Economic pressures combined with growing climate impacts mean that the next five years will be crucial for the European Green Deal. But with gains for the right in the European Parliament and growing pushback against environmental policies, how can Europe maintain its climate goals ..read more

Rituals as collective practices: why rituals offer solutions to the problems of our rationalist age; an example of ritualism cum eco-activism; artivism and AIDS campaigning in the 90s; and how sorcery can save the planet ..read more

The ongoing genocide in Gaza has galvanized a persistent, creative and disruptive global uprising for Palestine, including workers and activists shutting down arms factories and disrupting trade, and youth-led university encampments and national protests. Yet this dynamic movement in response to Israel’s relentless mass killing, devastation and displacement of Palestinians in Gaza since 7 October 2023 has been met with increasing systematic repression. In contravention of all democratic standards, students and staff have faced vilification, police brutality and arbitrary detention in the USA ..read more

The bouquets are so fresh and abundant in Lviv’s Field of Mars that bees are foraging cut cornflower blooms. Walking the stretch of this improvised wartime burial site – an extension of the carpark near the inner-city Lychakiv Cemetery – I observe numerous mourners tending their loved ones’ graves amongst all the commemorative flags. Their concentrated activity creates individualized plots: framed portraits of soldiers often enthusiastically posed, soft toys for missing parents, potted chrysanthemums mulched to last, well-rooted sunflowers having already reached full height; the physical rema ..read more

In May 2022, Iryna Khamayko started an educational center for Ukrainian teenagers seeking refuge in Austria after Russia’s full-scale invasion. The idea was clear: to ensure a safe educational environment, equip the students with the German language, and make sure they could continue their education. Today, the Free People Educational Hub in Vienna is still open. Two of the school’s students, Lena and Maria, interview Irena Khamayko in this first episode of the Knowledgeable Youth podcast series. They discuss language barriers, the Austrian school system and the challenges of making friends i ..read more

One morning in April 2016, 27 private security agents arrived on the grounds of a rundown warehouse in Vitry-sur-Seine, a Parisian suburb, to evict the 29 people living there. All of them were Romanian citizens of Roma ethnicity. The agents came with three dogs and no judicial mandate. Daniel, a 25-year-old migrant, his wife, and their baby were among the residents who were told to leave the premises immediately. The warehouse was a 20-minute walk from the centre of Vitry, and the site of a train stop on the future line 15 of the Parisian metro. Vitry is just one of 45 towns that will be ..read more

A non-event, a continuity: growing rapeseed in Ukraine. For the most part, it’s an unsensational succession of seasonal repetitions: hybridized seeds are sown late summer into nitrogen-treated soil; phosphorus fertilizer is added in autumn to strengthen roots; the plants mature in spring, absorbing another dose of nitrogen; four-petalled yellow flowers, blooming late spring into summer, are sprayed with insecticide; once the plant has dried out and the seeds have darkened, the crop is harvested – shortly before the growing season restarts. The war has disrupted some of this, but farming rapes ..read more

Displacement is a bitter muse, but a very powerful one. The experience of exile has played a huge role for thousands of years in literary history, making way for the likes of Hannah Arendt and Edward Said to explore its multi-facetedness, to name just a couple of the millions of authors who have contributed to exile literature. The sorrowful memoirs of those who had been forced out of their homes have inspired theories surrounding language, identity, and memory. Should an exile write only in their mother tongue or in adoptive languages, or maybe rather in the reigning lingua franca? How can ..read more

In the June issue of Turkish literary journal Varlık – titled ‘Loneliness in the age of information’ – contributors attempt an accounting of what we’ve gained and lost in the transition to digital spaces and technologies. For many, what has been discarded are the subtleties and comforts of communication mediated through the human body. İlknur Doğu Öztürk makes the case for more physical and embodied communication. Human interaction relies on body language, tone of voice and other elements that are absent from social media, she writes.Stripped of those signals, online communication favours ‘hi ..read more

As Russia’s attempt to reestablish its ‘external empire’ via its war on Ukraine enters its third year, Osteuropa focuses on the relations between Moscow and its ‘internal empire’, the myriad republics, oblasts and territories that make up the Russian Federation. Though a federal system was enshrined in the Russian Constitution of 1993, ‘in reality, Russia has for the past twenty years been a de facto imperium’, note the editors in their preface, In an article on ‘Russia’s internal empire’, political scientist Andreas Heinemann-Grüder lays out a capsule history of Russian federalism in the pos ..read more