Browsing Tag

political culture

9

Security and Stability in Germany’s “Zeitenwende”

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.

 

Homelessness and EU Citizenship in a Borderless Europe

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.

How do We Talk about Housing Equality in an Increasingly Unequal Europe?

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.

An Anticolonial Museum

By Ana Sladojević

The anti-colonial aspect of the museum was mainly anchored in the prevailing socialist and nonaligned discourse of the time.

Breaking through the Latest Regulatory Plans of the Climate-Friendly Energy Union and Reaching the New Ambitious Plans of the European Green Deal

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.

Building Sustainable Water Futures

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.

Securitization of Identity

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.

From De-securitization to “Flexicuritization” of Migration Strategy in Greece

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.

When Minorities Become a Threat: From 9/11 to the COVID-19 Pandemic

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.

Mastery and the Banksia Tree

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.

On Becoming Lichen

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.

Moving the Green: Plant Behavior in the Human World

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.

In a Europe of Waters

By Matthew D. Miller

A hydrocentric mapping of Europe’s rivers, seas, and watersheds yields a refreshingly defamiliarized continental cartography

Animals as Dark Tourism Attractions: A Prototype

By David A. FennellBastian 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.

From ‘Trophy’ To ‘Patrimony’: Material Feelings and Proprietary Emotions in Post-WWII Kaliningrad

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?

European ‘Code Unknown’ Cinema

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.

“Kultur Als Kopfkino:” Hermann Glaser’s Critical Visions for the Arts and Social Entertainment: Translating German “Culture as Civil Right” for the European Project

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.

Europe’s Moving Images

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.

The New European Cinema of Precarity

  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

History and Story in Amazon’s El Cid (2020)

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).

Anti-Roma Racism in Romania

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.

The Belarus Crisis: How Can the EU Turn it Into an Opportunity?

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.”

Peasantry and Rural Social Movements in Twenty-First Century Turkey

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”

The Agrarian Reform in Italy: Historical Analysis and Impact on Access to Land and Social Class Composition

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.

Practicing Regenerative Design in Greece

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.

Where Are the Women in “Empty Spain”?

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.

Changing Agriculture in Rural Europe

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.

Changing Ruralities in Germany

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.

Landscapes of Care and Isolation in the 21st Century: A Focus on Migrant Women in Italy

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.

From Fake News to False Elections

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.

Placing Islam in European Studies

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.

From Past Practices to Future Directions in European Studies

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.

Imagining Europe, Citizenship, and Scholarship in the Time of HIV/AIDS

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.

An Empty Spain Filled with Ideas?

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.

Europe in a Global Context: Geographical Perspectives

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.

Culturalist Perspectives in Social Analysis on Europe

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.

The Afterlives of Refugee Dead: What Remains?

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.

Colonial Histories at the Humboldt Forum

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.

Far-Right Media Ecology in Norway

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.

“Translating Socio-Cognitive Models of Agency into Migration and Mental Health: A Framework for Individual and Community Empowerment” by Adam Brown and Evan Henritze

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.

The Medieval University as Refuge

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?

Different and Related: Experiences from the Project “Monuments and Artworks in East-Central Europe Research Infrastructure (FoKO)”

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.

European History Reloaded: The Case of Czechoslovak Communism

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?

Likeable Pasts: Historical Urban Views on Facebook

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.

Thinking Heritage Digitally: Examples from Contemporary Serbia

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.

Immigration Policy is Health Policy

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.

The Multiple Ontologies of Surplus Food

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.

Brokers in the Fight Against Waste

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.

Waste in Literature and Culture: Aesthetics, Form, and Ethics

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.

Reinventing European History to Show that Black Lives Do Matter

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.

Boxed In: Minority-Authored Films of Assimilation in an Irish Context

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.

Survival within Survival in Ayşe Toprak’s Mr Gay Syria (2017)

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.

Shedding Waters: Cinematic Mediations of European Multiculture

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.

Regional Identity in Contemporary Sardinian Writing

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.

Coming to Terms with Controversial Memories in South Tyrol: The Monument to Victory of Bolzano/Boze

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.

Imagining Planetary Refuge

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.

“I am Odysseus:” Tracing Mobile Desires and Resistance to Confinement Through Pseudonyms

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.

Italians First: The New Borders of European Humanity

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.

Facing Floods in the Middle Ages

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.

Climate Change, Water, and the Golden Age of the Dutch Republic

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.

Desalination: Water for an Increasingly Thirsty World

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

Management of European Water Bodies: Approaching a Good Status?

By Ralf B. SchäferMira 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.

A Legal Foundation: Critical to a Realized SDG 6 and Universal Access to Water and Sanitation

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.

Water Quality Law in the US and EU: A Comparison of the Clean Water Act and Water Framework Directive

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.

Seeking a Blue Urbanism: The Paradoxes of Blue Nature

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.

The Governance of Transboundary Rivers Across the World

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.

“Make the Nation Look at our Demands:” The 2018 National Prison Strike and the Crises of Mass Incarceration

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.

Habitual Punishment: Family Detention and the Status Quo

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.

Rationing Justice: Risk Assessment Instruments in the American Criminal Justice System

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.

 

Damon’s Case and the Meaning of British Antislavery

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.

The Strange Career of the Artisanal Penitentiary

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.

The Problem of Punishment in a Progressive Society

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.

Everyday Securitization: Prevention and Preemption in British Counter-Terrorism

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.

Preventing Extremism and Terrorism: Reporting on an Intervention in Secondary Schools

By Raymond SlotFrans Van AsscheSérgio 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.

Between the “Street” and the “Salon,” the Local and the National: Mediating Intelligentsia and the German New Right in Dresden

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.

Terroir, Wine Culture, and Globalization: What Does Terroir do to Wine?

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?

Looking Backward, Moving Forward: Articulating a “Yes, BUT…!” Response to Lifestyle Veganism

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

The Moral Economies of Agricultural Production and the Role of Property Relations

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.

From Disturbing to Disrupting? Cultured Meat and Early 21st Century Veganism

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.

Food Citizenship? Collective Food Procurement in European Cities

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.

Famine and Dearth in Medieval England

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.

Anxiety in Our Times

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.

Digital Strangers at Our Door: Moral Panic and the Refugee Crisis

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

Toward a Strengths-Based Approach to Mitigating our Anxiety Culture

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.

Do Our Concepts of Bilingual Education Match the Anxieties of Migrants?

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).

Migration, Europe, and Staged Affect-Scenarios

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.”

Robotics and Emotion

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.

Anxiety Culture: The New Global State of Human Affairs?

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?

Central Asia in the Age of Connectivity

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.

16+1: The EU’s Concerns of a Chinese ‘Trojan Horse’

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.

The EU and China: Prospects of Cooperation on Climate and Energy

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.

Roads, Belts, and Connectivities: Chinese Silk Road Projects in New Perspective

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.

The Politics of Studying Europe in China

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.

Public Spaces, Urban Heritage, and Politics

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.

Linked by Research: Berlin and St. Petersburg

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.

Commoning in Action: Walking in St. Petersburg, Urban Gardening in Istanbul

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.

Soviet Communists on the Factory Floor: 1926–1941

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.

A Forgotten Colony: Equatorial Guinea and Spain

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

Layering Over the Wounds of Algeria in Contemporary Pied-Noir Art

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.

Behind the Humanitarian Crisis in the Mediterranean: Five Years After Lampedusa, Political Incoherence and Dysfunction Continues to Kill

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.

Scrambling for Africa, Again: Germans in Kenya

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.

A Brief History of Dutch in Africa

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.

Globalization Under Fire

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.

The Rise of Nativism in Europe

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.

The European Union, Spain, and the Catalan Question: An Affair Beyond the Spanish Border?

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.

Poland, a “Normal” European Country

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.

Between Nativism and Indigeneity in the Kabyle Diaspora of France

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.

Russia’s ‘Myth’ of Equality in a Securitized Context

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.

Securitizing the Unknown Borderlands: Czechoslovak Subcarpathian Rus and Its Minorities

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.

Why Europe Needs Political Economy

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.

The Accidental Keynesian: How Refugee Spending in Sweden Challenged Austerity, Put the Local Fiscal Houses In Order and Proved Beneficial to All

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?

Political Economy on TARGET

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.

What Prospects for Change to Achieve a Sustainable EU Migration Policy?

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.

A Transnational Place-based Label for the “Glocal Village”

By Hélène B. Ducros

By the early 1980s, some rural mayors in France came to the realization that their villages were dying. In spite of a strong attachment to the rural in the French collective imaginary, many factors had contributed to rural decline and exodus since the early twentieth century.

Europe and Island Tourism

By Godfrey Baldacchino

In the wake of the Greek “financial crisis,” some observers were surprised to note that the Greek islands, with their less-developed economic fabric, weathered the storm much better than their urban counterparts.

Homonegativity in Eastern Europe

By Catherine Bolzendahl and Ksenia Gracheva

Stagnating and declining of tolerance toward homosexuality in Eastern Europe should be alarming to anyone taking note of changes in Europe. It represents not only disparate perspectives on sexuality and freedom of personal identity, but also signifies a cultural and political rift between Western and Eastern Europe that may be deepening. Growing intolerance could be a symptom of a dangerous divide between East and West, rooted in political disenchantment and subsequent mutual rejection.

The European Refugee Crisis and the Myth of the Immigrant Rapist

By Caitlin Carroll

In the “myth of the immigrant rapist,” white women’s bodies are seen as in need of protection by a paternalist state from the sexual violence of brown men. In the case of Europe’s refugee crisis, this protection took the form of closing borders and harshening immigration policies, including curtailing family reunification for refugees.

“A Beautiful Night with Marine:” Marine Le Pen and Gender-Hegemonic Charisma

By Dorit Geva

Why would FN members link such narratives of Marine Le Pen’s feminine and masculine virtues alongside their virulent criticism of the European Union, Muslim immigrants, and political elites? How is a woman who is viewed as the beloved political daughter, the quintessential femme moderne, and at the same time as the new Charles de Gaulle, treated as the most potent cure to France’s political and economic woes? Why, in sum, do populist supporters emphasize such gendered virtues in their everyday discourses around their beloved leader?

From Interinstitutional Competition to Interinstitutional Collaboration

By Stéphane Charitos, Christopher Kaiser, and Nelleke Van Deusen-Scholl

In response to rapidly changing conditions in higher education, an increasing number of institutions of colleges and universities are exploring the potential for collaborative models of course and program sharing to help them meet their academic goals.

World War I and Historical Memory

By Carl Strikwerda

World War I created a watershed in world history. It punctured belief in progress and radically shifted art, theology, psychology, and literature.

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Confronting the Terrorist/Refugee Narrative

By James Fitzgerald

This article critically interrogates the “terrorist/refugee” narrative that has become a mainstay of increasingly right-wing political and (social) media discourse. It contextualizes the conflation of “refugees” with “terrorists” by reference to logics of contemporary counterterrorism practices, which tend to securitize entire populations based on the threat that they might produce.

Yet Another Greco-German Imbalance

Reviewed by Angelos-Stylianos Chryssogelo

The first half is a Keynesian analysis of the flaws of the Eurozone architecture; the second half is a condensed political program of how a country could negotiate and implement an exit from the euro.

Missing Chances for Change

Reviewed by Shawn Donnelly

Instead of focusing on stable prices as the benchmark of a working monetary union, Flassbeck and Lapavitsas argue for coordination of unit labour costs instead, following observations of how economic growth in Europe closely follows wage growth.

Calling to Arms But Leaving Ammunition Behind

Reviewed by Michele Chang

Written in an accessible style, this hybrid treatment risks not engaging extensively enough with economic theory (there are not a lot of references for the various economic arguments they mention, for example) to convince those who are not already sympathetic to their cause.

Out of Sight, Out of Mind: Neglecting Health Inequalities in Germany

By Nadine Reibling

Unlike other rich countries in Europe, such as the United Kingdom, Denmark, or the Netherlands, Germany has no comprehensive political strategy or program that specifically aims to reduce such inequalities. Political attempts to address health inequalities are limited to small health promotion initiatives targeted at socially disadvantaged groups.