Lefteast
In 1989, the post-communist elites in the four Central European states of Czechia, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia had a supposedly innocent ambition. They wanted to escape from the captivity of the Russian ‘East’ back to the civilized ‘West’, where they sought political and economic equality. Milan Kundera put it best in his 1983 essay on […]
From October 26th to 29th 2023, union organisers and researchers from six Eastern European countries gathered in Kaunas to exchange experiences on union organising and speak about the possibilities for using strikes as a tool to advance a progressive agenda that seeks to tackle important social, ecological, and economic changes. The “Strike School” conference was […]
Note from LeftEast editors. We repost the recording of Stefan Christoff’s interview with Mary Taylor and Noah Brehmer on Free City Radio, and the text From Islands of Commons to Collective Autonomy that was published in e-flux journal, entitled From Islands of Commons to Collective Autonomy: Mary N. Taylor and Janet Sarbanes in conversation. The Commonist Horizon: Urban Futures […]
Note from LeftEast editors: This article is a version of an interview Bence Horváth conducted in Hungarian with Zoltán Ginelli and Eszter Szakács, published by 444.hu on 24 May, 2021. It has been translated and re-edited by Zoltán Ginelli. The original introduced the exhibition ‘Transperiphery Movement: Global Eastern Europe and Global South’ featured in the OFF-Biennale Budapest and […]
The former director of Karl Polanyi Research Center for Global Social Studies and Associate Professor at the Corvinus University of Budapest, and LeftEast author Attila Melegh recently published the book The Migration Turn and Eastern Europe. A Global Historical Sociological Analysis. Using Marxist and Polanyian frameworks, this book examines the structural and discursive transformation that can explain the polarization […]
In recent years, there has been a growing tendency among scholars and activists in Eastern Europe to draw parallels and links between the “postcolonial” and the “postsocialist”. In its extreme, as Adem Ferizaj argues in his recent review, the use of postcolonial approaches in the context of postsocialism “leads to the false analogy that postsocialism […]
In an effort to regulate foreign influence in Georgia, the Georgian parliament, People’s Power, as it is called, introduced two bills in late February, “On the registration of foreign agents” and “On the transparency of foreign influence.” People’s Power broke away from the ruling party, Georgian Dream (GD) so it could be more open about […]
This article is part of the multilingual ELMO series Transnational migration in CEE from intersectional perspectives of race, gender, class and citizenship. Since the so-called ‘migration crisis’ in 2015, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has become a key figurehead of an ultra-conservative and illiberal European right.[1] This politics is anchored in virulent anti-immigration positions and fierce […]
Note from LeftEast editors. This article is a report of the closing panel discussion of the multilingual ELMO series CEE housing movements resisting neoliberal urban transformations. All articles from the ELMO series, as well as the introduction, are available here in English. At the end of each English language article you can find links to CEE […]
In early September, two Zoom panels on the topic of decolonising Eastern Europe were organised as part of the seminar programme of the Institute of Culture and Society, Western Sydney University. We are happy to share the recordings of these conversations, hosted and curated by Tsvetelina Hristova. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has (re)produced a […]