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Letter of Support for Aleksandar Matković

An increasing number of concerned intellectuals and activists have signed an open letter in support of Aleksandar Matković, who has been receiving death threats for his research on and opposition to the Rio Tinto lithium mining project in Serbia’s Jadar Valley. Temporarily defeated in 2022, when the courts cancelled it, the project is being once […]

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Submission, Defiance, and Emancipation? Two Decades of the EU’s Eastern Periphery

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 […]

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From “Returning to Europe” to “Occupying Brussels”: The EU was crucial to Viktor Orbán’s rise — now, he wants to remake it in his own image

The article was originally published by Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung here. It is reproduced with permission.  In the past decade, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has emerged as one of Europe’s most important — and controversial — politicians: no small feat for the leader of a country whose economic or strategic importance on both European and global […]

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Migrant Workers and Strikes: or on the Tightly Packed Contradictions of Global Capitalism

Note from LeftEast editors: This article is a slightly expanded and edited version of a text, which appeared first in Slovak in Kapital. We publish the English original with permission. The article appears within the framework of the East European Left Media Outlet (ELMO). “For capitalism migrant workers fill a labour shortage in an especially […]

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Sonja Stojadinovic: The Macedonian left-wing SDSM lost the election because it did not dismantle the Gruevski regime of nepotism and harmed Macedonian identity 

  LeftEast is delighted to reprint this interview Vladimir Mitev recently conducted with our comrade and Macedonian political scientist Sonja Stojadinovic for Cross-border Talks, in which they discuss the internal situation and foreign policy dynamics immediately after the swearing the May 8 elections and the swearing in of Macedonia’s new president (Gordana Siljanovska from the […]

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Evaporating Solidarity: The Response to Displacement Cannot Be Sustained by Empathy Alone

After the second anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, it is now time to ask what happens when the fragile social relations that were able to handle the arrival of millions of displaced people start to break down. Many commentators have argued extensively that grassroots solidarity networks consisting of individual actors and local organisations […]

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We asked: How is the Suppression of Palestinian Solidarity Unfolding in Austria? 

Editorial introduction: Since the launch of Hamas’ Operation Al-Aqsa Flood and Israel’s bombing of the besieged Gaza Strip, Palestinians and pro-Palestine activists in Europe are facing unprecedented censorship, policing, harassment, arrests, gag orders, and threats. In compiling reports from leftist activists across Europe, we aim to alert progressives across the region of the oppression Palestinians […]

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We asked: How is the Suppression of Palestinian Solidarity Unfolding in Germany? 

Since the launch of Hamas’ Operation Floods of Aqsa and Israel’s bombardment of besieged Gaza, Palestinians and pro-Palestine activists in Europe have been facing unprecedented censorship, policing, harassment, arrests, gag orders, and threats. In compiling several reports from leftist activists in various locations in Europe, we aim to alert our activist communities across our region […]

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A letter to Europe from a Palestinian

I am writing this letter as news continues to reach me of relatives, neighbours, and friends being killed in Gaza by Israel’s indiscriminate bombardment. Dear Europeans, I, like millions of Palestinians, am living through the worst nightmare of yet another round of mass death and destruction unleashed on our people – something you would often […]

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We asked: How is the Suppression of Palestinian Solidarity Unfolding in France? 

Although as of October 21, the widespread ban on protests has been deemed unconstitutional, it remains the case that since October 7, the French government has voluntarily conflated any expression of Palestine solidarity with supporting terrorism: this is a new step in an escalation of repression premised on an attempt at silencing any voice that is not in line with the government and its positions.