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Bulgaria on Greece: Tale of the Virtuous Poor

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 […]

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The Balkans: the missing link the the international solidarity on the Greek referendum

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 […]

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VIDEO: Living up to a name: The story of Plamen Goranov. An interview with the film-makers.

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 […]

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Private electricity at the expense of the State: The privatization of Maritsa Iztok 1 and 3 in Bulgaria

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 […]

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Was the 8th of March cancelled in the Balkans this year?

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 […]

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International Women’s Day in the Balkans: Jana Tsoneva

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 […]

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Bulgaria’s Creeping Apartheid, Part III: Racism with a Touch of Responsibility

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 […]

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Bulgaria’s Creeping Apartheid, Part II: Liberal Dehumanization

The following is the second 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 […]

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Bulgaria’s Creeping Apartheid, Part I: Mobilizing Racism to Shrink the Social State

The following is the first 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 shows that while the discourse is focused on the Roma, the measures proposed will cut social provisions for all poor Bulgarians. Part II‘s main […]

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Bulgarian youth in the maelstrom of political struggles

Note from the LeftEast editors: this article has been published in collaboration with the Balkan web-portal Bilten.org. The publication in Serbo-Croatian is to be found here. In Bulgaria there is a (neo)liberal hegemony over student politics that hasn’t been challenged up until last year’s university occupation. This process, however, is not that clear cut, the […]