Lefteast
Note from LeftEast editors: This article was originally published on Counterfire on February 4, 2025. On January 28, the ongoing mass protest movement in Serbia brought down the country’s government, inaugurating the biggest challenge to the more than decade-old rule of the authoritarian president, Aleksandar Vučić. The basic chronology of events is now well-known to […]
Serbia has been shaken in recent months by student-led protests. What began as an isolated demonstration to honour the dead and demand accountability after a railway station canopy collapsed in Novi Sad has quickly evolved into a mass movement that is presenting Aleksandar Vučić with his most severe test yet. LeftEast thanks the Centre for […]
Note from LeftEast editors: In recent years, the Serbian government has grown increasingly repressive, enacting measures aimed at stifling dissent and tightening control over citizens’ rights. Most recently, activist Ivan Bjelić has been detained in Novi Sad during a protest following the deadly accident at the Novi Sad Railway station on 1st of November and […]
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 […]
Ever since the fall of socialism, Serbia has had virtually no left-wing parties. The legacy of the workers’ struggle and radical politics, reaching to the 1870s, had been up to that point upheld by the League of Communists of Serbia, a national branch of the ruling party of Yugoslavia. In 1990 the League became the […]
Note from LeftEast Editors: Originally published by Second Cold War Observatory on May 2, 2024. Perhaps more than any other material, lithium has, in recent years, been increasingly presented as the silver bullet for the so-called twin transition—the digital and the green transitions. Lithium is essential to most conventional batteries used in diverse technologies, from phones […]
Editorial note. On June 2, 2024, local elections were held in 88 cities and municipalities in Serbia, in addition to rerun elections in the City of Belgrade. The local elections in Belgrade were repeated because of serious irregularities in the December 2023 elections for local representatives to the City Council. Compared to December, this time […]
Note from LeftEast editors: This is an updated translation of an interview with Ognjen Kojanić, originally published in July by our comrades at Radnička prava. We publish this edited version as part of our collaboration within ELMO – The Eastern European Left Media Outlet. Ognjen Kojanić is an anthropologist, who spent a year researching worker […]
On the morning of 3 May 2023, Serbian media reported an unusual shooting event in the elementary school “Vladislav Ribnikar” in the center of Belgrade. By late morning, the news became increasingly gloomier: many are dead. In the end, it looked like something we usually hear coming from the USA – a student entered his […]
Curated by Sanaz Raji, Independent Scholar Fellow at the Department of Geography and Environmental Sciences, Northumbria University, Global Sites of Border Violence seeks to bridge different areas of knowledge and learn from both activists on the ground resisting and scholars researching border violence happening in various parts of the world. The intention of these discussions […]