Lefteast
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 […]
Nearly everywhere the operations of Uber have generated controversy. For example, Uber sparked mass protests of taxi drivers in France demanding that the service be discontinued. In contrast, when the Bulgarian Commission for the protection of competition (CPC) fined, and ordered Uber to stop operations in the country, citizens protests erupted in defense of the […]
source: Framing Financial Crisis and Protest (Open University coordinated project) Parents tell children stories to lull them to sleep under the rhythm of feel-good predictability, with the added value of offering a moral formula or two. Children are expected to soak up the latter like sponges and turn into models of good behaviour in due […]
The negotiations of the Greek government with the Troika have shown that our ‘shared European home’ was built over financial quicksands. Yet, by 2015 it should come as no surprise that ECB, Eurogroup, and IMF readily risk a humanitarian crisis, a rise of disease, violence, hunger, and death of thousands in Greece and Europe. Syriza’s […]
LeftEast recently sat down with Martin Marinos and Andre Andreev to discuss their film ‘Flame: A Short Film About Plamen Goranov,’ which recently won the Thessaloniki Film Festival’s Audience Award for Best Short Film. The documentary explores the life of Plamen Goranov whose self-immolation during the Bulgarian protests in 2013 spurred the resignation of Varna’s […]
Note from the LeftEast editors: this article (by Tsvetelina Hristova & Svetlin Vesselinov) is published in cooperation with the Serbo-Croatian web portal Bilten.Org. In the first month of 2015 the new Bulgarian government led by GERB (Citizens for European development of Bulgaria) announced that it was going to start negotiations for reducing the price of the electricity provided […]
Wrapped in a perfumed Valentine’s-meets-Mother’s-Day packaging, year after year International Women’s Day seems to become further stripped of its political flavour. What is worrying is that this occurs at a time when women face deteriorating conditions across the region, in their homes, at the work place and society at large. We asked activists, researchers and […]
Jana Tsoneva is a PhD student in Sociology and Social anthropology at CEU, Budapest. She researches the latest anti-government mobilizations in Bulgaria and is interested in theories of populism, ideology and civil society. “The new textile factories, which fuel Bulgaria’s exports to Western Europe offer local women primitive working conditions and a pay that is […]
The following is the last of three articles by Jana Tsoneva and Stanimir Panayotov on the Bulgarian state’s increasingly harsh rhetoric and policy proposals vis-a-vis the country’s Roma minority. Part I showed that while the discourse is focused on the Roma, the measures proposed will cut social provisions for all poor Bulgarians. Part II‘s main argument is […]