Keywords: Russia; youth movements; Putin; discourse; Nashi; Set’
This article examines the pro-Kremlin youth movement Nashi (2005-2012) – the hitherto largest youth organization since the Soviet-era Komsomol – in order to elucidate the background of changes that have appeared in the Kremlin’s symbolic politics since 2012. Nashi’s disappearance from Russia’s political scene by the summer of 2012 can be seen as an elementary part of the crisis that the Kremlin faced with the largescale protests that shook Russia’s major cities in the winter of 2011/2012. However, Nashi’s negative image did not fi rst appear in Russia with Putin’s decreased popularity and the beginning of the large-scale protests; rather, such a negative image has been manifested throughout the existence of pro-Kremlin youth formations supporting Putin’s political leadership, before and after Nashi. Rather than demonstrating a wellplanned and calculated insistence on patriotism and moral conservatism, the history of the whole pro-Putin youth movement indicates that it has continuously struggled with its public image ever since its idol, President Putin, appeared in Russia’s political arena. By focusing on Nashi’s online writings as its major voice, the author exemplifies the basic and unsolved dilemma of governmental mobilization – the tension between didactics and stimulation – that is crystallized in the movement’s political communication. After that, in a short excursion on Nashi’s successor, the project Set’, the author’s aim is to pinpoint how the ‘exit’ from Nashi’s communicative dilemma, in line with the Kremlin’s symbolic politics since 2012, appears as a proliferation of Putin’s personality.
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Keywords: Soviet Army Monument; use of urban space; transformation of public Space; social resistance; creative resistance; street art; right to the city; everyday practices
The Soviet Army Monument in Sofi a has been the subject of a variety of public debates and controversies for decades. While some focus on its meaning and location in the city centre, arguing about its potential removal, new generations use the place, ascribing it new meanings and interpretations. Confronting the power discourse, civic initiatives such as gay pride parades, marijuana decriminalization events, and techno parades, use the symbolic meaning of the place to demand respect of human rights and freedom of expression. On the other hand, it has evolved as a medium for street art’s social criticism and contemporary art actions focused on broader issues such as the conscious use of public space by citizens, thereby provoking public debates on the contemporary way of living in the city.Meanwhile, young citizens have been transforming the space in a more casual way through everyday practices like hanging out, practicing urban sports, and partying. All these appropriations reinterpret the monument and the surrounding park, converting it into a place of freedom, alternative lifestyles, and anti-consumerism. The uses of public space as an act of resistance reconcile social and political consciousness and leisure in a bottom-up search for ‘humane’ places created by people for people.
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Keywords: Ukraine; student movements; Maidan; Revolution on Granite; Orange Revolution; Euromaidan; Revolution of Dignity
This article explores the role of students as actors during protests in Ukraine. It focuses primarily on the 2013-2014 Euromaidan revolution, but uses a broader historical context and comparison with the so-called Revolution on Granite in 1990 and the Orange Revolution in 2004. While it demonstrates that students were on the forefront of all three major upheavals, the article underlines the key differences between the three ‘revolutions’. The Euromaidan protests and the ensuing Revolution of Dignity are chronicled and subsequently analysed from the point of view of students’ actions. The article examines why students were not able to leave their mark, even though they had in fact spearheaded the protests. It points to the absence of a clear set of demands, the ambiguous role played by new social media, and the lack of organizational structures within the student movement. More so, the article concludes that though there were certainly similarities between Euromaidan and the other protest movements in the so-called global protest wave since 2008, it was foremost the experience of previous maidans that framed the protests in Ukraine.
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Keywords: student occupations; instrumental rationality; value rationality; civic protests; public action
This article aims to analyze the Bulgarian student occupations in 2013 in terms of two different rationalities - instrumental rationality and value rationality - which were referred to respectively by the opponents and the supporters of the protests in order to justify their account of them. The analysis elaborates a typology of the anti-protest rhetoric, distinguishing three main types: the fi rst insisted on the opposition between ‘moral’ and ‘social’, and criticized the protests as being based on an ‘abstract’ and ‘hazy’ moralism; the second treated the protests as a direct or indirect expression of private interests; the third claimed the protests were just a means to a particular end, be it that of the oligarchy or of the protesters themselves. The final part of the article argues against these instrumentalist approaches to the protests of Bulgarian students and introduces another perspective, suggested by Albert Hirschman in his analysis of the meaning of collective public action. According to Hirschman, public action should not be evaluated on the basis of its immediate results, because its value consists in the very act of protesting which educates and constitutes citizens as a critical civic community.
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Keywords: anti-government protests; politicized justice; protest radicalization; prosecution of corruption; Bulgaria; Ukraine; Euromaidan
For several months in 2013-2014, thousands of Ukrainians and Bulgarians participated in anti-government protests. However, the outcomes could not be more different. The Bulgarian government politically survived #DANSwithme, while Euromaidan precipitated President Yanukovych’s fl ight from Ukraine in late February 2014. Why did #DANSwithme gradually dissipate, while Euromaidan escalated into the worst episode of political violence since Ukraine’s independence? We know that medium levels of repression applied inconsistently during protests can lead to radicalization and violence. But we do not know whether the judiciary’s behaviour before and during the protests could affect the likelihood of an escalation towards violence. This article proposes a complementary explanation of protest radicalization, which posits that recent, unambiguous, and effective use of a pliable judiciary by political incumbents to punish and undermine the opposition raises the odds that both sides will engage in violence. Politicized selective justice raises the stakes of victory both for the government and for the protesters, and reduces the possibility of a compromise. In Bulgaria, where the judiciary, albeit politicized, has not been effectively used to undermine political opponents, protesters perceived the government’s attempts to engage in legal persecution as a hassle and the chances of imprisonment as remote. Neither should the Oresharski government have expected to be prosecuted in the event of losing offi ce. In Ukraine, by contrast, the judiciary had a clear recent track record of politicized selective justice both against protest participants and high-level politicians. Former PM Yuliya Tymoshenko and another Orange Revolution main actor and former minister of interior, Yuriy Lutsenko, served lengthy prison sentences. Consequently, both the leaders of the opposition and Yanukovych and his coterie probably expected that imprisonment would be inevitable if they did not come out as winners of the Euromaidan standoff.
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Keywords: #DANSwithme; power/knowledge; Foucault; Habermas; democracy; post-socialism; totalitarianism; Bulgaria; public sphere; politics; freedom; discourse
#DANSwithme is the longest-lasting anti-government protest in the history of Bulgaria. Acting as a temporary intervention into the urban fabric of Sofi a, the protest was a battle for the access to truth in the public sphere. Through this battle, a particular discursive critique and practical critical ethos were developed, which were aimed at uncovering the overarching relations of power and dominant systems of truth hidden behind the regime of a façade democracy in Bulgaria. It is argued in this paper that #DANSwithme functioned as a specifi c kind of diagnosis of the present because it generated distinct battles for the access to truth both about the present through the past and about the present through the future.
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Keywords: city; public; traffic; protest; everyday life; politics/policy
How politics was swallowed up by policies, both conceptually and as an orientation of practical social action, how policies in turn appeared to be just another name for administrative governance: Sofi a’s general public had the rare chance to learn that by experience. On 14 June 2013, thousands of looded Sofia’s Nezavisimost (Independence) Square, called Lenin Square before 1989, to reclaim it from what public spaces turn into when they are dominated by the everyday mode of social being together: that is, traffic intersections. The total domination of the everyday had made traffic and garbage the main reference points in shared social living. After 14 June 2013, however, the outrageous appointment of a highly controversial public figure to a top government position subsumed the fractured role-performances of a signifi cant number of Sofia residents under the totalizing force of their civic identifi cation and drove them to protest against the current way of governance. This disrupted the totalization of everydayness and enabled the reappropriation of former public spaces. This ecstatic mode of reappropriation, however, cannot resist the forces of routinization for long. The everydayinevitably strikes back.
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Keywords: : Istanbul; global city; urban branding; right to the city; Gezi protests
This article discusses the protests of the summer of 2013 in Istanbul as a struggle for the discursive hegemony over the city’s past. In the context of developing Istanbul into a global city, the administration attempted to impose a vision of the city’s past as an Islamic imperial capital in conjunction with Ottoman imperial glory and neoliberal economics. This clashed with competing visions of the city as an Eastern Roman capital, multicultural, a resident-centred cosmopolis, a theatre of a modernist Turkish state, or a site for leftist struggle suppressed in blood. Gezi Park stood for the right to the city (Lefebvre) articulated through these historical visions.
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Keywords: democracy; revolution; uprising; social movement; Occupy; Gez; Arab Spring
This article examines the uprisings since 2011 through a global lens. It focuses on a form that has become common to all: the continuous occupation of public space. Beginning in 2011, people from all walks of life came to the central squares of the world’s cities and formed various semi-permanent sites of protest. The article assesses the historical lineage and signifi cance of these public occupations and discusses their impact for our understandings of revolution, democracy, and their interrelation. What happened during these uprisings, how the people who were present took part in them, offers a radically different version of democracy, in theory and practice, from the liberal representative one that has become hegemonic today. This article will underscore how this alternate vision of a democratic society is intimately tied to a new form of contentious politics, one predicated on occupation and arrest rather than movement and dispersal. To do so, it highlights how these prisings have called into question two assumptions common to the liberal understanding of contemporary politics: the association between democracy and representative government; and the association betweensocial struggle and the category of movement. In this context, the article challenges the continued use of the term social movement to defi ne contentious political struggle in the 21st century and makes the case for a theory and practice of social arrest. It argues that a politics of social arrest has come to defi ne the global occupations of public space since 2011, a politics that has turned these spaces into immanent sites of democratic self-institution.
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Keywords: refugee crisis; refugee camps; Middle East; Europe; space of exception; state of exception; displacement; asylum seeker
This article revisits conclusions from my earlier ‘The Refugee and the City: Is the Camp Indeed a Space of Exception?’ (Critique & Humanism 42/2013). There, I analyzed Michel Agier’s perspective of the refugee camp as a space of exception (a concept, in turn, based on Giorgio Agamben’s ‘state of exception’). My discussion then was driven by my own ethnographic material on Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, as opposed to the massive refugee camps in Africa which seemed to have been the base for Agier’s conceptualization. However, in 2015, hundreds of thousands of refugees entered Europe, in what the European media and many of its governments proclaimed to be a ‘refugee crisis in Europe’. This crisis rhetoric bears resemblance with that of the‘state of exception’, representing the suspension of law and politics. But beyond media and governmental rhetoric, is Europe indeed facing a crisis and, if so, what is its nature? Is Europe on the brink of a state of exception?
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Keywords: educational justice; epistemic justice; luck egalitarianism; treshold egalitarianism; respect egalitarianism; recognition
The goal of this paper is to identify and justify a normative principle that allows for an identifi cation of inequalities incompatible with educational justice. To reach that goal, three alternative versions of egalitarianism are discussed: luck egalitarianism, threshold (minimalist) egalitarianism, and respect egalitarianism. Respect egalitarianism can be closely linked to the model of epistemic justice, which was recently the subject of intensive, far-reaching discussions in the fi eld of philosophy of education. This paper argues that the approaches of both luck egalitarianism and threshold egalitarianism are inadequate to satisfy its aim. Luck egalitarianism entails the ‘bottomless pit problem’ that seems to be conceptually and politically unsolvable. Additionally, luckegalitarians tend to interpret education as a positional, distributive good whose primary value is extrinsic. This stance ignores that education is foremost concerned with the growth of knowledge – a non-positional good whose worth is primarily intrinsic. On the other hand, threshold egalitarians do not offer a conceptual means of discriminating between just and unjust educational inequalities that lie above the capability threshold required by individuals to participate in the political life of society and/or to live a life of dignity. The approach of respect egalitarianism avoids these shortcomings. According to this approach, the most crucial form of educational injustice is treating select groups of students with disrespect by disregarding their beliefs, experiences, ideals, and achievements, as well as their knowledge-ability. Educational injustice appears as a lack of both empathy and cognitive respect toward students. To overcome this educational injustice, educational institutions should design and implement forms of teaching that equally include the beliefs and experiences of all students. Teachers should use these beliefs and experiences as a point of departure for addressing academic classroom content. Social, economic, and knowledge inequalities between students would no longer be an issue of educational injustice if principles of respect in formal education were fully implemented.
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Keywords: socialist realism; Cold War; ideological concepts
The reflections in this article concern the creation, definition, and use of a concept that, while supposedly pertaining to the sphere of literature and the arts, was central to the ideology and culture of socialist societies: socialist realism. The article discusses transformations in Western reactions to the vocabulary and practice of socialist realism after its introduction as a formal doctrine in the USSR in the early 1930s, and after the creation of the Soviet Bloc in the late 1940s. The author argues that initial attempts by external observers to make sense of the term and related policies were refl ective of the semantics of the early Cold War in general. Exploring the vicissitudes of its (mis)understanding by Western journalists, intellectuals and politicians can help us understandthe mechanism behind much of intercultural and political communication between the two camps.
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Keywords: political culture; populism; nationalism; Greece; Russia
This article concentrates on the phenomenon of Russophilia in Greece and situates it within the context of national populism. Numerous political analysts and journalists have not examined Russophilia in Greece as a component of a national populism which cuts across the traditional ‘left-right’ spectrum. This research is very topical at a time when Russia is emerging as a competitor to the EU and the Kremlin is searching for political allies throughout Central and Southeast Europe. This study demonstrates that the foundations of public russophilia in Greece are feebler than many external commentators tend to estimate. A rather ahistorical and almost ‘Messianic’ notion of Russophilia interweaves with national populism in the light of the dispute with the EU and Germany over the management of the economic crisis.
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Keywords: Uganda; Museveni; the Movement; regime durability; political parties; elections
The security and political context of Uganda’s 2016 general elections suggest that in his fifth term in office, President Yoweri Museveni will most likely face higher levels of civil unrest, political violence, and security volatility. Is Museveni’s Uganda, once given as an example of stability, drifting into a regime crisis that will inevitably lead to a political breakdown? Drawing upon the concept of ‘competitive authoritarianism’ developedby Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way, this paper assesses the sources of durability of Museveni’s regime at the beginning of his fourth decade in power. By explaining the coercive (material) and ‘soft’ (non-material) sources of Museveni’s governance, it seeks to contribute to the current discussions about Uganda’s political future.
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Keywords: e-entrepreneurship; e-commerce; IT policies; business and legal framework; public revenues;
Unlike “a classic” entrepreneurship that embodies ability of establishing, managing and developing a business that makes money at great risk and innovation, e-entrepreneurship is managing the same business but exclusively on the Internet. In this paper, we try to functionally link basically two distinctive notions of e-business and e-commerce, so that we can examine the thesis according to which the promotion of positive system of public revenues in the direction of legitimizing new forms of business would contribute to economic growth of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The development of e-entrepreneurship needs the existence of both economic and regulatory conditions. This paper deals with the issue of the level of the development and possibilities of implementation of information technology in e-entrepreneurship in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Through analysis method we try to examine the current state of IT in economic and legal system of Bosnia and Herzegovina, with special emphasis on analysis of current formal policies of IT development in 2003 and 2014, and also using the GEM indicators. The paper especially stresses the state of technical prerequisites for the e-entrepreneurship development in BiH: such as Internet (number of Internet users, the speed, the number of Internet service providers), the scientific and educational level in the area of IT, and legal regulations, etc.. However, due to inability to obtain data on the exact numbers of e-companies in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and due to the fact that these companies de facto exist and work successfully, the analysis is done through a case study, where is specifically shown what is necessary for establishment, management and development of e-companies in BiH and what obstacles are facing e-entrepreneurs during that process. On the other hand, an inadequate legal framework for this segment of operations inevitably results in reduced public revenues, as a result of lack of preparation of fiscal authorities to the environment where borders and common objects of taxation lose their original meaning. Law-enforcement authorities are facing with the challenge of understanding the nature of Internet transactions, and the new ways of doing business, as well as challenge of modifying the existing tax rules. Vice versa, the evolution of this type of business imposes the need of adjusting the public authorities to the new economic flows, where some of the arguments a contrario e-businesses (such as decreased revenues on the basis of tax residency, creating a tax gap, the negative effects on the tax base, etc. ), should also be in focus. In the context of the economic and legal system of Bosnia and Herzegovina, we think that improving the existing legislative framework regarding e-business would increase the growth of public revenue, especially if we take into account the administrative barriers for existing and potential taxpayers. Another aspect of the problem that needs attention is certainly the improvement of fiscal surveillance, as well as harmonization of public revenue delegated to lower political and territorial organizations in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
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Keywords: non-contractual damages; applicable law; foreign element; international jurisdiction;
The subject of the paper is legally and properly deal with cases with a foreign element in non-contractual damages. Past practice is not based on the proper application of private international law, which often leads to illegal decisions. The courts are not used correctly all the criteria for determining the existence of a foreign element, which results in determining that there is no foreign element though although there. Also are not rare cases where they will not examine whether there is a foreign element, already applicable laws of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Wrong treatment may be prescribed and the decision of the Constitutional Court Bosnia and Herzegovina, No. AP 428/04 of 23.03.2005. the year in which it did not examine all the criteria for the existence of a foreign element, respectively neglected the criteria of subject and object of the damages. In practice there are and misinterpretations of this decision. Because of this, the paper indicates that the criteria are legally relevant in determining the existence of a foreign element. How would court correctly applied the substantive law, should determine which laws is applicable, after having established that there is a foreign element. In these cases, the courts should take into account the rules for determining the international jurisdiction of the court Bosnia and Herzegovina, as well as treatment after the court established did not that international jurisdiction.
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Keywords: marital property regime;European Commission on Family Law; Principles on property relations between spouses;
Subject of this work are marital property relations, which are special property relations whose features are conditioned by the specificity of the connection between marital partners as owners of the property. In the legal system of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina simultaneously exist two regimes of property relations: statutory and contractual. Statutory property regime is applied if the marital partners have not chosen to apply contractual property regime. Commission for the European family law has developed comprehensive set of principles for the two matrimonial property regimes: participation in acquisitions regime and community of acquisitions regime. Both of these regimes seem equally acceptable for harmonisation or even unification of family law property relations between matrimonial partners in Europe. Both of these regimes are egalitarian. Each of these regimes is firmly connected with rights and duties of matrimonial partners and possibilities of conclusion of the marital contract.
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Keywords: Law on Prohibition of Discrimination; discrimination; subjects of discrimination; grounds of discrimination; personal characteristics; the reference person; positive measures; positive discrimination;
The introduction of anti-discrimination law in the legislation of Bosnia and Herzegovina is certainly a significant step that puts Bosnia and Herzegovina on its way to the membership of EU, but also makes an important step forward in eradicating of social inequality and injustice caused by years of prejudice towards the other and different. Regulating anti-discrimination issues through legal framework provides the legal basis to protect any individual or group of people in our society, but, only understanding of these concepts provides full and effective protection, which is why it is necessary to pre-acquainted with the very concept of discrimination, its subjects, grounds, and permitted measures of protection and its justifications. Of course, it is, in addition to theoretical knowledge, necessary to have insight in practical approach of the anti-discrimination legislation, and that will be the topic of this work.
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