September 21, 2020

Progressive Patriotism

by Kirill Medvedev Oleg Zhuravlev  

Translated from the Russian original on Colta.ru by Maxim Edwards. LeftEast publishes this text not by way of unreserved endorsement but rather in an effort to initiate a debate about leftist strategy. In our editorial discussion at least, it generated plenty of questions: Do we need to limit our imagination of political community to the form of the nation-state? Can we meaningfully expect to control the meaning of the notoriously shape-shifting ideology of nationalism? Hasn’t the progressive patriot niche in Russia been already occupied by forces that are not all that progressive, ranging from the Communis ..

September 16, 2020

Post-Pandemic Struggles in Social Reproduction: Lessons from the Therapist Union in Georgia

by Sopiko Japaridze  

Note of the LeftEast editors: The present text is part of a series of publications and webinars on the topics of social reproduction, (women’s) labour and migration in East-Central Europe and beyond. The video from the first webinar, where this text was first presentedcan be seen here. The aim of the series is to raise awareness about struggles for labour, reproduction and migrant rights, as well as of the condition of women in society and how these have been impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak. The publications and webinars are coordinated in cooperation between the Bulgarian Left feminist collectiv ..

September 11, 2020

The Serbia-Kosovo Treaty: a Servile Acquiescence to US Imperialism

by Anja Ilic  

This article was originally published in Serbo-Croatian on the website of the revolutionary socialist organization Marks 21 on September 5, the day after Serbia and Kosovo signed a treaty that international media have labeled “historic.” The “historic” treaty recently signed by Serbia and Kosovo under the auspices of the US president, will prove very useful to American (and western) imperialism in the Balkans, as well as to Israel, its main bulwark in the Middle East. The document should not be viewed as an historic rapprochement between Serbs and Albanians, but rather as a confirmation of the per ..

September 8, 2020

Is There a Globalization-Migration Nexus?

by Attila Melegh  

This article first appeared on the blog of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology. Eastern Europe and Eastern Asia Compared During the last 30 years migration levels have risen sharply. This change is associated with the opening up of national markets by global capital. The affinity between the mobility of capital and the movement of people can be explained through recourse to the Polanyian notion of disembeddedness. The increasing role of foreign investment in the 1990s and the 2000s was associated with privatization, the closing down of local industries, neoliberal (pro-market) shifts in economic poli ..

September 3, 2020

Colonial Legacies, Decolonial Struggles: Anthropology and Europe’s Peripheries Today

by lefteast  

This plenary session of the European Association of Social Anthropologists Biennial Conference, which took place July 21-24 in Lisbon, rethinks anthropology in and beyond Europe and considers how disciplinary hierarchies are reinforced. This requires concerted effort to create new spaces to counter structures and practices that reinforce hierarchies. The speakers engage with anthropology’s margins and marginalisations. Prem Kumar Rajaram (Central European University) &Mariya Ivancheva (University of Liverpool, LeftEast editorial board) convened this panel. Discussants include Mary Taylor (CUNY, LeftEast edi ..

September 1, 2020

Before Bandung: the Moscow-based Communist University for Toilers of the East (KUTV) and the Fates of Interwar-era Anti-Colonial Internationalism

by Rossen Djagalov  

This is an abbreviated version of an article that originally appeared on Global South Studies, a digital scholarship project hosted by the University of Virginia. The following account of the Moscow-based Communist University for Toilers of the East in Moscow (1921-1938) seeks to counter the prevailing tendency among scholars of the Global South to foreshorten the history of their subject. For a long while, Edward Said’s magisterialOrientalism(1978) was regarded as the point of origin of postcolonial thought. More recently, it has been replaced in this capacity by the 1955 Afro-Asian Conference in Bandung. Inde ..

August 27, 2020

Revolutionary Trans Montenegro: an activist & an anthropologist in conversation

by Jovan Dzoli Ulicevic and Carna Brkovic  

This text, published in English by the print and online journal Kuckuck: Notizen zur Alltagskultur, includes material (see below) published originally in Montenegrin on the website Viesnik Slobode, and then on the website of the LGBT Activist Association Spektra. Many thanks to all of these forums for permitting republication. This text presents snippets of an ongoing conversation between two friends from Montenegro, Jovan Džoli Ulićević, a trans activist and biologist, and Čarna Brković, an anthropologist. We met many years ago, during the activist meetings that led to the creation of one of the first Monte ..

August 24, 2020

Gift or Data Platform? Capitalist Hospitality and Couchsurfing’s New Paywall

by Katarzyna Gajewska  

Like most major corporations, Couchsurfing.com is a C Corporation, for-profit and subject to corporate taxes, though it was a non-profit from 2003 to 2011. Hosts on the platform offer free accommodation to travelers. However, lately it seems to have taken a turn toward becoming yet another scheme to extract money from online users. In mid-May 2020, many users received a message that they needed to pay a monthly or yearly fee if they wanted to continue using the platform. Some people who did not want to pay cannot access their profile, including information that they themselves left on the website. It is still pos ..

August 21, 2020

From Ukraine with Comparison: Emerging Notes on Belarus

by Volodymyr Ishchenko  

We share here notes by LeftEast contributing editor Volodymyr Ishchenko on Belarus from August 10th (Part 1) and 19th (Part 2), 2020. Part 1: SOME QUICK COMPARATIVE NOTES ON BELARUS (August 10, 2020) 1. Both Lukashenka and Tsikhanouskaia claim ~80% voters. The official results look suspicious as they are improbably stable. Lukashenka gets ~80% of the voters in the fifth elections in a row despite all ups and downs, particularly, the COVID crisis. But 70-80% that Tsikhanouskaia claims may be even further from the real support. It is extremely hard to believe that a person who was virtually unknown just a few month ..

August 19, 2020

The Rise of Heteronomous Academia on the EU’s Borderlands

by Adam Havas and Agoston Faber  

ith the very recent founding of a “streamlined” Family Research Centre, compatible with the government’s political agenda, within the Academy’s Institute of Sociology, heteronomy in academe has reached a new peak. In a context where “family research” serves as a governmental counter-discourse par excellence to bash “gender studies” (generally associated with liberalism, multiculturalism, relativism and the CEU), the foundation of a “family research centre” within the Hungarian Academy of Sciences is not only ethically questionable; it is also a clear sign of governmental policies permeating th ..