Lefteast
To offer our readers an inside look at contemporary Afghanistan, we have conducted an interview with Ali Abdi, a researcher who has been living there since 2015 and working with a queer community in Kabul. The Taliban’s speedy takeover of Kabul last week surprised many political observers. Yet, this is exactly what many in Afghanistan […]
Refugees, Racism, and the Turkish Ideology Villagers in the Turkish province of Konya murdered a whole family of Kurdish farmers on Friday, July 30. It was a premeditated massacre that announced itself well ahead of time to anyone willing to notice. Neighbors in the farming village of Hasanköy in central Anatolia had assaulted the Dedeoğulları family of […]
Beirut and Belgrade show off their emergence out of war by investing in massive construction projects on their waterfronts. But these modern projects are also sites of gentrification, erasure, and political contestation. Join Adriana and Miloš on their walks as they reflect on how capital from Arab Gulf countries is building new neighbourhoods of glass […]
The murder of French teacher Samuel Paty earlier this month by a young man of Chechen origin was the occasion for an Islamophobic and xenophobic campaign joined not only by the right but also by left-wing leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon. Mélenchon has since retracted his stigmatizing references to the “Chechen community,” but not his simplistic characterization […]
Note from the editors: Three weeks ago LeftEast published an anti-war statement of the Azerbaijani left. Now we are proud to publish the response of the anti-war Armenian leftists. In the meantime, the war has continued despite two ceasefires. The numbers of killed are hard to estimate, but are in the thousands by now, military […]
The Nagorno-Karabakh conflict has been with us since 1988, ever since the largely ethnic Armenian population of this province of the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic demanded a union with Armenia. The ensuing war ended in 1994 with Nagorno-Karabakh and some neighboring Azerbaijani territories under Armenian control and nearly a million people as refugees. Ever since […]
As a 45-year-old woman scoops up another spoonful of cereal for the three year old child she has professionally taken care of during the past couple of years, she tells me: ‘I’m not a migrant, I’m a gastarbaiter [a derogatory word for a guest worker]. And so I’m underground (podpolnij).’. Ljuba first came to Russia […]
On January 10th, Nicolás Maduro commenced his third term as Venezuelan President. At that time, the oppositional president of the parliament, Juan Guaidó called on the military forces to stage a coup d’etat. A few days later, he declared himself to be the president. Within less than half an hour, he was recognised by the […]
Note from LeftEast editors: This article has been reprinted from the Medium account of Are You Syrious. We, the human rights defenders and citizens from the countries relegated to the “periphery” of the European Union (EU) and the Schengen space, want to express our deepest concern for the current situation in which we can see […]
Turkey may hold a referendum on the transition to an authoritarian presidential system as soon as late March; however, Erdoğan’s Bonapartist shift does not herald stability for the ruling class, nor a solution to the crisis of neoliberalism. The argument that the contemporary world panorama resembles that of the 1930’s has almost become a cliché. […]