By Alan Matthews
The rightward shift in the center of gravity in the Parliament and Council may favor farm income over environmental objectives.
Perspectives
By Nicole Scicluna
Long dismissed as “second order” elections, of little consequence to Europeans let alone anyone else, the EP elections will play a key role in shaping the EU’s trajectory over the coming years, including in foreign policy.
By Craig Willis and David Smith
In some member states, governance at national or regional levels has already threatened the rights of national and linguistic minorities.
By Metehan Tekinırk and Dylan Irons
The question of how Erdoğan’s immigration and naturalization policies relate to his party’s domestic objectives deserves more attention. We explain the Turkish government’s logic in attempting to absorb a massive immigrant population amidst mounting economic challenges and increasing public opposition. How did Erdoğan-led administrations respond to a mass migration phenomenon that quickly transformed Turkey into a major transit and destination country?
By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee
Here is this month’s editor’s pick from Research Editorial Committee members Luke Johnson, Hélène B. Ducros, Brianna Beehler, Nick Ostrum, and Edina Paleviq.
By Lora Sariaslan and Claske Vos
Artistic practices are indispensable in addressing queries about what and who constitute “Europe,” because they express feelings of belonging and can make visible what the dominant consensus obscures and obliterates. Through their art, visual and performance artists in the former Yugoslavia invoke new transnational and transitional spaces of belonging in Europe.
By Veronika Ichetkina
The film is saturated with psychoanalytic meaning, illustrating not only the theory of Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, but also theories by present-day psychoanalysts of the French and British streams.
Interviewed by Elizabeth B. Jones
The difference between the tree and the forest is the same as that between the individual and society.
By Pierre Haroche
I propose a three-phase periodization of the relationship between Europe and the world that could serve as a basis for future research into the global history of Europe. They correspond to three paradigms in the Europe–world relationship, three levels of the centrality of Europe in the world, and highlight the fundamental reversal by which Europe made the world and the world made Europe.
By Oksana Ermolaeva
Before the great purge, changes in the legislature had already prepared the Soviet justice system for the Terror. In particular, various extrajudicial bodies were created to investigate “political crimes,” in complement to the existing Soviet legal structures. In the USSR, political—or “counter-revolutionary”—crimes were defined as those against the state and outlined in Article 58 of the 1922 Soviet penal code.
By David Smith and Craig Willis
European frameworks made space for transnational activism focused on stronger rights and protections for national minorities.
By Mikko Rask
Imagine a Europe where cities compete not for wealth or resources but for the title of most democratic city.
By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee
Here is this month’s editor’s pick from Research Editorial Committee members Hélène B. Ducros, Edina Paleviq, and Oksana Ermolaeva.
By Matej Nikšič and Nina Goršič
Placemaking contributes to the creation of vibrant public spaces that serve as focal points for community interactions and cultural exchanges in rural areas. It fosters social connections, boosts civic pride, and enhances the overall attractiveness of rural areas.
By Paul O’Keefe
In recent years Europeans have increasingly voiced concerns about the high levels of migration their respective countries are experiencing. In 2015, almost a decade ago, the European Commission’s Eurobarometer poll indicated that 58 percent of Europeans thought of immigration as the most pressing issue for the European Union.
By Pekka Tuominen
Helsinki can feel quite desolate on winter mornings. It is in January 2017 that I started conducting ethnographic fieldwork in Kontula, a district on the urban periphery of Helsinki with a notoriously negative reputation.
Interviewed by Zsuzsanna Varga
An architect and a filmmaker trace their respective journeys to placemaking activism.
By Alexander Leistner
This year will determine whether the political shift to the right can still be halted and the tipping points in democratic culture prevented.
By Kirsten Wesselhoeft and Sam Cavagnolo
In 2023, an estimated 117 million people were displaced from their homes worldwide. Europe alone received more than 1.1 million asylum applications in 2023, 80 percent of which were still pending at the end of the calendar year.
By Majbritt Lyck-Bowen
The foundations for Goda Grannar were laid when a Christian pastor from the Södermalm congregation knocked on the door of the local mosque and asked if any assistance was needed to serve people who had fled from war and poverty and arrived at Stockholm’s central train station.
By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee
Here is this month’s editor’s pick from Research Editorial Committee members Edina Paleviq, Aslihan Turan, and Nicholas Ostrum.
By Paul D’Anieri
Western leaders have sought to keep Ukraine on the periphery of European affairs for many years. It is now at the center of European concerns.
By William Glenn Gray
“The world afterwards is not the same as the world before,” intoned Chancellor Olaf Scholz to the Bundestag on February 27, 2022. In Berlin, the Russian assault on Ukraine reversed fundamental assumptions about the nature of international politics.
By Carl J. Strikwerda and Ruud van Dijk
Scholars of Europe from both sides of the Atlantic assess some of the impact of the war between Ukraine and Russia on NATO, European institutions, and individual European countries. Will NATO get stronger or weaker as the war persists in a stalemate and populist and isolationist political parties assert themselves in member countries? Will the renewed unity among EU members persist in the face of the obstacles lying ahead in Europe?
By Abraham (“Bram”) Boxhoorn
The impact of the Ukraine war on the transatlantic relationship and Euro-Atlantic institutions (EU and NATO) can be only conditionally assessed at this time. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sparked a number of consequences in European international affairs. Some European countries suffered more than others due to the self-imposed sanctions.
By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee
Here is this month’s editor’s pick from Research Editorial Committee members Hélène B. Ducros and Nicholas Ostrum.
By Oksana Ermolaeva
This suicide note was written in Finnish from a Petrozavodsk prison in September 1937 by nineteen-year-old Atto Liesi, a native of Finland and a resident of Vyborg.
By Jordan T. Kuck
The political leadership in Baltic countries is an antidote to the patriarchal propaganda emanating from the Kremlin. In addition to rebuking Putin’s machismo culture with examples of steady woman leadership, the Baltic states have also advanced on support for LGBT rights.
By Marc Jansen
The war between Ukraine and Russia can best be understood as the result of a profound shift over the last thirty years in the relationship between Russia and Europe, particularly the European Union (EU).
By Emilian Kavalski
From providing armaments and diplomatic support to hosting refugees and pushing their counterparts in Western Europe, North America, and beyond to offer more advanced weapons systems and include Kyiv in European and Euro-Atlantic organizations, the CEE states have been at the forefront of the Ukrainian support network.
Interviewed by Carl J. Strikwerda
The reaction to the war in Ukraine has done the opposite of what Putin intended, moving the EU and NATO toward greater unity.
By Djordje Popović
Difference may reside in the ecstatic essence of Dasein, in the arbitrary nature of language, in the interstitial space of hybridity and ambiguity, or in other equally abstract receptacles in which difference is supposedly spared the ravages of history.
By Matvei Yankelevich
Konstantinović poses the parochial spirit as a reactionary provincialism that shields itself from the world-at-large, as well as from linguistic creativity and history itself.
By Edin Hajdarpašić
Radomir Konstantinović published The Philosophy of Parochialism in 1969. I read this book twice: first in Sarajevo around 2002, in its original Serbian, and again in Chicago in 2022, just after it was published in English translation.
By Suzana Vuljevic
Penned in the 1950s and published at a time of rising nationalism in Yugoslavia, Serbian philosopher and writer Radomir Konstantinović’s (1928-2011) The Philosophy of Parochialism (1969) remains a keystone of Serbian and South Slavic literary-philosophical scholarship.
By Branislav Jakovljević
One of the key insights emanating from works on parochialism in Serbian culture is that the province and the empire constitute a dialectical couple. The empire is at once a negation of palanka and a full realization of the spirit of palanka.
By Andreea Mosila
Romania provides an excellent example of how nationalist and populist messaging significantly threatened the pandemic response.
By Oksana Ermolaeva
The Gulag has demonstrated a remarkable continuity based on the cultural foundations of pre-revolutionary Russia. This continuity is seen not only in the “serfdom syndrome” repeatedly cited by memoirists but also in the way inmates have lived. The tragedy of Russian history lies in the fact that numerous inherent features of the repressive Soviet system have been resurrected on a massive—if openly unarticulated—scale in present-day Russia.
By Benjamin Bernard and Matthew McDonald
The exhibition moves beyond earlier models by offering the public a comprehensive survey of early print that places Gutenberg in his historical and geographic context. The visitor could easily forget that print would soon propel an upheaval within European Christendom.
By Patricia Chiantera-Stutte
Since the 1990s, the increasing success and diffusion of dystopian literature and allo-histories have attracted the attention of political scientists. This “genre-blurring” literature offers new political and ethical perspectives on human relations.
By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee
Here is this month’s editor’s pick from Research Editorial Committee members Jennifer Ostojski, Aslihan Turan, Hélène B. Ducros, and Oksana Ermolaeva.
By David Berridge
During art book fairs, book launches, readings, talks, and performances are programed elsewhere in the building, further emphasizing the importance of sociality, which arguably often trumps actual book sales.
Interviewed by Luke Forrester Johnson
Shield focuses on the tensions and ambiguities that plague attempts to mediate race and sexuality in Europe.
By Vanja Petricevic
The fragmented character of asylum policies in European countries—coupled with a sustained lack of recognition of their specific need for protection—makes women more likely to become poor and homeless.
By Barbora Valockova
The BRI and MiC 2025 are emblematic of China’s rise and have placed Europe in the middle of a geopolitical confrontation.
By Arina Rotaru
Beyond religious and economic divisions, the question of the differences between Asia and Europe has remained constant in attempts to define Eurasia. While warning of the reactionary potential of Eurasianism, this feature looks into possibilities of convergence between Europe and Asia.
By Chris Hann
For those who insist on classifying Europe as a separate continent, Eurasia has come to mean a fuzzy interface covering more or less any expanse eastwards of the territories where Western Christianity has spread. For people in the political West, such a Eurasia has strongly negative connotations: it is authoritarian, and its prevailing values are incompatible with liberal freedoms.
By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee
Here is this month’s editor’s pick from Research Editorial Committee members Taylor Soja, Elizabeth B. Jones, and Hélène B. Ducros.
By Adrianna Hlukhovych
Because they are not mass produced, poetic films convey an aura of exclusivity that shakes ideological and political norms under certain circumstances. In the 1960s and 1970s in the Soviet Union, such exclusivity was remarkable both in terms of film aesthetics and film plots.
By Noriaki Hoshino
This paper explores how Japanese intellectuals have discussed the notion of the “New Middle Ages,” foregrounding the trans-regional, inter-disciplinary implication of the theme of Eurasia as it derives from debates implicating the connection between Europe and Asia, which I refer to as “the Eurasian intersection.”
By Holger Briel
For many decades, twentieth-century SF was arguably an Anglo-American cultural project, although works emanating from other national contexts had certainly participated in forging the foundations for much of SF before that time.
Interviewed by Arina Rotaru
Kim’s work invites us to imagine European studies from non-western angles.
By Christoph Butterwegge
What does it mean to be unhoused or unsheltered in a prosperous country that defines itself as a social welfare state?
By Hélène B. Ducros and Elizabeth B. Jones
While policymakers rightly blame the COVID-19 epidemic, the war in Ukraine, and persistently high levels of inflation for the lack of progress in alleviating homelessness and for the dire shortage of safe and affordable housing in many places, these factors have exacerbated rather than created a complex problem that touches a wide array of people at different life stages and under various socio-economic conditions.
Interviewed by Hélène B. Ducros
This photography project places homelessness at the heart of a global network of cities.
By Dion Kramer
The vast majority of EU citizens experiencing homelessness originally left their home country with the aspiration to find (better) work abroad and improve their quality of life. This fact helps us to connect homelessness to the very raison d’être of the freedom of movement principle in the European Union.
By Jörg Dittmann and Matthias Drilling
Until a few years ago, there were no data on homelessness in Switzerland, and homelessness was hardly researched there. Homelessness did not rank high on the social policy agenda or in poverty research either.
By Lindsay B. Flynn
Inequality is one of the defining issues of our time, and social scientists have consistently confirmed that housing is a key driver of contemporary inequalities. How then, should we talk about housing as part of a constellation of economic and social inequalities plaguing contemporary Europe? There are at least three ways to probe this question.
By Anastasia Paparis
This article addresses how the European Capitals of Culture program has engaged the urban question and what the implications for the city of Eleusis are.
By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee
Here is this month’s editor’s pick from Research Editorial Committee member Hélène B. Ducros.
Interviewed by Anastasia Paparis
Culture always reflects what occurs in the world, and sometimes art and culture even function as a “seismometer” for future development. It is unimaginable that future European Capitals of Culture not embody Europe’s disillusion about never engaging in war again.
Interviewed by Anastasia Paparis
In all our cultural development activities, networking, or educational projects, we have striven to support the inhabitants in their initiatives and to improve their skills and capacities.
Interviewed by Anastasia Paparis
Culture is not an EU “competency.” Arts and cultural policies and related topics are the prerogative of national governments. The EU can only intervene in cultural affairs by linking them to other EU policies.
By Anastasia Paparis
The general objectives of the European Capitals of Culture program are to safeguard and promote the diversity of cultures in Europe, highlight common European cultural features, and enhance citizens’ sense of belonging to a common cultural area.
By Anita Rotter and Erol Yildiz
Viewing society from the perspective of postmigrantism means going beyond a binary understanding by re-interpreting the genealogy of people’s migration.
By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee
Here is this month’s editor’s pick from Research Editorial Committee members Nick Ostrum, Oksana Ermolaeva, Hélène B. Ducros, and Sorcha de Brún.
By Markus Hallensleben and Moritz Schramm
The concept of postmigration has allowed for a rethinking of migration studies, the political borders of Europe, and the ongoing history of colonialism.
By Moritz Schramm
Postmigration societies are conceived of as polarized societies where ambivalence and antagonism between different agendas and actors are at the center of the political discourse.
By Markus Hallensleben
I propose a methodological perspective in postmigration studies that takes a participant-centered approach into account and includes manifold, subjective, and intersectional narratives of belonging.
By Cristina Blanco Sío-López
Debates in the European Parliament sent an early warning about the threat of addressing asylum policymaking from a repressive angle focused on security concerns at the expense of refugees’ fundamental rights.
By Marc Hill
Public exchanges and expressions of solidarity are critical to strengthen the agency of vulnerable people to act.
Interviewed by Arina Rotaru
My interest in silent films has been nourished by their black and white aesthetics and interhuman communication beyond spoken language.
By Erica Lehrer and Joanna Wawrzyniak
In singling out the ECE museumscape for decolonial attention, we are mindful of the pitfalls of pathologizing, orientalizing…
By Katrine Sieg and Hélène B. Ducros
Academic specialists, artists, activists, and museum professionals have engaged for at least two decades in the project of “decolonizing” the memory cultures that shore up European identity.
By Alexandra Birch
Saami coastal settlements were expropriated by premodern Europeans, who also eradicated Saami ecosystems, religion, and crafts.
By Laura Frey, Vincent Bababoutilabo, and Joel Vogel
People came to Berlin and had to act out the colonial fantasies of the exhibition’s organizers.
By Ana Sladojević
The anti-colonial aspect of the museum was mainly anchored in the prevailing socialist and nonaligned discourse of the time.
Interviewed by Hélène B. Ducros
Kim Vaz-Deville addresses the “making of” art exhibitions and the value of cross-cultural collaborations to confront difficult histories.
Interviewed by Katrin Sieg
Part of reorienting ourselves is to build spaces of care.
By Marie-Laure Allain Bonilla
Decolonial practices and thinking have been invented, experimented with, and promoted in Swiss art spaces for a couple of decades.
By Emilia Epštajn
The conference aimed to bridge the professional gaps between scholars, researchers, artists, and curators and use the museum as a meeting space for different experiences and expertise and for communication with the public.
By Cresa Pugh
Theft becomes a political act through which resistance to conventional modes of possession and ownership is performed. By inverting the logic of criminality, Diyabanza remakes the museum as a space of inclusion.
By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee
Here is this month’s editor’s pick from Research Editorial Committee members Oksana Ermolaeva, Arina Rotaru, Brittany Kennedy, Angela Cacciarru, Vanja Petričević, and Hélène B. Ducros.
Interviewed by John Haberstroh
We learn about the continuing relevance of ancient myths, the power of opera, and the potential of virtual reality productions.
By Christakis Georgiou
The drive to create the single currency in the late 1980s and 1990s is usually linked to the drive to complete the single market.
By Niels Selling
This article proposes that companies are more likely to weigh in on morality issues in America…
By Beverly Barrett
In recent years, a global democratic backslide, as well as the actions of Russia in Ukraine, have shined a spotlight on national governance in Europe.
By Magnus Feldmann and Glenn Morgan
Businesses are important economic and political actors, and it is important to understand their role in resisting or underpinning populist rule.
By Astrid Hedin
There has been a tendency to assume that the relationship between business and the welfare state is unequivocally adversarial.
By Xira Ruiz-Campillo
When questioning who should bear the most in facing environmental challenges, we tend to think about international organizations, states, or citizens. But what about cities?
By Maria Dolores Sanchez Galera
The new Green Deal shows how the EU is striving to update a wide range of instruments and adopt new policies to boost the transition towards a new economic system and an energy and industrial transition through four main pillars: carbon pricing, sustainable investment, a new industrial policy and a just transition.
By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee
Here is this month’s editor’s pick from Research Editorial Committee member Hélène B. Ducros.
By Elana Resnick
Images of the plant burning caused horror around the world. Many observers, including Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, evoked the specter of Chernobyl.
By Pauline Münch and Jörg Niewöhner
In the Anthropocene, more-than-human habitability on this planet is at stake. Societies must develop ways of existing within planetary boundaries.
Interviewed by Angela Cacciarru
Bieler analyzes how struggles for reclaiming a fundamental common good are carried out and unveils the thread that links these struggles.
By Larisa Kurtović
In the rugged and haunted lands of Bosnia-Herzegovina, rivers are places of extremes. Rousing of acute, aching love—the kind that inspires folk songs and popular devotion—rivers are often celebrated for their ability to ensure both survival and joy to the communities that live on their banks.
By Dominic Boyer and Maria Dolores Sanchez Galera
This special feature of EuropeNow offers a flavor of what the current European engagement with a Green transition is—its prides and less virtuous instances.
Interviewed by Hélène B. Ducros
We talked with one of the founders of historical ecology, who is also trained in an array of social and Earth sciences.
By Jazmine Contreras
Baudet challenges the increased state attention on the Holocaust and Jewish victimhood…
By Heidi Hein-Kircher
“Security” is a very general, but often used catchword of political discourses.
By Lesley-Ann Daniels
The war in Ukraine has brought Europe together as a political project with countries opening their arms to fleeing migrants. Likewise, when the Libyan regime collapsed in 2011, the previous controls on migration failed and people smugglers took advantage of the chaos to send thousands out to sea in flimsy boats.
By Marcus Nicolson
In recent years, social inclusion processes of migrants have been at the forefront of political debates in the UK and beyond.
By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee
Here is this month’s editor’s pick from Research Editorial Committee members Temenuga Trifonova and Hélène B. Ducros.
By Georgia Dimari and Stylianos Ioannis Tzagkarakis
Research on the Greek migration experience has shown that new concepts are necessary in order to describe both the weaknesses of the current response mechanisms and the need to identify and formulate more specific solutions to the problems induced by massive migration and refugee flows since 2015.
By Andrea Carlà
Since the turn of the century, the concept of securitization has not only become a recurrent theme in scholarship on minorities in regard to both so-called “old” (national, ethnic, linguistic, and religious) minorities, as well as new minorities stemming from recent migratory flows.
By Thomas Henökl
Digital Transformation is advancing, virtually at light speed, and has a series of repercussions on people’s lives and livelihoods. Disruptive innovation is causing turbulence…
By Stuart P.M. Mackintosh
The history of the European Union is a remarkable story of war and desolation being replaced by peace and seventy-plus years…
Globalization in Modern English Literature and its Medieval Roots: A Comparative Literature Approach
By Christene d’Anca
Medieval genealogies rose out of the need to elevate one branch of a population…
By Félix Jourdan
In France, the question of animal slaughter has been largely publicized by the animalist association L214. Throughout the past ten years, they have frequently published online images of slaughtering taken by hidden cameras.
By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee
Here is this month’s editor’s pick from Research Editorial Committee members Emily Schuckman Matthews, Temenuga Trifonova, and Hélène B. Ducros.
By Michele Chinitz
The most staged dramatist after Shakespeare, the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen is regarded as the father of modern drama. A Doll’s House is his most popular play.
By Barbora Šedová and Lisa Thalheimer
The number of forcibly displaced people has been steadily on the rise. In 2015, over one million refugees and migrants reached Europe, the largest fraction of whom were fleeing the civil war in Syria.
By Isabel Hilpert
In spring 2021, events in the Spanish exclave of Ceuta dominated international headlines for a few days, presumably due to an upset over the behavior of the Spanish government in the context of the Western Sahara conflict in which the Moroccan government loosened border controls with the European Union.
By Sean Ireton
Ecosophy thus implies an “identification so deep that one’s own self is no longer adequately delimited by the personal ego or the organism…”
By Shira Shmuely
The plausible inclusion of cephalopods and crustaceans in animal welfare legislation reveals the central role of science in shaping the moral and legal obligations towards nonhuman animals.
By Prudence Gibson and Sharon Willoughby
Banksia serrata (B. serrata) is a species of native Australian tree that catches stories of colonial dominion, botanical naming controversies, and Indigenous knowledge in its branches.
By John Charles Ryan
In its radically-open otherness, lichens materialize more-than-human wisdom—the knowledge of the world expressed by intelligent beings other than humans.
By Vicente Raja
To show that (at least some) plants are able to exhibit goal-directed behaviors to cope with their environments may have dramatic implications for our understanding of plants as biological systems, but also as cognitive, or even sentient systems.
By Richard J. White and Hannah C. Gunderman
A fundamental cause of human neglect of, and violence toward, insects can be directly placed at the door of anthroprivilege, which, crucially, is learned behavior.
By Matthew D. Miller
A hydrocentric mapping of Europe’s rivers, seas, and watersheds yields a refreshingly defamiliarized continental cartography
By Kathryn Kirkpatrick
Our largely rationalist discourses leave us without tools for reciprocal forms of communication with the nonhuman. How do we go about opening ourselves to such exchanges? Poetry might be a better vehicle for exploring the uncanny.
By Charlène Dray and Jocelyne Porcher
Through the lens of sociology and animal performance studies, we consider here the specific presence and work of stage animals.
By David A. Fennell, Bastian Thomsen and Samuel R. Fennell
Dark tourism, or thanatourism, is a complex subset of the tourism industry, which capitalizes on human death and suffering from human and environmentally induced events.
By Francesca Ferrando, Rohan Hassan, and Hélène B. Ducros
The first insight that Posthumanism gives us to understand what it means to be human…
By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee
Here is this month’s editor’s pick from Research Editorial Committee members Emily Schuckman Matthews and Hélène B. Ducros.
By Nandita Biswas Mellamphy
Problematizing AI in light of posthumanistic critiques would be beneficial in confronting questions of whether nonhuman intelligences can be conceptualized in terms other than humanistic.
Interviewed by Elizabeth B. Jones
Botanical artists are positioned very well to mediate new conversations about plants and understandings, in particular the connections between natural sciences, the humanities, and the public
By Hélène B. Ducros
Non-human, more-than-human, other-than-human, posthuman, transhuman, anti-human, multispecies, transspecies—all are terms that have been circulating in the humanities and social sciences, but have lacked clarity in their definitions, interpretations, purposes, uses, and range of application.
Remembering and Forgetting in Transit: The Interplay between Physical Spaces and Memory and Identity
By Adam D. Brown and Alexa L. Elias
Every year, millions of people are confronted with violence, environmental disasters…
By Ava McElhone Yates, Maria Höhn, and Chase Estes
Across Europe and the US, large scale projects addressing the history and memory of displacement are underway. All of these efforts are concerned not only with rectifying the prevailing historical narratives but also with using design as a way to tell a more appropriate and inclusive narration.
By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee
Here is this month’s editor’s pick from Research Editorial Committee member Hélène B. Ducros.
By Antonia Noll, Veronika Zaripova, and Ayham Dalal
Berlin Anhalter Bahnhof, 1938, children board a train to London. They wave goodbye to grief-stricken parents huddling on the platform. For many families, this was a last farewell; they would never see each other again.
Interviewed by Maria Höhn and Nicole Shea
After the collapse of Communism in 1989, the city of Berlin, just ten years later, again became the capital of a newly, re-unified Germany.
By Olga Sezneva
While the fate of the German population displaced in the former East Prussia, today’s Kaliningrad Oblast, has attracted considerable scholarly attention, less is known about the property and personal belongings left behind or “proprietary emotions,” and material feelings of Kaliningrad’s new occupants.’ What emotional responses did the forcibly acquired things produce in their new owners? How did these feelings initially form and gradually change, and under which conditions?
Interviewed by Sanders Isaac Bernstein
Rather than understand the growing strength of the so-called far right as a matter of political program championed by distant extremists, Strick argues that we need to consider how they transform the emotional climate of everyday life.
By Peter Verstraten
Traditionally, art cinema has been used as a term of endearment to pit European cinema as the “good” object against Hollywood as the commercial giant.
By Irina Herrschner and Benjamin Nickl
The blueprint of a house precedes its construction. That much is clear. With a European Project that started in 1950 as the European Coal and Steel Community, a common culture was that blueprint, and it was meant to construct a union of all and for all: in a shared culture that was alive and thriving.
By Anne-Marie Scholz
In 1992, Richard Dyer and Ginette Vincendeau published an edited volume of essays entitled Popular European Cinema. The notion was new at the time, they argue in the introduction.
By Michael Gott
In recent years, borders and borderland settings have proliferated in European television, arguably making the “border series” a category of its own. HBO Europe’s Polish series Wataha (2014-) was translated as The Border for its 2016 UK release.
By Randall Halle
Already during World War II, leading European cultural figures oriented themselves toward a post-war future in which a federation of Europe would become a reality.
By Philip E. Phillis
Prospective audiences may be at a loss if they try to conjure in their minds an Albanian film, especially since production has gained momentum only in the last twenty years.
By Hester Baer and Jill Suzanne Smith
the fall of 2019, the European Film Academy announced its creation of a new award category, one that would allow the EFA to “remain relevant” in the eyes of younger viewers and in light of clear changes in visual media creation and distribution.
This is part of our special feature on European Culture and the Moving Image. “Precarity” and “the precariat” have become two of the buzz words in studies of neoliberalism’s restructuring of the global economy and of the human sensorium. Originally signifying a social condition linked to poverty, precarity now refers to the rise in flexible and precarious forms of labor, the growth of the knowledge economy, the reduction of welfare state provisions, the suppression
By Casey Harison
Vsevolod Pudovkin’s The End of St. Petersburg (1927) and Jean Renoir’s La Marseillaise (1938) are beautifully filmed and timeless stories that continue to hold the attention of the viewer almost a century after they were made.
By Lora Sariaslan
The first section of Nilbar Güreş’s video Stranger (Yabancı, 2004-2006), titled “Person of Cloth” (fig. 1), documents a woman on the Vienna subway covered in blue and red floral cloth that wraps her body completely with a traditional Turkish black scarf (yazma) on her head.
By Maria Stehle and Beverly Weber
About halfway through Faraz Shariat’s debut film, No Hard Feelings, Banafshe is notified that her asylum claim has been rejected while her brother will be permitted to stay.
By İpek A. Çelik Rappas, Michael Gott, and Randall Halle
From the earliest days of film as a sideshow attraction to the present multiplatform mode of reception, moving images in Europe—in their broadest sense—have been imagining communities in various forms.
By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee
Here is this month’s editor’s pick from Research Editorial Committee members Temenuga Trifonova and Hélène B. Ducros.
By Joseph Keady
German activists’ complicated relationship with the United States contributes to their capacity to foment a cohesive transatlantic far-right.
Interviewed by Elizabeth B. Jones
Germany’s military and police forces have come under scrutiny for their failure to root out right-wing sympathizers in their ranks…
By Stuart P.M. Mackintosh
Europe’s ever-closer union began with the creation of the European Coal and Steel Community in 1955, which was followed by the creation of the European Economic Community (1957) and eventually the European Union.
By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee
Here is this month’s editor’s pick from Research Editorial Committee members Emily Schuckman Matthews, Temenuga Trifonova, and Hélène B. Ducros.
By Ida Sofie Gøtzsche Lange and Chrisann Neysa Rodrigues
The world’s population growth and migration to urban areas eat into global limited resources.
By Gregor Goetzl, et al.
A wide global consensus has been reached that it’s time to foster sustainable, just, and “green” transformations of society, irrespective of our cultural backgrounds and prosperity levels.
By Anna Louise Bradley, Clara Julia Reich, and Adam Curtis
Placemaking is far more abstract than simply making a place. It is not focused primarily on the end result, but rather the co-creative, democratic, and inclusive processes along the way.
By Anita Savo
Those who know anything about the Cid, Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar (c. 1048–1099), imagine him as a crusader hero of Christian Spain. His popular image, on horseback with sword raised against a presumed Muslim foe, deliberately evokes the iconography of “Saint James the Moor-killer” (Santiago Matamoros).
By Kai Zosseder, et al.
As stated in part one of “how geothermal heating and cooling networks may support the green and livable urban transformation,” geothermal energy can be very efficiently used as a resource for district heating and cooling networks and can have the ability to be a key technology for a necessary heat energy transition.
By Pekka Tuominen, Mikko Rask and Titiana Ertiö
Participatory budgeting is a rapidly growing democratic innovation with promises to alter citizens’ participation significantly. In the last thirty years, it has spread to thousands of cities with around 11,000 reported cases around the world, and with very different models of collaboration, co-creation, and democracy.
By Nicole Shea and Zsuzsanna Varga
This feature offers insights into developing the sustainability of European cities through a number of case studies of recent social and technological practices, while also foregrounding the role of the digital in modernization.
By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee
Here is this month’s editor’s pick from Research Editorial Committee members Jean Beaman, Temenuga Trifonova, Nick Ostrum, and Hélène B. Ducros.
By Marius Turda
The real labor of education begins with a question and finding an answer to it. Regarding the Roma, education is also essential in the un-making of anti-Roma racism.
By Cristina Blanco Sío-López
Though largely neglected in recent studies about the European integration process, Salvador de Madariaga was a key forerunner and contributor to the “European idea,” as well as a highly influential Spanish diplomat, writer, historian, and pacifist at different critical junctures of the twentieth century.
Interviewed by Elizabeth Jones
Migration to the EU has created pressure on governments to ensure safe entry of migrants & establish the credentials of those in legal limbo.
By Francesca Pegorer
Even in these pandemic-ridden winter months, Hermannplatz, in Berlin’s North Neukölln, is bustling with activity.
By Alexandria Cogdill, Zach Kulstad and Jennifer Wargo
While these quotes are grounded in the philosophical teaching that food influences one’s state of mind, today, more than ever, we can appreciate the literal meaning of the words, “you are what you eat.”
By Sunnie Rucker-Chang
COVID-19 laid bare the health inequalities and gaps in access to care among marginalized communities in the United States and Europe.
By Manuela Boatcă
During the first three months of lockdown in 2020, the European Roma Rights Centre (ERCC) identified twelve countries across Europe in which Roma communities faced movement restrictions or disproportionate impacts from emergency measures despite the lack of evidence of higher case counts in those communities.
By Ioanida Costache
The Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, and more specifically, the public lynching of George Floyd by Minneapolis police, sparked a collective investigation into the racial logics of white supremacy that supports racist systems in the United States.
By Ioanida Costache
While across the Atlantic, the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police sparked an unprecedented reckoning in America with the country’s racist past and the enduring legacy of this history through current manifestations of systemic racism, the pandemic served as a catalyst for anti-Roma racism to resurge.
By Ioan-David Onel
The parliamentary elections organized in Kyrgyzstan on October 4, 2020, brought a new wave of social unrest and instability.
By Georgiana-Cătălina Marcu
In the last nine weeks we were witnesses to the thawing of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. This is a decades-long conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan, which has escalated sharply in the last weeks.
By Dragoș Ioniță
In order to get a clear understanding of the political climate and the impact of recent developments on the country’s relationship with the EU, one must first delve deeper into Serbia’s democratic track record beyond 2020.
By Vlada Șubernițchi
Belarus, 2020 Presidential elections: What could have been another ordinary rigged election won by the unchangeable leader of Belarus since 1994, Aleksander Lukashenko, this time turned out to be a promising chance to remove the “last dictator of Europe.”
By Ana-Maria Anghelescu
In 2020, the European Union was supposed to take stock of its actions—looking both at the internal and external evolutions—in order to finalize and better prepare for the Multiannual Financial Framework of 2021-2027.
By Ali Meghji
The little Englander imagery of British history is an imagery that bifurcates the country from its unequal colonial relations.
By Audrey Célestine
It’s both an exciting and worrying time in French research. On the one hand, we’ve witnessed the multiplication of high-quality work on race in social science in the last fifteen years.
Europe and the Myth of the Racialized Sexual Predator: Gendered and Sexualized Patterns of Prejudice
By Saskia Bonjour and Sarah Bracke
Throughout history, and across the globe, perceived threats to the nation have often been sexualized and represented in terms of a rape threat to “our” women. Such representations have been part and parcel of the gendered and sexualized constructions of the nation and its others.
Interviewed by Laura Bartley
The recent events sparked by the murder of George Floyd, the disproportionate effect of…
By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee
Here is this month’s editor’s pick from Research Editorial Committee members Hélène B. Ducros and Nick Ostrum.
Interviewed by Hélène B. Ducros
The history of eugenics intersects the history of racism from its inception. Most eugenicists, particularly the “founders” of the eugenic movements across the world, from England to Greece, and from Romania to the US, were also supporters of racial ideas of white/European superiority.
By Jean Beaman and Jennifer Fredette
Since the police killings of Breonna Taylor in March and George Floyd this past May, hundreds of thousands of protesters have taken to the streets across the United States to call for an end to police violence—and, sometimes, the abolition of police altogether.
By Michelle D. Weitzel
The last century has seen growing ethnic diversity in France as immigrants from former French colonies and economic migrants from all over Europe settled, made homes, became citizens, and built lives across generations.
By Siún Carden
Far from cities and geographically distinguished from mainland rural places, Scotland’s islands are varied in landscape, economy, and community make-up, yet share key challenges and are increasingly positioned to address these together in the context of national and regional government.
By Victoria Leigh Brown
Authoritarian populism has emerged from rural spaces long ignored as “empty” and out-of-fashion within European academe.
By Twan Huijsmans
Scholars, pundits, and policy-makers frequently express concern about growing polarization between urban and rural areas, arguing that it could become the dominant conflict line in Western democracies.
By Tom Mordue, Oliver Moss, and Lorraine Johnston
Wind energy has not only been promoted as sustainable by officialdom across Europe, it has received broad public approval. In the UK, for example, a high of 76 percent support for wind energy among the public was recorded in a YouGov survey in April 2018.
By Corinne Geering
The image of rural Europe has been defined by local traditions that distinguish each locale from another. Hardly anywhere else is this idea as pertinent as in crafts, as reflected by the following assessment by a Hungarian official in an American magazine in 1908.
By José Duarte Ribeiro
Referring to the death of peasantry in the twentieth century as the “most dramatic and far-reaching social change of the second half of this century, and the one which cuts us off for ever from the world of the past,” Eric Hobsbawm (1994, 289) declared Turkey the last “peasant stronghold”
By Aris Anagnostopoulos
Two young urbanite Herakliots, an architect and a cinematographer, who both hail from highland Crete were deeply engaged in conversation following a recent spate of armed violence in a village back in 2012.
By Elizabeth B. Jones
No one knows when the uncertainties of the COVID-19 era will ease into more predictable rhythms. In Europe, as everywhere else, the pandemic has complicated even mundane tasks like grocery shopping.
By Wyn Grant
The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is the European Union’s (EU) longest lasting policy. It is the policy that has arguably most greatly influenced European farmers’ decisions.
Interviewed by Hélène B. Ducros
Ralph Lister is a man with a passion: to bring creative Europe beyond its usual metropolitan frontiers.
By Angela Cacciarru
The current Italian rural land tenure system is rooted in land reform that was implemented in the peninsula in 1950, known as the “Agrarian Reform.” The Southern Development Fund (Cassa per il Mezzogiorno) provided the funding that made carrying out this reform possible. Mezzogiorno is used to define southern Italy, which extends from Abruzzo to Sicily, and includes Sardinia.
By Arielle DeSoucey and Michaela DeSoucey
Nestled in the southeast corner of Czechia, South Moravia is located on the western tip of the Carpathian Mountains and at the foot of the Danube river.
By Evy Vourlides
I could not have anticipated my boots being layered with dirt for much of my eighteen months of PhD dissertation research. My initial project explored how young adults in Athens, Greece, navigated a precarious job market.
By Jeremy MacClancy
La España vacia, “Empty Spain,” is the contentious, popular term summing up so much of the nation’s countryside today: thousands of villages left with no inhabitants or only a few.
By Ruth McAreavey
Migration to small towns and rural places, like those of my childhood in Northern Ireland, has been witnessed across many countries of the Western World, including Norway, Sweden, Greece, and Spain.
By Hélène B. Ducros
In this roundtable on “Changing Agriculture in Rural Europe,” EuropeNow wishes to convey a portrait of an agricultural Europe that shows its dynamism and adaptable capacity in the way it mirrors and incorporates the major concerns of our time and faces the historical legacies of past agricultural practices and policies.
By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee
Here is this month’s editor’s pick from Research Editorial Committee members Hélène B. Ducros and Elizabeth Jones.
By Gesine Tuitjer
This story begins shortly after the Second World War and covers the tremendous changes, both economically and socially, that the rural areas of Germany have undergone until today.
By Hélène B. Ducros
In this roundtable on “Changing Agriculture in Rural Europe,” EuropeNow wishes to convey a portrait of an agricultural Europe that shows its dynamism and adaptable capacity in the way it mirrors and incorporates the major concerns of our time and faces the historical legacies of past agricultural practices and policies.
By Diana-Andreea Mandiuc
Just two days after the virus spread was categorized as a pandemic, Europe recorded the largest number of cases outside of China (Ghebreyesus, 2020), testing the Union’s ability to cope with emergency health issues.
By Marcela Romero Rivera
When does a revolution triumph? Can we say that a revolution is victorious when strategic military objectives have been secured?
By Adedoyin Teriba
At times, architecture is a response to an existential crisis—especially if one is in dire straits in a European colony. All the more if, perchance, one had the ill fortune of being enslaved.
By Valeria Bonatti
Throughout much of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, most societies witnessed a steady growth in life expectancy. In much of the Global North, but also in wealthier parts of the Global South, this generated and continues to generate a growing demand for affordable elderly care workers—a demand that many societies meet through low-wage migrant labor from the Global South.
Interviewed by Nicole Shea
Migration has always played a major part in creating a European identity, derived from a thriving pluralistic space.
By Matthew Brill-Carlat, Ava McElhone Yates, and Maria Höhn
Even in the more prosperous countries of the Global North, poor communities and communities of color—be they Indigenous, Black, migrants, or another minoritized group—are being ravaged by COVID-19 to a far greater extent than white and more privileged communities.
By Rachel A Cohen and Catherine Butterly
Violence against women and girls is a ubiquitous and pervasive problem, affecting about one in three women worldwide. The psychological, social, medical, and economic consequences are deep and enduring.
By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee
Here are this month’s editor’s picks from Research Editorial Committee members Nick Ostrum and Hélène B. Ducros.
By Răzvan-Victor Sassu and Eliza Vaș
The new coronavirus has drastically reshuffled both economies and societies in the past months. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has described the situation as being a “crisis like no other” with “an uncertain recovery” and a “catastrophic hit” to the global labour market, with more than 430 million jobs losses in the first two quarters.
By Angela Cacciarru and Antonio Paesano
There are many factors intervening in a society’s ability to combat disease. While Italy was featured everywhere in global media as the place where COVID-19 was out of control and the situation desperately stark, the spreading of the virus was showing more and more its uneven impact.
By Ruxandra Paul
Migrants have always been both essential to modern economies and objects of suspicion, but the Coronavirus pandemic has brought this tension to a head both in migrant-sending and migrant-receiving countries.
By Agnes E. Venema
When Gabon experienced an attempted coup d’etat in late 2018, very few media outlets picked up on the fact that suspicion of a deepfake fuelled underlying unrest.
By Siraj Ahmed
Murderous Consent’s aim is, first, to critique political violence, whether hegemonic or revolutionary. The book’s aim is, second, to enunciate another politics that never legitimizes violence in any form. These aims could not be more profound, attempting, as they do, to overturn both Western political theory and contemporary geopolitical practice.
By Diana-Andreea Mandiuc
Presented as a plan for Europe to become “the first climate-neutral continent by 2050,” the European Green Deal has been the first priority for the new Commission.
Translated by Ghjulia Romiti
I wander through paris, empty / of our laughter of our frenzy / absent from our absence / the spring sun / shines uselessly / stripped of our meanderings / of the lovers’ kisses
By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee
Here are this month’s editor’s picks from Research Editorial Committee members Nick Ostrum and Hélène B. Ducros.
By Cristina Blanco Sío-López
This article aims to examine the origins and evolution of the dichotomy between liberty and security in the European integration process by focusing on the case of the historical construction of the EU’s Free Movement of Persons (FMP).
By Niloofar Sarlati
The global pandemic has simultaneously made visible and intensified longstanding economic and social inequalities across the world. Ethnic, religious, and racial minorities, people with disabilities, and the poor have been suffering at a much higher mortality rate and a more dreadful death. The murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery have once again brought to light the systemic anti-black racism.
Interviewed by Juliane Mendelsohn
It can take a long time, if one is brought up in a place foreign to one’s artistic sensibilities to discover other artists that speak your language.
By Cătălin-Gabriel Done
Between Romania and Hungary, for one hundred years, historical issues have impeded the development of consistent bilateral relations, even if the bilateral relations have the character of a “strategic partnership for twenty-first-century Europe.”
Interviewed by Friederike Eigler
We built an international network that includes some participants who have experienced displacement and some who have not but who collaborate at all levels in a multilingual and transdisciplinary manner.
By Michael Loriaux
It is true that dismantling myths of belonging presents no real challenge to the historian. All such myths labor to attribute some foundational homogeneity to collections of people that are very large and historically contingent.
By Jacob Levi
The formulation “murderous consent” is striking because it confronts us with an uncomfortable truth: while most of us would not actively consent to murder, just as we would prefer to think that we do not condone violence, we are all participants in a range of systems of violence which we generally accept with resignation, passivity, and silence. Murderous consent is the operating principle of the modern state, which on principle it must vigorously deny for its own legitimation.
In this series, we feature a spotlight on the Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic and its connections to European politics, society, and culture.
By Thomas Henökl
During the second-longest summit session in the European Council’s history, in the early morning hours of June 21, 2020, and after almost four days of tough negotiations, the twenty-seven heads of state and government finally agreed on a €1,074 billion long-term budget and COVID-19 recovery fund.
By Alyssa Granacki
Reading these recent pieces, one might believe that the Decameron is mostly about the Black Death of 1348, but the plague takes up a relatively tiny fraction of the work. After the Introduction, Boccaccio’s brigata—the group of seven young women and three young men who narrate the Decameron’s tales—escapes ravaged Florence.
By Alexandru Pieptea
Although many EU countries have faced challenges brought on by the coronavirus, there are differences in the extent of required measures. Several countries have decided to take measures in terms of closing some or all educational institutions for varying time periods.
By John R. Bowen
Our views of European history and society ought to change as we pay greater attention to the long-term presence of Islam, especially in the Balkans and Russia.
By Hélène B. Ducros
As Europeanists ponder about the state of integration and disintegration of the European Union—under pressure from multiple crises and the “tensions and fractures” latent in the European project—it is only logical that they also interrogate their discipline and the ways in which “European studies” has been framed, as well as which “Europe” has been of concern to their field in practice.
By Nikolina Zenovic
The long history of peoples and movements throughout the Balkans has situated Yugoslavia in a particularly interesting position culturally, geographically, and politically.
By Mark I. Vail
The scholars in this roundtable explore, from a variety of substantive perspectives, the meaning and evolution of the concept of European integration and the tensions within it, interrogating an idea beholden to more than its share of conventional wisdoms, clichés, and airy nostrums.
By Louie Dean Valencia-García
The immense project of the history of HIV/AIDS in Europe has largely been unwritten. While attempts have been made to make sense of the historical impact of the virus in Western Europe, most transnational, comparative studies were done in the midst of the crisis with the goal of informing policy, and before effective treatment of HIV/AIDS became widely available.
By Jeremy MacClancy
Instead of a standardizing policy to re-create long-term stable communities, we should accept variegated, patchy development, where settlements are occupied, but whose inhabitants are not necessarily lifelong, and where the high contrasts between the city and the countryside are drastically lowered.
By Neil Archer
British films, in short, need Europe. Celebrated British film companies such as Working Title, whose output ranges from Notting Hill and Bridget Jones’s Diary, to Atonement and Darkest Hour, may seem to exemplify a “British” success story, in terms of their settings, stories, and British stars.
By Milos Rastovic
The future enlargement of the European Union (EU) has become a critical question for debate among its members. Whether the EU maintains its existing boundaries or expands to the East is a concern that divides many.
By Angélica Szucko
On March 25, 2017, the European Union (EU) celebrated the 60th anniversary of the Treaties of Rome, which established “an ever closer union” as a fundamental principle for regional integration.
By Rafael de Miguel González
Europe, thus, has played an important geopolitical role, in particular through the European Union from the twentieth century on, even though the latter faces two major challenges to become a one and only voice in the world: a lack of political cohesion among its member states and limited European citizenship.
By Vanessa Bilancetti
In front of the explosion of the financial crisis, between 2008 and 2011, European studies was completely unable to comprehend the unfolding socio-political and economic dynamics.
By Mihaela Tofan
The financial crisis that took place during the first decade of this century pointed out that further financial mechanisms are necessary to emphasize the integration process of cooperation among EU member states.
By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee
Here are this month’s editor’s picks from Research Editorial Committee members Louie Dean Valencia-Garcia, and Hélène B. Ducros.
Interviewed by Hélène B. Ducros
Focusing on the role of critical scholars in effecting change.
By Hélène B. Ducros and Louie Dean Valencia-García
This issue gathers a wide spectrum of interdisciplinary scholarship where all Europeanists have a place, whether they consider themselves European studies scholars, integration studies scholars, or European Union studies scholars.
By Stefanie C. Boulila
Modernity and progress have operated as central ideas for pan-European identification. Citizenship, equality, and human rights are claimed to have their “natural” home in Europe. In its post-structuralist understanding, history is theorized as a site for the negotiation of power.
Interviewed by Juliane Mendelsohn
I think we are learning that the European project still requires more from all of us: more unity, more compassion, and more selfless solidarity.
By Jean Beaman
Minority populations are responding to a violence that is not new, but rather an extension of the violence of French colonialism. The quarantine period reveals how some individuals, even those who are citizens, are forever seen as suspicious.
By Anke S. Biendarra
While mutual support might work reasonably well on an interpersonal level, the Coronavirus outbreak is rapidly revealing the limits of solidarity when it comes to nation states, confirming that it is not a genuine “European” value per se, but is borrowed from the national political vocabulary.
By Peter Debaere
If we continue to scapegoat globalization instead of being willing to share more equitably the benefits of technological progress and of globalization, we will fail to bring about the international cooperation we need.
By Jennifer McWeeny
Much like Beauvoir and her famous entourage, we, too, are contending with an unexpected and catastrophic visitor. The coronavirus pandemic therefore allows us to enter the historical experience of these French thinkers more deeply than we have before.
By Anke S. Biendarra
The regimented and multilingual intake and asylum interview features prominently in many narratives of flight and refuge across.
By Timm Beichelt
The field of European Studies is not only constituted by its inner conditions, but also by the many different meanings attributed to it. European Studies are sometimes seen as one among many Area Studies, which implies cooperation of several disciplines in order to develop a somehow holistic approach to societal and/or cultural developments of a given territory.
By Estela Schindel
The persistence of migrants’ death on their way to Europe through the last two decades poses a challenge to the political and administrative forces of the continent, but their implications go far beyond those spheres.
By Kristin Dickinson
In October of 1932, just months before Hitler’s rise to power, the Turkish modernist poet Ahmet Haşim stepped off a train in Frankfurt am Main.
By Christopher Impiglia
As any student of history can attest, there are times when the voices of the past prove eerily relevant to the present.
By Christine Ivanovic
The task of “reshaping Europe” asks for experiments, for agency, for translating the experience of the migrational condition into a new cultural practice.
By Randall Halle
Integration seems to offer orientation and unity. And, yet, integration also seems difficult to achieve, apparently coupled with its antithesis―disintegration.
By Susann Worschech
There are not too many societies in Europe that have experienced such a close sequence and severe intensity of protests, crises, and social change as Ukraine did since its independence in 1991.
By Zsuzsánna Magdó
Balázs’s utopian desire and practice records his lived experience of a set of social realities and discursive positions that scholars have come to associate with the problematic concept of (global) modernity.
By Renata Schellenberg
Since gaining independence in 1990, Namibia has engaged in a process of seeking reparations from the German government, requesting compensation for the material damages and loss of life that incurred during Germany’s colonial rule in German South West Africa from 1884 to 1915.
By Karen Remmler
Images of overcrowded boats have become iconic for the plight of refugees. At the same time, however, the portrayal of the overcrowding elicits a sense of the pitiful and helpless victims, masses, in need of saving from the humanitarians of the global north.
By Emi Finkelstein
The reconstruction of the major Berlin landmark has fostered debate about the ways in which Germany continues to come to terms with its (short but brutal) colonial past, particularly in reference to the repatriation of objects, which were looted during the era.
By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee
Here are this month’s editor’s picks from Research Editorial Committee members Juliane Mendelsohn, Louie Dean Valencia-Garcia, and Hélène B. Ducros.
By Randall Halle
The European project is one that I have come to describe as dis/union—a dynamic of push-pull factors that remain constant. Precisely because there is a European project, the dynamic of union and disunion, contentious skepticism and optimism, pro and contra, which are part of all polities, obtains within the EU and at the broader European level.
By Júlia Garraio, Sofia José Santos, Inês Amaral, and Alexandre de Sousa Carvalho
This embodiment of national pride is gendered, based upon class and race assumptions.
By Sumayya Ebrahim and Lisa Liu
Celebrities not only have the potential to discursively influence contemporary issues, they have the potential to be activists and resist silence for any given cause.
By Elisabeth Pauline Gniosdorsch
The very notion of women in combat throws the boundaries between masculinity and femininity into question. The military is an important state institution and its gender assumptions and narratives are constantly referenced and reproduced in society as a whole.
By Bronwyn Winter
Both Macron’s words and the media debate over #Metoo/balancetonporc brought into sharp relief the particularly “French” dimension of public debate over sexual harassment that had been in evidence both at the time of the DSK Affair and in French reactions to the Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas sexual harassment case in the US.
Interviewed by Alice R. Bertram
When dealing with gender-based violence, there is baggage. Looking at it from a corruption perspective doesn’t have the same baggage.
By Sarah Cooper and Koen Slootmaeckers
The disparagingly fickle and fleeting attention of citizens often times serves to dilute the extent of actual change following public scandals, but it arguable that the mounting critical mass of cases of sexual assault and harassment now punctuating the media’s gaze opens a prominent window of opportunity for the social movement on the political agenda.
By Caitlin Carroll
The Swedish #MeToo movement has revealed a fundamental hypocrisy when it comes to sexual violence and the law.
By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee
Here is this month’s editor’s pick from Research Editorial Committee member Hélène B. Ducros.
By Benjamin Tainturier
It is because of its radical opposition to the past that the movement of the Gilets Jaunes is so little intelligible to most people.
By Christopher Campo-Bowen
First premiered in 1866, The Bartered Bride became the single most beloved of all Czech operas in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Critics and scholars praised the work as a symbol of Czech national character, emphasizing that its music flawlessly represented the essence of the Czech people, regardless of their education or class.
By William Allchorn
For several years now, scholars have identified a rich seam in far-right discourse that has strategically used liberal rights to further what is ostensibly an illiberal, anti-immigration agenda.
By Sindre Bangstand
The Norwegian case illustrates how crucially important it remains to take local and national context into account when studying the rise of far-right and populist right-wing political formations, and how mistaken the view that right-wing populism is inherently ‘anti-elitist’ and anti-thetical rather than instrumental to neoliberalism actually is.
By Robert Kramm
In light of current phenomena such as the gilets jaunes in France, rising right-wing populism and nationalism all over Europe and social media undermining democratic discourse and the electoral system, the Hong Kong protests raise important questions also for a European audience.
By Marc Tuters
In the aftermath of the insurgency of US president Donald Trump there was a great deal of concern regarding the problem of “fake news,” often imagined or assumed to be the work of exotic “Russian trolls.”
By Christina Isabel Zuber
In the late 1980s, when ideational explanations were on the rise, political scientists suggesting such explanations often had to defend their work against harsh critique.
By Jenny Barnett
“Visual culture,” Jane Lydon writes “can define boundaries between people, supporting perceived hierarchies of race, gender and culture, and justifying arguments for conquest and oppression.”
By Diogo Magalhaes
In recent years and with all four areas of European integration—economic, social, legal and political—facing a series of unprecedented and interconnected crises, the normative foundations of the integration process have been shattered.
Interviewed by Kathryn Crim
At the center of Berlin-based Australian artist and writer Alex Martinis Roe’s work is the concept of feminist genealogies.
By Rüdiger Müller
At some point in the days that followed, I remember my mother telling me that the wall was gone, and that my father had been promoted to managing director of his company.
By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee
Here are this month’s editor’s picks from Research Editorial Committee members Hélène B. Ducros, Mark Vail, Carol Ferrara, Nick Ostrum, Juliane K. Mendelsohn, and Louie Dean Valencia-García.
By Hélène B. Ducros
In the fall issue of EuropeNow, we feature an Author-Meets-Critics on Vichy contre Vichy, Une capitale sans mémoire by Audrey Mallet
By Richard J. Golsan
To today’s casual visitor, Vichy seems an attractive, prosperous provincial French town. One of Europe’s most celebrated spas, it has enjoyed a long and largely prosperous past.
By Bertram M. Gordon
Mallet addresses the prewar history of Vichy as a spa center, reaching a turning point with the construction of a railway station under Napoleon III, which brought an extended clientele and made it internationally famous, evidenced in an article in the New York Times in 1876.
By David Lees
For historians of modern France, it can sometimes appear that all roads lead to the small spa town of Vichy. Such is the legacy of World War II in France that the four “dark years” of German Occupation and Vichy rule still cast long shadows over French society today.
By Richard Carswell
The visitor to Vichy today will look in vain for the Hôtel du Parc, seat of Marshal Pétain’s government from 1940 to 1944. The building still exists. But there are no signs to indicate its former incarnation. It is now a block of offices, apartments, shops and the local tourist office, where an official will tell you—on request—that, yes, this was the site of the Hôtel du Parc. The only sign of the building’s association with the defunct regime is closed to the casual tourist.
By Kirrily Freeman
In this engaging book, Mallet examines the factors that shaped the wartime experiences of the town of Vichy (which was the provisional capital of France and seat of Marshal Philippe Pétain’s collaborationist government from 1940 to 1944), the responses of the local population, and the ways in which these experiences and responses have been remembered locally (or not remembered) since the end of World War II.
By Amy Kaslow
This series transports you to a dozen countries, decades into their post-war years, providing historical context, spotlighting here and now conditions, and pointing to horizon issues.
By Giovanna Faleschini Lerner
With the rise of western modernity and the invention of childhood, the job description of parenthood has expanded to include the establishment and maintenance of childhood archives.
By Evan Henritze and Adam Brown
The potential negative mental health consequences of forced migration is becoming increasingly recognized as an urgent issue in the context of international public health. Recent estimates show forcibly displaced people to be approximately 71 million worldwide. This crisis not only impacts those directly affected by forced migration, but also subsequent generations as well as non-immigrant populations of host countries whose health is closely associated with immigration policy.
By Adam Brown
Since 2016, millions of individuals have fled the Middle East and Northern Africa and have entered the European Union (EU) through Italy, Greece, and Spain. Although the majority of refugees seek asylum in Germany, a considerable minority of individuals seek protection in Switzerland.
Interviewed by Matthew Brill-Carlat
In today’s world, repressive and authoritarian governments across the globe are an increasing threat to intellectuals and civil society.
By Julie K. Allen, Chunjie Zhang, and Sabine Zimmermann
Inspired by an actual hunger strike conducted by African asylum seekers in Berlin in 2012, and published just as the Syrian refugee wave peaked in 2015, Erpenbeck’s novel centers on Richard, a recently retired Classics professor in Berlin, who befriends a group of African men trying to get the Berlin Senate to consider their applications for asylum and becomes gradually aware of the many challenges they face in trying to start their lives over in Europe.
By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee
Here are this month’s editor’s picks from Research Editorial Committee members Hélène B. Ducros and Louie Dean Valencia-García.
By Brittany Murray and Matthew Brill-Carlat
Together, these contributions indicate new ways to narrate forced migration, rooted in past actions of hospitality while remaining responsive to contemporary challenges. As these contributions demonstrate, the call to build sustainable models of defying borders is at the same time a call to rethink academic categories.
By Nancy Bisaha
As we witness one of the largest movements of people in world history, universities and colleges endeavor to provide refuge for scholars and students. They offer homes, short or long term, for people fleeing oppression, injustice, and poverty. They create a space for reflection upon the universal ideals of education and collective action toward attaining them. How and where did these notions arise?
By Vera Zvereva
Among various research areas in digital memory studies, one in particular is the study of “digital memory wars.”
By Martin Kalb
Scholars have long understood youth as a social construct only partially connected to age. After all, youth often appears in history as a hope for the future or as a threat to contemporary society. Those studying policing and juvenile delinquency have wrestled with stereotypes surrounding young people.
By Andrea Recek
During the Middle Ages, at ecclesiastical institutions throughout western Christendom, the choice of a patron saint was a fundamental expression of the identity of the community.
By Tadeusz Wojtych
To say that history fuels conflicts and inspires sacrifice in times of war borders on a truism. Are people, however, emotionally invested in history in times of peace and prosperity?
By Ksenia Stanicka-Brzezicka and Emilia Kloda
The Mária Valéria bridge joins Esztergom in Hungary and Štúrovo in Slovakia, across the River Danube. Since its opening in 1895, the bridge has been destroyed twice, in 1919 and 1944. Decades of intransigence between the Communist governments of Hungary and Czechoslovakia mean that the bridge was not rebuilt until the new millennium.
By Adéla Gjuričová
Even when reducing the issue to archives and other history-related footage, we miss an analytical understanding of what kind of material is actually attractive enough to circulate and how to find out. On what platforms and in what context does the re-use happen?
By Piotr Kisiel
In the ever-expanding universe of Facebook, it is hard to keep track of all the features of the platform. However, it is one of its most basic functions that can be of interest to those working in “history from below” in the digital age.
By Amanda Garrett
There is no shortage of scholarly evidence to suggest that voters can be receptive to negative messaging concerning immigrants and other ethnic minorities. The idea of racially coded campaign appeals has long been discussed by academics, particularly in the case of the United States.
Interviewed by David Leupold
Today more than ever, the call for building and restoring trust dominates all spheres of social and political life.
By Eszter Gantner
What does the concept of historic consciousness describe or include? According to Andrew Glencross, “Historical consciousness is defined as the understanding of the temporality of historical experience or how past, present and future are thought to be connected.”
By Sarah Wilma Watson
The scope and framing of this collection raise a number of questions. How did these diverse “treasures” come to the UK? Why are these objects so valuable? And what does it mean that they are displayed in a “British” space?
By Eszter Gantner and Olga Dovbysh
In the last decade, there has been increasing interest in digital technologies and their influence on the production of memory, history, and heritage, not only within academic research, but also in politics, especially in Eastern Europe and Russia. The tendency toward selective history, heritage, and memory politics in the region manifests itself more and more in the digital sphere.
By Stefan Trajković-Filipović
There are a number of ways in which one can explore the historical heritage of the Serbian capital, Belgrade. Apart from visiting museums or joining tours, a visitor can also download a smartphone application (available both for Android and iOS), titled Hidden places of Belgrade, developed by the Danube Competence Center, an association of tourism actors who are promoting Danube as a touristic destination.
By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee
Here are this month’s editor’s picks from Research Editorial Committee members Hélène B. Ducros, Louie Dean Valencia-García, Nick Ostrum, and Daniela Irrera.
By Elyas Bakhtiari
As rates of immigration have risen in recent years, so have questions and concerns about the health needs and care delivery challenges for newly arrived populations.
By Julia Lynch
What lesson will social scientists take from public health and epidemiology? That clean causal inference from experimental (or at least quasi-experimental) data is the holy grail for social science; or that deep contextual knowledge, generated by expenditure of shoe leather, is necessary for advancing scientific understanding of social causation?
By Nadine Reibling
Many empirical studies have demonstrated how more and more social problems—from childbirth to death, from restless children to melancholic adults—have been interpreted in medical terms and brought under medical jurisdiction.
Interviewed by Rusudan Zabakhidze
Only specific migration policies and cultural attitudes do anything to reduce health inequalities between natives and immigrants.
By Sigrún Ólafsdóttir and Jason Beckfield
Health is a major political, cultural, and societal issue across Europe. While health and illness have, of course, always been a part of the human experience, the epidemiological transition from infectious, deadly diseases to the increased burden of chronic and mental health problems, has put various pressures and constraints on policy makers.
By Terje A. Eikemo, Tim Huijts, Mirza Balaj, Johan P.Mackenbach, and Emmanuela Gakidou
In the EU alone, more than 700,000 avoidable deaths per year and 33 million preventable cases of ill health are due to health inequalities, costing the EU 141 billion euros in economic losses annually.
By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee
Here are this month’s editor’s picks from Research Editorial Committee members Hélène B. Ducros and Louie Dean Valencia-García.
By Josh Lepawsky
Concerns over how to handle discarded electronics as a waste stream have been growing over nearly two decades in Europe.
By Willi Haas
When I visit my childhood neighborhood, I hardly recognize it. Empty spaces have been filled; what was once, in the seventies, a one-storied building, is now multileveled. Even a sky-scrapper has risen.
Interviewed by Hélène B. Ducros
We tend to think that modernity and progress allow us to resolve issues of waste through technology and increased efficiency.
By Megan Blake
Global estimates suggest that approximately one third of all food that is produced is wasted. Alongside this, a myriad of concerns, not least a concern for people who struggle to access food that is safe and healthy, has given rise to a host of organizations operating across the world that seek to move food that otherwise would be wasted from the commercial supply chain to the not-for-profit sector.
By Tatiana Kasperski
When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, the countries of the socialist block moved to redefine international alliances and quickly reestablished ties with the members of the EC.
By James Wilkes and Myra Hird
On a global scale, waste, we argue—as material object, as concept, as symbol, and as leitmotif—is a symptom of colonialism, and indeed, cannot be meaningfully understood detached from historical and ongoing forms of colonialism.
Interviewed by Hélène B. Ducros
While food waste has long been considered in European media and regulations, until recently the issue of pre- and post-consumer textile waste had mobilized less public attention.
By Isabelle Hajek
Recent years have seen a resurgence of interest in the fight against waste in many industrialized countries. Discourses and documented analyses on growing masses of waste and their devastating consequences for natural and human milieus have received increased exposure.
By Hélène B. Ducros
Will we seize this moment as an opportunity to make strides in waste reduction and develop ecological solutions for surplus, unused, and rejected materials of all sorts, or will we simply seek out new trash havens elsewhere in the world?
By Susan Signe Morrison
Waste Studies offers ethical frameworks to pay attention to, understand, and act on bodily, cultural, and societal waste—material aspects of our world. As an aspect of the environmental humanities, Waste Studies expands traditional approaches of ecocriticism, once devoted to “nature,” a loaded and complex term.
By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee
Here are this month’s editor’s picks from Research Editorial Committee members Hélène B. Ducros, Louie Dean Valencia-García, and Daniela Irrera.
By Thomas O. Haakenson
After nearly a decade in the United States, Ai returned in 1993 to China and continued an active practice and spoke openly about Chinese censorship.
By Jocelyn Wright
Young Arab men just like the boy in Arabico are a group that continues to be maligned in France due to a complex combination of colonial history and socioeconomic class.
By Lydia Lindsey and Carlton Wilson
The xenophobic discourse that denounces the illegitimacy of a non-white presence in Europe is frequently justified by a denial of the historical contribution of non-white populations in the development of Europe, in particular, people of African descent.
By Daniel Shea
The critical conversation concerning the migrant experience tends to focus on those countries on the front line: first-contact issues in Italy, capacity challenges in Germany, or right-wing responses in the United States. Ireland, at the edge of the EU and with only a fraction of the migrant refugee population, is often overlooked in context of conflicts in assimilation and minority status.
By Nurretin Ucar
Balibar talks here about the discriminatory functions of real borders, but the aforementioned invisible borders are stricter in terms of limiting the movements of foreigners and refugees. This limitation is carried out through violence.
By Ljudmila Bilkić
Sitting outside a tea house in Istanbul on a cold evening in early 2016, the Berlin-based Syrian journalist and gay rights campaigner Mahmoud Hassino discusses his intentions of sending the first Syrian gay man to Mr. Gay World, an annual international beauty pageant competition for gay men.
By Matthew D. Miller
Once celebrated as a path-breaking project of peace, hope, and greater political cooperation in the new century, the unification of Europe under the auspices of the European Union appears, from the vantage-point of 2019, to be fraught with disunity, animosity, and peril.
By Giovanni Dettori
In recent decades, the island of Sardinia, the second-largest island in the Mediterranean after Sicily, has lived a cultural renaissance that has brought many Sardinian authors onto the national and international literary stage.
By Zakaria Fatih
Except for a brief postwar episode of epuration (purge), for decades, France entertained the image of a country with unquestionable moral authority, an added value to the Jacobin ethics the French bequeathed to the rest of the world.
The Netherlands as a Specialized Foreign Policy Actor in European Regional and International Affairs
By Luke Wood
The 2016 election of Donald Trump to the American Presidency marked the beginning of a new era of deteriorating relations between the United States and its core West European allies.
By Andrea Carlà and Johanna Mitterhofer
The richness of Europe’s cultural heritage and diversity is embodied in the striking monuments and historical buildings that dot the continent, but many of these artifacts also talk of difficult times and remind of the darker history of Europe—its wars, its violence, the sufferings of its people that lie behind today’s union of democratic nation-states.
By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee
Here are this month’s editor’s picks from Research Editorial Committee members Hélène B. Ducros and Louie Dean Valencia-García.
By Randall Halle
“United in diversity” is the official motto of the EU. Yet this special issue appears at a moment when European unity seems distant, and diversity seems to foster disunion, conflict, and cultural clash, rather than accord. We may do well to recall that the motto reaches back to the immediate post WWII era and the attempts to overcome the cataclysm of the war.
By John Hultgren
Our world today shares troublesome similarities to the one Polanyi encountered.
Emergency Medicine and Refugee Mental Health: Can Swiss ER Doctors Reduce Gaps in Mental Healthcare?
By Adam Brown
Addressing the mental health needs of refugees within the current context of forced migration is an unprecedented challenge for the international mental health care community.
By Agata Lisiak
Our team investigated how Poles, coming from cities that are largely homogenous in terms of ethnicity and religion, make sense of and come to terms with the much greater diversity they encounter in the British and German cities in which they now live
Interviewed by Susan Sgorbati
I was being persecuted because of signing a peace petition entitled “We will not be a party to this crime,” along with over 1,100 academics.
By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee
Here is this month’s editor’s picks from Research Editorial Committee members Nick Ostrum and Hélène B. Ducros.
By Maria Höhn, Brittany Murray, and Nicole Shea
As institutions of higher learning, we are uniquely positioned to draw on our robust local, national, and international educational and cultural networks to prepare our students for a deeper, more nuanced understanding of forced migration and displacement. Indeed, the coming era of human movement will, without doubt, challenge our existing national and global institutions, and our students must be able to respond to these challenges with intelligence, compassion, and ingenuity.
By Kerry Bystrom
From the Global North, and from Berlin specifically, the so-called “refugee crisis” and those seeking refuge from acute and structural violence are imagined through two key figures: the camp and the border. I will focus on the second.
By Frederic Baitinger
The violence that underpins the sexual conduct reported by #MeToo has its roots in one of the most typical and commonly shared male fantasies: the fantasy of domination.
By Melissa Kerr Chiovenda
There is a very different understanding as to what human rights should be, between the refugees, those who make asylum decisions, and policy makers.
By Árdís K. Ingvars
The common denominator within these stories is the elevated symbol of mobility (Salazar 2018). However, the stories around the names further reflect everyone’s fragility, thus illuminating the men’s wishes to be acknowledged as human beings with myriad experiences (Mallki, 1995), countering the defining criminalized image of men from the Middle-East in Europe. As Lila Abu-Lughod (2002) demonstrated, it is possible to trace power through shifting modes of resistance.
By Silvana Patriarca
The League wants to put the “Italians first.” But who are the Italians? Until recently, race was not mentioned explicitly when speaking of Italian identity. But these days even this post-Holocaust taboo seems to be on its way out, as the paranoid representation of immigration as an attempt at “ethnic substitution” and other language of this kind is spreading.
By Julia Khrebtan-Hörhager
Rethinking the Italian Self and normalizing its patriarchal core implies multiple approaches. Using religion as a tool of normalization of patriarchy, and re-establishing the infamous in critical feminist studies Madonna/Whore duality is one of them.
Interviewed by Melanie Evans
Good translation is reading at glacial speed and writing in sync with a voice that isn’t yours but is nevertheless coming from you.
Interviewed by June Brawner
I started this project by working with the few remaining photographs of Paul made shortly before my grandmother and her family left Europe for America. These provided actual evidence of this man, the missing person in my family’s narrative. I combined these family snapshots into a single piece titled Every Paul, presenting an accumulation of all visual evidence we still have of this man.
By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee
Here are this month’s editor’s picks from Research Editorial Committee members Hélène B. Ducros, Louie Dean Valencia-García, and Daniela Irrera.
By Sharon Jacobs
Blaming the Rescuers—an academic investigation into the criminalization of Mediterranean rescue work—charges European Union member states with the responsibility for migrant deaths as a result of their preventing aid at sea.
By Nataliia Slobodian and Iryna Ptasnyk
We cannot expect sanctions to lead to surrender. The relevant question is rather: are sanctions changing the context in which Russia’s decisions are being made? Would we have achieved the Minsk package, even with its weakness of implementation, without sanctions?
By Ellen Arnold
In the summer of 2018, a series of “hunger stones” in the Czech Republic’s Elbe River emerged, bearing warnings of the perils of drought and the vital importance of rivers.
By Cynthia A. Ruder
If we consider the construction of the three European canals as part of the larger program to build a singularly Soviet space, albeit on the backs of slave laborers, then the consequences and subsequent apprehension of the canals remains no less important.
Interviewed by Hélène Ducros
In endorsing social and environmental justice causes dear to them, athletes recognize their potential as change agents.
By Dagomar Degroot
These are momentous times in the history of our planet. Industrialized and industrializing nations, as well as world-straddling corporations, are choking our atmosphere with greenhouse gases in such quantity that the whole Earth is warming with a speed, on a scale, unprecedented in the 300,000-year history of our species. Yet natural forces have repeatedly changed Earth’s climate during that long history, even before the onset of industrialization.
By Alexis Morgan
Civilization was founded on the presence of water. The two cradles of civilization—the Nile Valley and the region between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers—were established around fertile river valleys that brought both the rewards of rich soils for agriculture, and perversely, the risks associated with the nutrient-laden flood waters.
By Fernando Mercé
Today, there are approximately 4 billion people living in regions where the water supply is woefully inadequate. With about 663 million people without safe drinking water, scarcity has become a very real and complex challenge. Additionally, UNESCO estimates that by 2025, 1.8 billion people will be living in countries or regions with severe water scarcity, and two-thirds of the world population could fall under “water stress” conditions from increased demand and the impacts of climate change.
Interviewed by Peter Debaere
The appropriation and transfer of virtual water can also be associated with the acquisition of agricultural land instead of “just” crops.
By Geoffrey M. Geise
Within the next decade, water shortages are projected to affect 40 US states and effectively all Americans. The issue of water accessibility is not one limited to the US, however, as the problem of clean water availability has become more widely recognized in recent years. For example, the US National Academy of Engineering has recognized the urgent need to provide access to clean water as one of the “Grand Challenges for Engineering
By Monica Garcia Quesada and David Aubin
2018 has seen the hottest and driest summer in Western Europe since records began. This prolonged heat and dryness has touched areas in England, the Netherlands, Belgium, and France amongst others, affecting farms and forests, threating agricultural output, pasture, and feed supply.
By Ralf B. Schäfer, Mira Kattwinkel, and Elisabeth Berger
Water has always been essential for human societies providing ecosystem services, such as drinking water, crop production through irrigation water, food, climate regulation, and recreation. The German sociologist Karl Wittfogel went so far as to suggest a connection between water and the evolution of the state, the so-called “hydraulic societies.” Today, water management is a key sector of environmental policy in Europe, and arguably the environmental sector with the highest aspirations.
By Stefan Siebert
If water and soil resources are not well managed, water use for irrigation can negatively affect ecosystems and water availability for other water use sectors. Globally, irrigation is by far the largest water use sector and contributes to about 90 percent of the additional evapotranspiration caused by human water use
By Alexandra Campbell-Ferrari and Luke Wilson
It seems simple: water and sanitation are essential to life and livelihood, and thus everyone should have access to these basic necessities and services. But therein lays the challenge. They are services that demand resources, capacity, infrastructure, and governance to be safely and efficiently delivered. Services do not come free. And the reality is: it costs a lot to provide water and sanitation services, it is not easy to provide these services, and everyone should but not everyone can pay.
By Robin Kundis Craig
“Water management” can refer to several types of governmental activities. These include allocation of surface water use and depletion rights, allocation of groundwater use and depletion rights, control of surface water pollution, control of groundwater pollution, preservation or restoration of aquatic habitat and ecosystems, and regulation of development near and in waterbodies, including the destruction of wetlands and mangrove forests.
By Javier D. Donna and José-Antonio Espín-Sánchez
Water scarcity is ubiquitous, affecting all continents and nations. The World Economic Forum (2015) listed water scarcity as one of the “greatest global [risks] to economies, environments, and people.”
By Nicole Shea and Peter Debaere
Fresh water is essential for life. No plant, animal, or person can live without it. Because whatever we do requires a lot of water, cities and towns were initially built next to rivers or streams, and farmers grew crops where water was plentiful or accessible. Water abundance cannot be taken for granted any longer everywhere. A dry spell and record temperatures caught up with Europe this summer, testing farmers from Scandinavia and England as well as France, the Netherlands, Germany and southern European countries.
By Timothy Beatley
We live on the Blue Planet, as oceanographers like Sylvia Earle remind us, but we are also increasingly the Urban Planet. How to reconcile these two realities, and how to integrate them into a unified vision of future cities is a major challenge and a topic I have been working on for many years.
By Neda Zawahri
It may be argued that there is sufficient fresh water in our planet to meet basic human needs throughout the world, however, this water is unevenly distributed. For instance, regions containing large populations, such as the Middle East, North Africa, western portions of the United States, and northern portions of China all confront extreme shortages of fresh water.
By David Harrisville
For decades after the Second World War, both the public memory and historical study of the German military were dominated by what has come to be termed the myth of the “clean” Wehrmacht.
By David L. Phillips
Hate speech gives rise to hate crimes. Demonizing the other legitimizes violent extremism, undermining principles of an open society and cultural diversity.
By Toussaint Losier
State officials did not simply build more prisons, but they commissioned increasingly secure, riot-proof facilities. These new prisons were designed to hold captive a population that might regularly exceed official capacity, while limiting the space in which imprisoned men and women might move about, congregate together, and, potentially, gain control of the institution.
By David Hernández
The problem with framing mass emigration of refugees and asylum seekers as one-off crises is that they demand one-off solutions—walls and fences, military deployments at the border, and deterrence that hinges on mass detention of families.
By Victoria Troy
Although there are parenting programs currently being delivered within the Criminal Justice System, more emphasis needs to be placed on addressing the holistic needs of the populations being targeted.
By Julia Gardiner
I feel guilty, as usual, because I can leave and my students cannot. Razor wire glitters in the dark as I walk down the hill from the school building to the front gate. Not for the first time in my experience, I see a bus idling in the dark as women board, holding small bundles of their possessions.
By Julie Ciccolini and Cynthia Conti-Cook
Naturally, in a system already primed for triage, actuarial risk assessment instruments are spreading rapidly. At nearly every stage of decision-making—including bail, program eligibility, sentencing, probation, prison classification, parole release and supervision—actuarial tools are assisting decision-makers to ration liberty and due process.
By Padraic X. Scanlan
In practice, there was a law for the rich and a law for the poor in Britain. In the British Empire, there was a law for whites and another for everyone else. Courtrooms were officially blind to race, but racism was everywhere.
By Anne Kerth
The similarities between convict leasing and modern mass incarceration are uncomfortably clear: in both systems, convicts are cordoned off from larger society and coerced into the performance of menial labor, from which they gain neither profit nor personal advancement. In this version of history, slavery, convict leasing, and modern incarceration merge to form an unbroken legacy of American coercion of unskilled and easily replaced black labor.
Interviewed by Hélène B. Ducros
What really interests me in this emerging field is that it has pushed geography into a new empirical territory and critical agenda.
Interviewed by Christopher P. Gillett
Between June 9th and October 7th, 2018, the Palace Green Library of Durham University hosted the exhibition “Bodies of Evidence: How science unearthed Durham’s dark secret.” This display forms part of a much larger, interdisciplinary research project investigating the remains of seventeenth-century Scottish prisoners of war discovered in the grounds of the cathedral square in November 2013.
By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee
Here is this month’s editor’s picks from Research Editorial Committee members Hélène B. Ducros (Geography), Louie Dean Valencia-García (History), and Mihai Sebe (Political Science).
By Christopher M. Florio and Nicole Shea
The study of crime and punishment is bound up with the study of a host of other subjects, ranging from social welfare to immigration to imperialism, from law to race relations to education. It is our hope that this issue helps readers to understand how crime and punishment have long been and continue to be entangled with virtually every side of human existence.
By Sarah Armstrong
Should mass imprisonment be applied as a general phenomenon that might arise anywhere, or should it be understood as a label for the unique experience of one country at one point in time? The distinctiveness of the US experience and the lack of a similar pattern elsewhere argue for the latter. No country in Europe has experienced post-war a scale of imprisonment (bar Russia with its gulag legacy) or a rate of growth anything like that observed in the US between the 1980s and 2000s.
By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee
Here are this month’s editor’s picks from Research Editorial Committee members Hélène Ducros (Geography) and Louie Dean Valencia-García (History).
By Aude Jehan-Robert
That official proclamation of “failure of multiculturalism” was indicative of Europe’s inability to situate Islam within its society.
By Tom Pettinger
The Prevent program tries to stop people becoming drawn into, supporting, or engaging in violence based on twenty-two supposed “signs of radicalization.”[4] The program has moved through several different iterations, focusing, in its early years, specifically on Muslim communities who were targeted with explicit funding, to a whole-of-society approach where specific community work has become less overt.
By Chris Allen
The far-right’s championing of free speech is an interesting albeit flawed development, an argument best articulated by Nesrine Malik. As she notes, free speech is no longer a value but as she puts it, “a loophole exploited with impunity.”
By Raymond Slot, Frans Van Assche, Sérgio Vieira, and Joana Vieira dos Santos
One specific psychological approach to understand the terrorist is not feasible, as terrorists differ widely in motivation, conviction, and objective. Consequently, trying to identify or profile terrorists within the general population based on psychological characteristics is a difficult task.
By Lella Nouri
How do groups like Britain First use social media, and how does this result in such unprecedented popularity? Does social media bring out xenophobia in British society? Is Britain First really that popular? Is this thanks to its online strategy; and if so, what is their secret?
By Katherine Kondor
In a political environment so influenced by radical right elites, the number of radical right street-level and direct-action organizations is notable. Derivatively, in a county whose political atmosphere is becoming increasingly radicalized, on what grounds do radical right activist groups stand? In what way have the attitudes and aims of radical right street movements shifted in reflecting this change?
By Julian Göpffarth
While Tellkamp and Grünbein are well-known figures in the German public sphere, and their debate received a lot of attention in the German mediascape, little attention is paid to less prominent, more local intellectuals. This is probably due to the tendency to associate the social concept of the “public intellectual” with a certain degree of grandeur or prestige, and a national or even global audience.
By Bernhard Forchtner
When contemplating radical-right politics, whether past or present, few think about the fight against environmental degradation. Yet to consider radical-right perspectives on environmental issues and the natural environment more generally does provide an important insight into these actors’ ideas and practices.
By Barbara Manthe
They live in their own world. They proclaim their own state territories, which are sometimes only the size of a stately home. They reject the legitimacy of the Federal Republic of Germany and its legal system, arguing that the pre-1945 German “Reich” is still in force.
By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee
Here are this month’s editor’s picks from Research Editorial Committee members Hélène Ducros (Geography), Louie Dean Valencia-García (History), Malcolm Campbell-Verduyn (Political Science), and Thomas Nolden (Comparative Literature).
By Rob May
The radical right is currently flourishing across the globe. Positioned at the extreme end of this ideological spectrum are Hitler worshipping neo-Nazis. Back in the 1980s, these white supremacists created their own genre of music – White Power – which has since become an essential ingredient of neo-Nazi skinhead propaganda.
Interviewed by Kelly McKowen
I feel that the phenomenon of surveillance has completely gotten out of hand and is going to continue to.
By Cynthia Miller-Idriss, Nicole Shea, and Fabian Virchow
In this special issue, artists and authors take up these issues in a series of feature essays and works, short opinion pieces, and research reports, examining questions of radicalism and violence, prevention and intervention, and radicalization and de-radicalization across Europe and other parts of the world. The authors examine cases from Germany, France, Hungary, the U.K. and beyond, looking at social media, school-based interventions, the use of history by far groups, the role of public intellectuals, and more.
By Sam Jackson
National history is often familiar to a broad segment of the nation’s public, providing a set of recognizable characters that extremists can attempt to connect to their cause.
By Elizabeth Heath
Tariffs are tools of international diplomacy. They are also political mechanisms that prioritize the interests of certain producers and consumers.
By Marion Demossier
Throughout the last decade, the global world of wine has seen a radical transformation, defined by the emergence of the concept of terroir as a space for renegotiation of past, present, and future ways of producing, selling, and consuming wine. But what is terroir? And why is it attracting so much interest from academics, producers, experts, and wine consumers?
By Anu Mai Kõll
Historically, the fate of the Baltic realm has been difficult. It served as a kind of Middle East of the North; inhabited by small ethnic groups with larger neighbors, which tended to play out rivalries fighting about their territory. German feudal lords, knights and barons, were a heritage from the crusades in Latvian- and Estonian-speaking areas in the thirteenth century.
By Louise Manning
This article focuses on Europe and the interaction between food price spikes, economic downturn and political austerity, and the risk of reported food fraud. It is important to firstly consider the impact of the 2007-2008 financial crash on household food security and the role of food insecurity as a driver towards political instability.
By Richard White
One way to approach this question involves identifying and teasing apart two rather crude-but-important approaches of veganism. One is rooted in the “original” definition for veganism, which emerged in the UK in the 1940s. I will refer to this as “activist” veganism, one which inspires a more radical vision for veganism, encouraging greater critical reflection, awareness, and commitment to social justice issues than “the other” type of veganism, namely “lifestyle,” or “corporate” veganism
By Angela Cacciarru
How do diverse property systems work in order to ensure access to land and the management of local resource? What role do moral economies play beyond property? Von Benda-Beckmann and Wiber find these questions intriguing, and argue that property regimes cannot be expressed by any one-dimensional political, economic, or legal model: they are multi-dimensional and multi-functional.
By David Sutton
This short essay explores the power of eating together as a symbol and practice of social relations with powerful political implications in our contemporary times of neoliberal austerity and xenophobia.
By Erik Jönsson
As a number of scholars have noted, cultured (or “in vitro,” or “clean”) meat is, today, a confusing technology, shot through with ontological ambiguity. What cultured meat eventually could become, and what cultured meat is today, are both uncertain. Moreover, in making sense of cultured meat in relation to (particular forms of) contemporary veganism, cultural and technological processes visibly entangle.
By Cristina Grasseni
Collective food procurement defines the production, distribution, and consumption of food with a participatory dimension: for example community gardens, but also new entrepreneurship based on urban agriculture, as well as broader projects governing food markets or allotments at municipal level.
Interviewed by Hélène Ducros
The neuroscientist explains how “the industry” and the “big business” side of food optimize and improve the quality of the food supply.
Interviewed by Hélène B. Ducros
Food is an enormous business and food companies want to sell as much food as they can, regardless of its health consequences.
By Christine Aubry and Baptiste Grard
Through this conversation, we can see that urban agriculture is an open door to delve into many issues around the functioning and development of urban environment: food provisioning, habitat fragmentation, soil waterproofing, waste recycling, well-being, social linkages, etc.
By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee
Here are this month’s editor’s picks from Research Editorial Committee members Hélène Ducros (Geography), Daniela Irrera (International Relations), Samantha Lomb (History), Louie Dean Valencia-García (History), and Malcolm Campbell-Verduyn (Political Science).
By Hélène B. Ducros
The articles and interviews included here clearly convey that food stands as an entry point into a wide range of contemporary and historical debates that touch all humans. What is more, they also indicate that food operates as a spatial and temporal link across a complex web of interconnected social, cultural, political, economic, environmental, demographic, nutritional, and physiological topics
By Ken Albala
We are all too familiar today with the wildly exaggerated health claims made for so-called super foods. Often based loosely on clinical research, the underlying motivation for these claims is, of course, selling new products. Foods are likewise demonized with the same motives, here too pushing a new line and maximizing profit underlies the latest fad diets that ban whole classes of food.
By Phillipp Schofield
While we have a general sense of famine events in this period and some inroads into exploring the extent and impact of famine and dearth, there is also a great deal we do not know about famine in the middle ages. In fact, our ignorance in regards to famine reflects a more general gap in our understanding of medieval society.
By Thomas Henökl
Nationalism both fosters an affection towards the nation’s past and an aversion towards present change and challenges, as well as the demands of flexibility and adaptation.
By Jordi Torrent
Many studies and experts are pointing that the main reason of the increase of anxiety in our society (particularly in youth, but not only) are the uses we are making of contemporary media, in particular of social media.
By Liya Yu
Not only are our brains ill-equipped to handle the socio-political realities that accompany liberal democratic procedures, but we might never be able to completely overcome our brains’ biases and dehumanizing abilities, nor can we prevent people from preferring cognitive closure over openness towards ambiguity, uncertainty and risk.
By Sandra Ponzanesi
The status of Europe, which is supposed to welcome so-called “legitimate” refugees, is itself so very precarious at the moment; instead of identification with the needy, this has led to antagonism, ambivalence and fear, often erupting into pure xenophobia, expertly manipulated by right-wing demagogues and anti-immigration parties
By Raphaël Liogier
For millennia, human beings have been fascinated by their own tools; and they still are. The question that preoccupies us now, is why anxiety has replaced the original optimism attached to technical objects and activities.
By Beatrice L. Bridglall
It appears that our ability to moderate anxiety over accelerations in climate change, may hinge on what we believe and how we perceive this issue. Cognitive scientists suggest the value of reframing our mental maps in efforts to process our fears and dilemmas more constructively and positively.
By Bàrbara Roviró and Patricia Martínez-Álvarez
Anxieties related to the parenting experience for migrant families are complicated by multiple factors, some of which are perceived as being life-threatening, and thus, at times, prioritized over any others (e.g., making a living, finding a home, having someone to care for their children, paying their bills, or avoiding police prosecution, among others).
By Paul Mecheril and Monica van der Haagen-Wulff
Lacan’s ideas establish the theoretical framework in which subjectivization and identity formation can be understood, not merely in the solipsistic process of the self, but rather as a constant “mirror dynamic.”
Interviewed by Sarah Wilma Watson
Strakhov is committed to challenging the artificial boundaries of national literary canons, periodization, and discipline.
By Stephan Habscheid, Christine Hrncal, Jens Lüssem, Rainer Wieching, Felix Carros, and Volker Wulf
One of the commonplaces in the debate on technological innovation is that interpretations and expectations, emotions and assessments with which people encounter new technologies, differ considerably in cultural terms. In the public debate in Germany, for example, it is often claimed that robots in Japan are generally already anchored much more widely and consensus-based in society, and that instead of the fears, anxiety, and skepticism towards robotic technology, which are characteristic for Germany, trust in and gratitude towards technology prevail in Japan.
By Nicole Shea and Emmanuel Kattan
The challenges of climate change, pandemics, mental illness, rapid technological change and its impact on work and individual freedom, migration and its social and political consequences are not always best understood under the prism of “crisis.” Rather, they seep into our collective consciousness, building on an increased sense of insecurity and powerlessness and shaping our relationships with others and the world.
By Michael I. Schapira, Ulrich Hoinkes, and John P. Allegrante
There are many consequences of living in this state of anxiety on an individual or collective level. Invoking crisis or danger tends to speed up our thinking and lend a sense of urgency to our actions, but might this come at the expense of a deeper understanding of the changing face of our societies?
By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee
Here are this month’s editor’s picks from Research Editorial Committee members Hélène Ducros (Geography), Daniela Irrera (International Relations), Samantha Lomb (History), Louie Dean Valencia-García (History), Nick Ostrum (History), and Thomas Nolden (Literature).
By Andreas Bøje Forsby
This human rights dialogue can be traced back to the 1990s, with the moral outcry in the West in response to the Tiananmen Square massacre.
By Alberto Turkstra
At a time when other regions and geopolitical hotspots are dominating the political and media headlines, Central Asia has been quietly taking advantage of the extraordinary opportunities deriving from the region’s increasingly central role in the numerous connectivity initiatives and corridors that are traversing Eurasia, of which China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is a primary example.
By Eamonn Butler
In July 2018, Bulgaria, fresh off the back of its EU Presidency, will host the seventh annual summit for “Cooperation between China and Central and Eastern European Countries.” More commonly known 16+1 Initiative, it is a diplomatic platform coordinated by China, to support institutional coordination of relations between China and sixteen countries from the Central and East European (CEE) region.
By Alexandra-Maria Bocse
The EU also cooperates with China towards the implementation of the Paris Agreement in the framework of initiatives such the Clean Energy Ministerial, a global forum promoting policies and sharing best practices in order to accelerate the transition to clean energy.
By Madeleine Herren
Chinese news is presenting the new silk road project with a strong reference to a deep historical past, imaging the silk road as a bustling trading route established centuries ago. The narrative usually does not mention the very fact that the concept of a silk road in the sense of a coherent trading route only surfaced as recently as 1877.
By Ralph Weber and Silvana Tarlea
It is difficult to disregard the importance of the relationship between Europe and China. The European Union (EU) is China’s biggest trading partner and China is the EU’s second-biggest trading partner after the United States. In order to enhance and consolidate relations with China, the EU has provided considerable research funding to Chinese universities over the years.
By Jan Knoerich and Simon Vitting
This short article presents a wide range of perceptions and views on Chinese investments in Europe, from positive and encouraging to highly critical, in a way rarely discussed by one individual stakeholder group.
By Xinghua Liu
Hit by the sovereign debt crisis, Europe has proven eager to obtain China’s support in terms of spurring trade and investment. Yet, when BRI was proposed in late 2013, European countries had a lukewarm stance.
By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee
Here are this month’s editor’s picks from Research Editorial Committee members Hélène Ducros (Geography), Samantha Lomb (History), and Louie Dean Valencia-García (History).
Interviewed by Sherman Teichman
A world-renowned expert on what he has termed the “Global Cold War,” he is an analyst of contemporary international history.
Interviewed by Kelly McKowen
Who are the makers behind the “Made in Italy” label prized by the world’s fashion-conscious consumers? In Prato, a small Tuscan city with a long history of textile production, the makers come increasingly from a growing community of transnational Chinese migrants.
By Eamonn Butler and Nicole Shea
It has been more than 40 years since the first formal, diplomatic relations between China and the European Union (EU) were established. In the subsequent years, relations between these two global economic powerhouses have significantly developed, with both the EU and China publishing and implementing a number of communiqués intended to build and strengthen partnership.
By Patrick Bayer
At the end of last year, the Chinese government approved plans for a national emissions trading scheme. While many of the details are still in the works, the biggest carbon emitter’s commitment to set up carbon markets nationwide has important implications for global climate mitigation.
By Pekka Tuominen
Kontula has never been a strictly delineated district, but has constantly had a dynamic relationship with urban and suburban spaces.
By Heike Oevermann
Industrial heritage is not only about identity, memory, traditions, and labor movements; it belongs to cities, sites, and their transformations.
By Juli Székely
Following the year of 1993, when several socialist statues were relocated to a designated Statue Park in Budapest, the previous memory-scape of the city considerably changed; partly remaining visible, partly disappearing.
By Christoph Sommer
Amidst the “overtourism” debate going on in Europe, one question pops up routinely. Namely, how much tourism do cities bear?
By Cor Wagenaar
Only in the late eighteenth century, curing patients was identified as the primary function of hospitals, and the provision of clean air as the best tool to do so. This view was propagated by medical doctors and produced buildings in which medicine, paradoxically, only played a marginal role.
By Lilia Voronkova and Oleg Pachekov
Disappearance of public space in cities due to their privatization and commoditization has become a truism in the twentieth century. What is less discussed is another danger — lack of publics, which leads to the deficiency of demand for public space.
By Eszter Gantner
We consider urban interventions to be practices in which the most diverse participants make their socio-political positions and genuine private interests clear and visible and exert their influence on the public space.
By Ayse Erek
Debates on the shrinking public space in Istanbul are not new. Since the last two decades, they have been crystalized in relation to the topics such as the regeneration of old neighborhoods, protecting heritage, the right for the waterfronts and green spaces, as well as the public but unused spaces, revived with old or new ways of usages.
Interviewed by Eszter Gantner
Kaschuba has been addressing key issues of post-modern urban European life for decades.
By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee
Here are this month’s editor’s picks from Research Editorial Committee members Hélène Ducros (Geography), Samantha Lomb (History), and Louie Dean Valencia-García (History).
By Nicole Shea and Eszter Gantner
By now, urban public spaces have become strongly contested resources in present European cities, where multiple agents are claiming the right to these spaces. Reacting to this development, this special issue concentrates on European cities, focusing on their public spaces, their histories and their rich heritages.
Interviewed by Mara-Katharina Thurnhofer
European migration research has been shining a spotlight on various global and local trends.
By Michael Haspel
With both areas connected with the Reformation, the prince expanded his power and united several layers of ruling in his control.
Interviewed by Ida Bencke
Short periods of time spent in Norway have proven generative for engaging Norwegian as literary material for my lack of fluency.
By Foster Chamberlin
The recent push for independence in Catalonia represents the greatest challenge to the authority of the Spanish state since at least the coup attempt of 1981.
By Susan Smith-Peter
Russians knew of the idea of civil society for nearly 150 years before the end of serfdom. In 1703, the first Russian use of the term drew upon Aristotle’s concept of a civil society that was contrasted to an uncivil, or uncivilized society.
By Yiannis Kokosalakis
The question thus remained; what did Lenin’s vanguard actually do? One of the most influential social historians of the Stalin period described party activism as a paradox, pointing out that the many thousands of communist rank-and-filers were representatives of political authority, but their activities brought them to conflict with functionaries of the state everywhere.
By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee
Here are this month’s editor’s picks from Research Editorial Committee members Hélène Ducros (Geography), Samantha Lomb (History), Malcolm Campbell-Verduyn (Political Science), Louie Dean Valencia-García (History), and Daniela Irrera (International Relations).
By Katrine Øgaard Jensen and Kayla Maiuri
A selection of emerging writers from Nordic countries—Iceland, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland, and the Faroe Islands.
By Peo Hansen and Stefan Jonsson
The history of European integration and colonialism is best understood through a geopolitical entity once known as Eurafrica.
By Annalisa Butticci
African women and men are mobilizing the resources of the long-established African diasporas, joining local civil rights associations, and fiercely expressing their anger at the racial violence and the economic and social injustice.
By Veit Bachmann
The term “Eurafrica” invokes a global panregion that has long and pervasively been a fantasy of imperialistic geopolitics, yet that has never existed. First, the spatial construction of panregions is in itself problematic as it describes a “large functional area linking core states to resource peripheries and cutting across latitudinal distributed environmental zones” and is thus inherently exploitative and imperial. Second, it is superficial, incomplete, and possibly essentializing as it suggests a homogeneity that has never existed.
By Adriana Chira
In our geographic imaginaries, Spanish colonialism tends to be mapped onto South America. But the last Spanish colony to claim independence from Spain in 1968 was a territory in West Africa—Equatorial Guinea
By Marcia C. Schenck
It is 2014. The faded flag the German Democratic Republic used from 1959 to 1990 blows in the wind on a makeshift flagpole in the heart of Maputo. It consists of the tricolor: black, red, and yellow, and features the symbols of the worker and peasant state: a compass and hammer encircled with rye.
By Margaret Andersen
Family allowances became a focal point in debates about rights and equality within a larger imperial framework as Moroccans increasingly traveled to France to work in the postwar period.
By Amy L. Hubbell
France’s former French citizens of Algeria, the Pieds-Noirs, include one of Europe’s largest diaspora communities in the twentieth century. This diverse group of people settled in Algeria during the colonial years, and after one-hundred and thirty years of French colonial rule, Algeria fought for and won its independence in 1962. The seven-year war was traumatic for both the Algerians and the French living in the colony, and nearly one million people crossed the Mediterranean during and after the war to make a new home in France.
By Anna Arnone and David O’Kane
Certain historical incidents can crystallize and condense the reality of an entire era. The mass drowning of at least 500 migrants, mostly Eritrean, near the island of Lampedusa on the third of October 2013, was one such incident. It was part of a wider set of political logics that characterize this era, logics that include those described by Barbara Pinelli in her ethnography of the conditions endured by asylum seekers in the reception centers of the Italian state.
By Thaddeus Sunseri
Although rinderpest was long known in Eurasia, emanating from the central Asian steppes with trade, warfare, and herd migration, its arrival in sub-Saharan Africa in 1888, and subsequent spread throughout the continent over the next decade, is surprising.
By Nina Berman
Across the world, the effects of neoliberal capitalism and anthropocentric excesses act as stressors on people and their natural habitat. On the sub-Saharan African continent, neoliberal economic development, in conjunction with economic and political programs of authoritarian postcolonial rulers, have increased the economic and social precarity of the urban and rural poor.
By Michael Meeuwis
Dutch has been present in South Africa since the establishment in 1652 of the first permanent Dutch settlement around what is now Cape Town. In the decades and centuries that followed, the Dutch spoken there, detached from its ancestor in Europe, underwent internal developments as well as influences from other languages.
By Pamela Feldman-Savelsberg and Alma Gottlieb
The lives, status, and images of immigrants may constitute the single-most urgent human issue.
By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee
Here are this month’s editor’s picks from Research Editorial Committee members Hélène Ducros (Geography), Louie Dean Valencia-García (History), Mihai Sebe (Political Science), and Malcolm Campbell-Verduyn (Political Science).
Interviewed by Sherman Teichman
The current conflicts in Africa are concentrated in specific regions, but they are intense, volatile, and some pose great challenges to both regional and global governance and stability.
By Hélène B. Ducros
With this special feature, EuropeNow confirms the web of connectivity that exists between nations of Europe and nations of Africa, as not only rooted in geopolitics and global economic flows, but also increasingly in global cultural flows, which support the enduring linkages and reciprocal influences between the two continents and shape the ways in which both Africans and Europeans apprehend the local and the global.
By Daniel Mengara
History owes the term “Françafrique” to François-Xavier Verschave, the late French human-rights activist who enshrined the notion in a number of groundbreaking books that provide an extensive background to France’s neocolonialist policies towards Africa.
By Peter Debaere
Under the banner of “Make America Great Again,” Trump took every opportunity to call for more protectionism and to blame “bad trade deals” for the predicament of the United States.
By Samantha Fox
Dark, with its drama centered on the consequences of nuclear energy production—social and economic consequences, in addition to those more speculative and supernatural—illustrates the degree to which changing energy politics serve as the backdrop to everyday life in Germany. One hopes that the show can export Germany’s attention to energy politics to an international audience.
By Jan Willem Duyvendak and Josip Kesic
Wilders has not only dominated the public sphere in the Netherlands for more than fifteen years, but has also become a prominent voice in transnational anti-Islam circles.
By Juan Andrés García Martín
Since the economic crisis began, Catalan nationalism has abandoned its traditional cooperation with the central government. This radicalization happened under the argument of lack of economic assistance, the impossibility of recognizing of its particularities, and political repression, leading towards a unilateral policy. Moreover, Catalan nationalism identified not only a foreign enemy — Spain — but domestic enemies — those who support unity with Spain.
By Agnieszka Pasieka
Among numerous questions that have been posed after recent electoral successes of conservative, right-wing, populist parties at least one seems to be repeated ad nauseam: “Who voted for them?” Whether this question is asked on the occasion of a dinner among friends, an academic conference, or a business meeting, it tends to provoke a somewhat comforting reaction: those who committed “such terrible electoral mistakes” were misled, driven by emotions (usually “anger” and “fear”), and deluded by hopes of economic gains.
By Jonathan Harris
Nativism and nationalist populism, despite Macron’s 2017 victory over the Front National, are a significant part of contemporary French politics. Popular concerns about the weakening power of the nation-state to control the economic and demographic effects of globalization contribute to xenophobic, and particularly Islamophobic, attitudes in broader contemporary French state and society, predominantly directed at France’s large Maghrebi postcolonial diaspora.
By Jan Čulík
Zeman’s victory is a sign of the emergence of politics of parasitism as a mainstream political strategy within Central Europe in general, and the Czech Republic in particular. Both Miloš Zeman and most Czech politicians have realized that in order to gain substantial political support amongst voters, they no longer need to develop strategies for the solution of many of the existing, often intractable, social problems. The only thing they need to do in order to gain influence and money is to peddle fear.
By Christopher Impiglia
What the alt-right still lacks is a leader that can not only champion many of its ideals and bring them to the forefront of the political debate, but outright embraces it in return; despite flattering calls of “Heil Trump,” at Charlottesville, the president has increasingly distanced himself from the alt-right, most recently by ousting their mouthpiece—Bannon—from the White House, although his policies and consistent, racist comments continue to reveal clear alt-right sympathies.
Interviewed by Sherman Teichman
Liberal democracy has been the bulwark against authoritarianism, ever since the end of World War II.
Interviewed by Morten Høi Jensen
In democratic nations there is usually a multitude of narratives about people in power, but in these one-man dictatorships there’s just one, and its usually very warped and far-fetched. So I was very interested in the idea of Ceaușescu’s narrative in Romania, and of how one’s own narrative about one’s life clashes with that larger, overpowering official narrative. And then, of course, there’s the fact that, from a storytelling perspective, in a world in which these very rigid rules are imposed on you there’s much more at stake.
By Kieran Kelley
The specters of anti-social criminality and death by overdose, amplified by crisis-inflected media coverage, loom large in public discourse. In the face of the uncertainties and crises that proliferate around drugs, the language of social inclusion and human rights raises new perplexities.
By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee
Here are this month’s editor’s picks from Research Editorial Committee members Malcolm Campbell-Verduyn (Political Science), Samantha Lomb (History), Louie Dean Valencia-García (History), and Hélène Ducros (Geography).
By Manuela Achilles, Kyrill Kunakhovich, and Nicole Shea
This special issue examines the resurgence of far-right groups, considering how recent events in Charlottesville can illuminate radical movements in Europe. It focuses on three key elements: nationalism, nativism, and the revolt against globalization. Nationalism was the word most associated with the Charlottesville rally, whose participants often called themselves “white nationalists.” By this, they meant that a racialized national identity should be the condition for political belonging.
By James Fitzgerald
Political theorists and philosophers of a certain ilk argue that the impulse to control life and death is woven into the body politic.
Good Europeans or Poor Relations? Transnational Minority Activism in the Age of European Integration
By Marina Germane
The well-documented “rise, fall and revival” of minority rights during the turbulent twentieth century can be subdivided into three corresponding periods: post-World War One, post-World War Two, and post-Cold War.
Moderated by Peter Haslinger
Since the beginning of the so-called refugee crisis in 2015/16, the discursive shift away from multiculturalism and the agendas of ethnic, cultural, religious, and other minorities to a perspective of assessing risks and challenges that evolve from societal diversity has intensified.
By Sergey Sukhankin
The case of Kaliningrad Oblast – the westernmost region of the Russian Federation physically detached from the mainland – should be seen as one of the most disappointing examples of post-Soviet transformation.
By Olga Chuprakova
Despite the prevailing trend to demonize Russia, we can find sincere sympathy for and understanding of Russia and the Russian people in the fiction of the bestselling British novelist Iris Murdoch (1919-1999). Russia, Russian culture, and Russian identity are prevalent themes in twenty of her twenty-six novels.
By Ana Ivasiuc
As observers have pointed out, the rationale behind the EU’s political engagement with minority rights, and with Roma issues in particular, was at best ambivalent.
Interviewed by Lillian Klein
We have seen a lot of criticism being voiced against approaches to multiculturalism, especially for reinforcing cultural hierarchies.
By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee
Here are this month’s editor’s picks from Research Editorial Committee members Samantha Lomb (History), Louie Dean Valencia-García (History), Daniela Irrera (International Relations), and Hélène Ducros (Geography).
Interviewed by Lillian Klein
At that time—right after the fall of the Berlin Wall—many Bulgarians started traveling freely, and a lot of us young musicians chose to study abroad. But many of us still felt deeply connected to Bulgaria, so we started a Bulgarian concert series in New York.
By Nicole Shea and Peter Haslinger
In this special anniversary edition of EuropeNow, curators Peter Haslinger and Nicole Shea highlight the importance in research and culture of smaller central and eastern European regions. The research presented here assesses the concepts, paradigms, and methods for the re-evaluation of multi-ethnicity, diversity, and mobility in a globalized and “post-factual” era, and seeks to identify factors and agencies that help to explain the current trends towards the obsession with security agendas.
By EuropeNow Editors
A selection of contemporary Bulgarian fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.
By Federica Prina
Russia is an exceptionally vast and heterogeneous country with high levels of ethnic, linguistic, and religious diversity, and a complex federal structure. The Russian empire already saw an intermingling of peoples, encompassing Slavic, Scandinavian, and Asiatic groups, with various forms of hybridization, multilingualism, and cultural cross-fertilization.
By Sebastian Paul
The Subcarpathian Rus is still a region for specialists. For hundreds of years, together with Slovakia, the territory of later Subcarpathian Rus embodied the northeastern part of the Kingdom of Hungary. Until 1918, it was the neighboring region to Habsburg Galicia, and in the Interwar Period, it formed Czechoslovakia’s eastern borderland to the reestablished Polish state.
By Gregory W. Fuller
Fuller considers how European policymakers have relied too much on “mainstream” economic analysis in the design and re-design of eurozone governance structures.
By Salvatore Settis
“The city is in ruins.” In European cultural memory, these simple words have, sometimes, a literal sense (either narrative or descriptive)—when we talk about wars, insurrections, and natural disasters, for instance. More often, they have a strong metaphorical relevance according two complementary directions.
By Peo Hansen
“Despite Sweden’s sizeable refugee reception, its economy is doing exceptionally well.” This line has been repeated on countless occasions over the past year or so. By the government, experts, and pundits — from right to left. As the president of the Swedish Trade Union Confederation put it a little while ago: “Despite an unstable world and a refugee emergency, Sweden’s economy is performing very well.” Despite?
By Alexandros Kyriakidis
The Eurozone crisis has been a turning point for the European Union (EU), and especially for the Eurozone – the epitome of the economic and monetary union (EMU) – bringing to the surface long-standing structural weaknesses.
Interviewed by Sherman Teichman
Nikos argues that the best way out of the downward spiral for Greece, is to analyze the crisis in terms of violations of human rights.
By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee
Here are this month’s editor’s picks from Research Editorial Committee members Katrine Øgaard Jensen (Literature), Samantha Lomb (History), Louie Dean Valencia-García (History), Daniela Irrera (International Relations), and Hélène Ducros (Geography).
By Waltraud Schelkle
Albeit an arcane institution, TARGET, the cross-border payments system of the euro area, is a good example for how economics and political economy can be combined to advance our understanding of European integration.
By Erik Jones, Regine Paul, and Nicole Shea
The inescapable politics of knowledge production about and for a Europe in crisis demands scholarly transparency. In this issue, we consider the value and limits of their disciplinary perspectives in explaining the recent crises of European Integration. We nail our colors to the mast by arguing that a political economy approach is valuable – and ought to be cherished – for seeing more than just economics vs. politics at play in explaining crisis and navigating Europe’s future.
By Daniel Cohen
Since the fall of the Berlin Wall and German reunification, “philosemitism” has migrated closer to the mainstream of European societies, even in some cases in post-communist countries.
By Irial Glynn
The sea offers hope but also dread for boat refugees leaving behind one region and setting sail for another.
By Elif Çetin
Europe is facing the largest humanitarian disaster since the end of World War II. Even though the European governments, in an attempt to address public feelings of insecurity about immigration, seek to project themselves as able to manage international migration effectively, the objectives and outcomes of their immigration and border control policies do not always overlap.
By Antonio Sorge
Neo-nationalist parties throughout Europe are deriving considerable mileage from the current refugee “crisis,” seeing within it an opportunity to shore up support from a disaffected electorate reeling from a slow economic recovery and high unemployment.
By Agnieszka Kulesa
Despite fears related to the increase in hate crime numbers following the EU referendum, and the uncertainty around their future residency status, immigrants from Poland will not abandon their established lives in the UK as willingly as the Brexit supporters would wish to see.
By Liudmila Kirpitchenko
In recent decades, we’ve witnessed an increased mobility of university students and scholars. International mobilities for academic purposes have become more commonplace and more diversified.
By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee
Here are this month’s editor’s picks from Research Editorial Committee members Hélène Ducros (Geography), Malcolm Campbell-Verduyn (Political Science), and Lillian Klein (Literature).
Interviewed by Sakeef Karim
Santos explains how Europe and the New World intersect due to contemporary migratory processes and the echoes of the past.
By Jennifer Elrick, Oliver Schmidtke, and Nicole Shea
We have seen two opposing trends across Europe: On the one hand, civil society has demonstrated a great degree of compassion with the plight of refugees, organizing local welcome committees and, in the Canadian case, even putting pressure on the government to accept more refugees from Syria as a fundamental humanitarian commitment of the country. On the other hand, the populist Right has exploited the influx of so many refugees for their political mobilization.
By Stefan Wallaschek
At the beginning of October 2013, a boat shipwrecked at the coast of Lampedusa and caused the death of approximately 350 asylum seekers. During his visit to Lampedusa shortly after it, the President of the European Commission José Manuel Barroso, demanded solidarity from the EU member states.
By Morten Høi Jensen
The “white whine” has since reverberated across the country with increasing clamor, from the orifices of white nationalists to the offices of the White House.
By John Lindner
I see only the two small feet of a child, who had just been previously feigning sleep, walk across the stage below a hovering curtain. They are met at the wings by a pair of adult shoes when the lights turn on for intermission.
By Hélène B. Ducros
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