East & Southeast Europe

Over 50,000 Armenians have already fled Nagorno-Karabakh to Armenia following Azerbaijan's recent military offensive. Despite ongoing negotiations, further escalations could follow. What options do Germany and the EU have?

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.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine will bring flashbacks to millions of people in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, and Kosovo, who have all suffered massively under the regime of Serbian dictator Slobodan Milošević. In April 1992, Serb nationalists waged a war on my home country under a similar pretext as Putin did with Ukraine, denying its statehood, history, and national identity. Today, Bosnia and Herzegovina is in the worst crisis since the end of the war.

Not a dormant ethno-national conflict is the main problem in Bosnia. Rather, the source of crises since 1995 lies in the state’s weakness as well as a political class prone to corruption, nepotism, and abuse of power in the name of ill-defined ethnic interests. Is the Russian aggression on Ukraine a wake-up call for US and EU’s engagement in Bosnia?

The largest refugee movement since the Second World War now requires coordination throughout Europe.

We declare our full solidarity with Ukraine. We stand by the side of our Ukrainian partners and colleagues and, at the same time, by the side of our partners in Russian civil society who are beset by harsh repression.

This article weaves together an in-depth interview of a journalist and his family’s tribulations of urban flooding in the city of Karachi in Pakistan analysing various dynamics that merge erratic changing climate to faulty urban management. The article further explores the intergenerational loss due to climate change by retelling the protagonist’s experiences with family history and flooding. Socio-political elements are also discussed to shed light on the more sinister and systemic bottlenecks to urban planning and management that is more climate resilient and responsive. Finally, it merges Karachi’s most popular urban myth with climate change projections to show how people use storytelling to either fight against climate change or become complacent to its eventual disasters.

Germany leads as a destination country for migrants from Azerbaijan ahead of other European states. It is hard to provide an accurate number but according to various expert estimates, Germany is home to approximately 20 to 30 thousand Azerbaijani migrants. 

At the Eastern Partnership (EaP) summit on 15 December, Chancellor Scholz is to meet with high-ranking representatives of the EU, the member states and the EaP countries. How can the traffic light coalition contribute to a more effective Eastern Partnership?

Looking back at 16 years of Angela Merkel's Balkan policy, there were ups and downs, but the objective of eventually bringing Serbia closer to the EU has failed. It is now high time for a fresh, new start to Germany‘s relationship to the key enabler or blocker of a European future for the region - Serbia.

More than 50 people were injured in attacks on journalists and civil society in Tbilisi in early July in connection with Pride Week. The German Federal Government and the EU should strongly urge their Georgian partners to address the violence through prompt and comprehensive legal and political action.