Political Critique Archive

As a group of young female activists travels across Europe — part of the Transeuropa Caravans project — they carry a banner that defiantly reads: “Cities have become the field of the social battle: of resistance and of innovation, a place where protests spark and mutual cooperation grows.” The premise of their pan-European initiative is […]

Weakened by 9 years of authoritarian rule and a lack of resources, the opposition was able to show that even small successes can lay the foundations for the future.

As we walk by the hospital in the early afternoon drizzle, Małgorzata Adamczyk points to an empty parking space across the street. “That’s where they usually park the van with the posters,” she says. There’s nobody there today, but Adamczyk, a local feminist activist, explains that anti-abortion protestors will usually camp out in that lot […]

Two seventeen-year-old boys, originally from Iran, stand motionless in front of a police vehicle in the wasteland near the Croatian town of Korenica. Two officers put on black gloves and begin their search before loading the boys into a car and driving to the local police station. These are just two of the thousands of […]

September sees protests in the Czech Republic and a fight over abortion in Slovakia.

Sitting in the narrow Warsaw apartment that doubles as an LGBT advocacy group’s headquarters, Stanisław Orszulak doesn’t feel confident about Poland — or even safe.  As a trans non-binary Pole, they are distressed by the increasingly hostile government rhetoric directed at members of the country’s LGBT community. “In our current climate, people don’t want the […]

The authors predict that Poland currently faces three potential political scenarios.

In Europe and the United States, the far-right continues to gain political ground. And yet — despite increasingly frequent episodes of racist violence and the breakdown of the rule of law — acts of dissent remain scattered, limited to internet bubbles, and scarcely offer opportunities concrete change. But how can citizens make a difference when […]

To clean or not to clean Prague’s statue of Soviet Marshal Ivan Stepanovich Konev — a man known locally as “the Bloody Marshal” for his role in the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary —  keeps getting in the way of spray cans and flying buckets of paint. Now — apparently sick of constantly having to […]

Despite the spread of patriarchal, neoconservative politics in Central Europe, the last years have also brought a growing awareness of women’s rights in the region. Green European Journal spoke with Réka Kinga Papp, editor-in-chief of Eurozine, about issues of gender in Hungary under Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s illiberal regime, the impact of #MeToo in the […]