A collaboration with The New School & the European Democracy Institute
 
Category: <span>Dispatches</span>

Dispatches

Category: Dispatches

Neighbors Respond to the Russian Attack on Ukraine I

Written by: , ,

Perspectives from Romania, Lithuania ans Slovakia During a regular meeting of Democracy Seminar, the worldwide committee of democratic correspondence, last Thursday morning, (February 24th), we discussed the unfolding crisis in Ukraine and agreed to write up and share our quick responses from our different locations. In this post, perspectives from Romania, Lithuania, and Slovakia, sent to us soon after the meeting. Jeffrey C. Goldfarb   Maria Bucur: Romania …

The Nation and Putin, Revisited

Written by:

Photo by kremlin.ru I have to admit that I’ve been suffering from fatigue and depression about the state of our polity, and finding it difficult to write. However, the combination of the terrible prospect that the 1914 Guns of August have now become the bombs and tanks of February 2022, and might yet become the Nuclear Weapons of the 21st Century. This fearful prospect, together with the unfathomable …

Volodymyr Zelenskyy, The Hero We Now Need

Written by:

Volodymyr Zelenskyy is a 44-year-old man who until a few years ago was a professional actor and comedian. In 2019 he was catapulted to the Presidency of Ukraine, in an election in which he stood against corruption and ran as the leader of a party, “Servant of the People,” named after the television series in which he had starred. An unlikely politician, and an even less likely statesman, …

Medusa of War

Written by:

Putin on Ukraine Photo by Ad Meskens It was the most terrifying speech I heard in my adult life. These twenty-eight minutes activated my inherited memory of war’s destructiveness. The calm with which Putin spoke was leaden. Even the fact that he was sitting behind a desk, with white low-tech phones on his left showed his determination. I don’t need to show off, to raise my voice, he …

Putin’s Attack on Ukrainian Freedom Must Be Opposed

Written by:

On November 4, 1956, Soviet tanks entered Budapest to perform the “fraternal task” of suppressing a short-lived popular revolt against the Soviet-installed Communist government and ending the shorter-lived reform government of Prime Minister Imre Nagy, who had committed the ultimate political sin: he had declared that Hungary would exit the Warsaw Pact. The Soviet “peacekeeping forces” spent the next week organizing a full-scale military assault against the Hungarian …

The News: History as Distraction

Written by:

Wednesday’s Child Is Full of Woe Vladimir Putin’s speech this week focused on the history of the Ukraine as a justification for Russian aggression argued that Ukraine was created by the Bolsheviks after the Russian Revolution as an administrative convenience and that it never was a “real” nation with a deep history of its own. Other heads of state in Europe and elsewhere panned the speech. Ingrida Simonyte, the …

People in the Swamp

Written by:

Notes from the Polish Border with Belarus The heavily policed Eastern borderlands of Poland, Podlachia, saw significant changes in the latter half of December. The number of police personnel and road checkpoints  began dwindling away. Previously, one could hardly drive ten kilometers without being stopped and being subject to inspection. Each car trunk, no matter how big the vehicle, was checked multiple times. In theory, judging from the …

Thinking with Hannah Arendt in Mainland China Today

Written by:

In mainland China today, Hannah Arendt has an important presence in both the academic and the public sphere. CNKI—China’s main academic database—records more than a thousand pieces of scholarly writings that have “Arendt” in their titles, dating back to the 1990s. Arendt is also among a small group of contemporary Western thinkers whose influence is beyond the boundaries of academic research. Concepts coined by Arendt, such as the …

The Politics of Small Things + the Internet (still) = Alternatives

Written by:

Reflections on the Democracy Seminar Launch We “zoomed” our launch event for the Democracy Seminar in December. We discussed the relationships between collaboration and democracy. The discussion featured Obaidullah Baheer from Afghanistan, Daniel Peres from Brazil, Karolina Wigura from Poland, Shireen Hassim from South Africa, and Jeffrey C. Isaac from the U.S.A., and a few dozen others joined us from around the world: watching, listening, and questioning the …

Three Tales about France and Eric Zemmour

Written by:

France’s presidential election will be held in April. Emmanuel Macron will seek re-election. Will he be able to overcome the failures of his two predecessors, Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande, and restore the tradition of the long presidencies of François Mitterrand and Jacques Chirac? His biggest rivals are on the right, the most unpredictable of whom is Éric Zemmour. Éric Zemmour, the far-right candidate for the presidency of …