Barbara Törnquist-Plewa & Magdalena Góra
Barbara Törnquist-Plewa is Professor of Eastern and Central European Studies; director for the Centre for European Studies, Lund University, Sweden. She specializes in cultural studies and contemporary history, focusing on studies of identities, collective memory, and nationalism.
Magdalena Góra is Assistant professor at the Institute of European Studies, Jagiellonian University, Cracow. PhD in political science. Her focus is on the EU role in international relations, Polish foreign policy and processes of collective identity formation in the context of the EU enlargement.
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Articles by Barbara Törnquist-Plewa & Magdalena Góra
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This paper is based on two arguments: First, “grim storytelling” only gives access to part of the story and therefore needs to be supplemented with “better stories” — stories that generate an understanding of human potentiality, creativity, resilience, interconnectedness and shared “vulnerability”. Second, the tendency towards “grim storytelling” in critical social sciences constitutes a major limitation for the possibilities of imagining and enacting the very transformations that Europe most urgently needs in order to enhance the European project.
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The article deals with samizdat writing in the GDR, which could not be published legally. Thus, authors published their critical texts on handbills and smaller booklets. The article shows forms of distribution and focuses the analysis on individual examples and actors.
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One out of four, and 1941 are two numbers everyone who went through the Soviet and post-Soviet schools in Belarus is familiar with. The former stands for the statistics of the Belarusians who died in the Great Patriotic War, the latter marks the year this war began. However, when I first came to Europe as a teenager, I was amazed to discover that no one actually knew either of my people’s heroism or our great victory. The war, as I found out then, did not even start in 1941 — nor was it defined as “patriotic”. Rather it was everyone’s — “world war” — with patriotism not attributed to nationalities.
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2015, amid the summer of migration, the house was founded by writers Sven and Elke Lager who got access to the building from the City Mission. The wish was to contribute with solutions for the topic on everyone’s lips: refugee integration. By then, Give Something Back To Berlin (GSBTB) had already made us a name in migrant support circles. Since 2013 we had built up a big grassroots movement of volunteering and skill-sharing all over
Berlin. GSBTB was by no means a refugee project, it was a migrant led-community project that simply reacted to the current needs of the city. One of the most pressing was for modern and human-centered activism supporting newcomers.
Also, meet the refugee helpers: Bärbel Heinrich shares her story when she was imprisoned for helping people escape the GDR.
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The journey to Ukraine is no longer measured in kilometers. After Ukraine closed its airspace, the trip demands new spontaneous, situational solutions to get there. Instead, travel can be measured by time — at least fifteen hours from Copenhagen to the western Ukrainian border, but it may be up to thirty hours or more. However, the most accurate measurement of the distance to Ukraine today is the level of closeness to all those people who are staying in Ukraine, in their own homes, and do not even think about surrender. From this point, Lviv is closer than ever.
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February 2023 will be remembered for a lavish propaganda event of the Russian government in Luzhniki stadium in Moscow dedicated to the anniversary of the second Russian invasion of Ukraine. This year it was combined with a celebration of the most significant regular ideological commemoration — a day of “The Defender of Otechestvo
[the Fatherland]. Using the propaganda transfer technique, Russia frames the invasion as a fight against the “Ukrainian
Nazis”, providing parallels with winning WWII, thys inheriting Soviet traditions intended to increase feelings of patriotism and national pride.
One of the key narratives promoted by Russian propaganda is the “protection of the people of Donbas”, in particular using propaganda materials with children, especially those deported from Ukraine.
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Is radical Ukrainian nationalism disappearing? However marginal but playing a decisive role in the resistance against
Russian aggression, along with the rest of Ukrainian society, this political movement has suffered terrible losses that raise questions about its ability to maintain itself in the post-war political arena. This forward-looking essay examines the multiple challenges posed by this issue, arguing that the Far-right in Ukraine could perhaps find in the war an undeniable opportunity for a renaissance
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Street artists have demonstrated their condemnation of Russia’s invasion of a neighbor with murals, both in Ukraine and abroad. The most famous of these artists is Banksy. On a wall of what was once a kindergarten, he has sprayed the image of a child in a judo match overcoming a seemingly far more powerful opponent (an adult with some resemblance to the Russian leader). Although such works of street artists in Ukraine sometimes also show Putin, children are a common theme – often a girl with two stiff braids. Some of these works are presented in this essay, considering the role of the child in them, seeking to understand the role of art in protest as an appropriation and reconfiguration of public space.
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The war against Ukraine sank the civil society of Russia into despair. The dreams of turning the country with a centuries long tradition of despotic power and imperialist foreign policy into a peaceful postmodern liberal democracy were brutally crushed. Alongside the tragedy of thousand Ukrainians, this full-scale invasion has meant a defeat of the Russian intellectuals, liberals, and political dissidents who had been trying for many years to persuade themselves and the outside world that the strange reality they inhabited was an inevitable part of being a transitional society. This defeat forced them out of their country. Cursed by their compatriots as “traitors” and by some public abroad1 unwilling to stand up to the criminal regime, the new Russian émigré are now trying to construct a new “Civitas Solis” in exile, a different future for themselves and their country which is supposed to rise in place of the apocalyptic darkness of the present.
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Since the beginning of Russia‘s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the repression of civil society has gradually intensified in Russia. During recent years political activism has been under threat and pressure, and in the last year activism has largely gone underground due to the escalating level of repression; therefore one sees few mass protests. The Russian authorities have consistently taken restrictive measures against any street protest, and the last permissible form (a single-person action) in the end also turns out to be almost impossible.
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Issue 2025, 4: