East & Southeast Europe

With the return of former Prime Minister Fico, old authoritarian patterns could resurface in the upcoming elections. However, progressives also have a chance to win.

The German government is in the process of spelling out a feminist foreign and development policy. This article, aimed at contributing to policy changes based on the new paradigm, suggests how Germany’s policy towards Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan, whose political relevance has increased for Berlin due to Russia’s war in Ukraine, could become feminist.

For many years, Western players have been going all out to placate the populistic-nationalist players and their destructive ideologies: yet their questionable methods of appeasement and undemocratic interventions have ended up bolstering the very powers that have come to pose a threat to peace.

In this far-ranging interview, our office director, Nino Lejava talks to NIN Award winning author and director of the KROKODIL independent cultural center, Vladimir Arsenijević, about the historical and political foundations of Serbia's current geopolitical as well as cultural position with regard to its immediate neighbors, as well as Europe.

The short documentary film “Kapitän Wakusch” or in english: “Captain Wakusch” is a poetical portrait of the German-Georgian writer and philosopher Giwi Margwelashvili born in 1927 in Berlin, died 2020 in Tbilisi. A permanent stranger and migrant between Germany and Georgia, East and West, reality and literature. 

Parallels between the American "New Right" and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s brand of illiberalism extend beyond CPAC and his relationship with Trump.  

The need for practitioners and history promoters to do historical work “beyond the walls of the traditional classroom” is constantly growing. One of the main takeaways from our recent study trip to Berlin is that public and open discussions about the past and remembering are crucial for building future welfare.

Georgia and the EU are standing at a historic crossroads. Which factors affect their abilities to bring the membership bid on track, and what should the EU’s response look like?

On April 28, Montenegro got a new, minority Government. Prime Minister Dritan Abazović’s cabinet, however, is one of the largest in the country’s recent, three-decades long history of multi-party democracy.

Hungarian foreign policy has been standing on two pillars in the past decade: building multilateral ties with great economic powers in order to boost trade, foreign investment, and development, and in the meantime maintaining traditional commitments to EU and NATO allies in the security and defence realm. However, with the tensions between Russia and Ukraine escalating to a war, Hungary has had to change its long-established attitudes overnight. In such a situation, any pro-Russian stance and balancing became practically impossible.