, the liberal Movement for Rights and Freedoms […]
Corina Tulbure analyses the business of trafficking migrants which has come as a response to the fortification of Europe and the infringement of their rights to political asylum and International protection supposedly guaranteed by EU regulations. The focus on fighting migrant traffickers reveals the lack of an asylum policy on an EU level and a policy of persecution against […]