Cofiwch Dryweryn (remember Tryweryn). The walls exhort us in bright red and white, from Llanrhystud in West Wales to Chicago. And the writing’s not only on the wall: it’s on a sticker on a lamppost outside Camden Market in North...
For three decades after the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991, political science and practical politics in Western Europe and North America very rarely addressed Moscow’s efforts to ‘reintegrate’ the ‘post-Soviet space’ (i.e., the former republics of the Union of Soviet...
Sometimes it is almost impossible to escape a feeling of wonder for the abundance of life in our world. Especially on a summer’s day – when bumblebees buzz among flower petals, grasshoppers play in the dry grass, blue-winged butterflies flutter...
Languages’ similarities are not rooted in a special genetics for language. They follow from culture and common information-processing solutions and have their own individual evolutionary stories. Daniel Everett, How Languages Began Nothing great can be expressed in Belarusian, it...
Historians are generally wary of commemorations – fireworks that dazzle the eye only to fade in the same instant. But they are also aware that ‘round number anniversaries’ can provide a unique opportunity to think about contemporary societies in their...
Ever since Donald Trump’s victory in last year’s US presidential election, there has been frantic speculation about what it is the American Right really wants. The tendency is to look to the leadership for clues. Who belongs to the inner...
The Syrian writer, journalist and dissident Yassin al-Haj Saleh is one of the most prominent voices of the Syrian Revolution. Imprisoned as a communist by the Hafez al-Assad regime from 1980 to 1996, after his release he became an influential...
The following text is a chapter from Decolonising Art: Beyond the Obvious (2025), a publication that summarizes and documents a public programme of the same name from the Ukrainian Pavilion at the 59th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale....
Every year in Poland we ritualistically lament the country’s low-level readership, but we are yet to see the state take any meaningful action. What are the consequences of this lack of regulation, when readership is clearly not important enough for...
The student protests in Serbia have persisted for seven months, yielding widespread and diverse effects. All state universities are still blocked and primary and secondary school teachers ceased work from January to April 2025. Lawyers went on strike throughout the...
