Europe & Central Asia Archives

Activism

A Year After Cuts to USAID, an Urgent Reminder from the Ukraine-Poland Border

Documentary photographer Nancy Richards Farese captures the effects of Russia’s war in Ukraine and the US’s shutdown of foreign aid

March 9, 2026 • by Nancy Richards Farese

In Przemyśl, a small city on the Ukrainian–Polish border, the train station has become something of a moral center. Late one November evening, fluorescent lights glare against steel rails as the night train from Kyiv pulls in late—again. The delay is familiar now. Russian forces bombed the rail line earlier ...

A Year After Cuts to USAID, an Urgent Reminder from the Ukraine-Poland Border

Democracy

It May Be the Last Time

Lithuanian art and culture resisting a takeover at the height of hybrid warfare

November 10, 2025 • by Edvardas Šumila

Recent developments in Lithuanian politics have produced a decisive, immediate, and spontaneous resistance from culture workers in various fields. The formation of a new coalition government led to the populist political project Nemuno Aušra (NA)—headed by the antisemitic politician Remigijus Žemaitaitis—being given control of the Ministry of Culture. Žemaitaitis has ...

Activism

Should Universities Just Leave?

How can institutions fostering open inquiry survive authoritarian assaults?

October 23, 2025 • by Anastasija Mladenovska

Over the past year, I have tracked the journeys of five universities caught in the crosshairs of authoritarian pressure: Central European University (CEU) in Hungary; the Higher School of Economics (HSE) and the European University at St. Petersburg (EUSP) in Russia; Nazarbayev University (NU) in Kazakhstan; and the American University ...

Europe & Central Asia

The Gospel According to Queer Russians

Sergey Khazov-Cassia’s newly translated novel reimagines Christ’s story as a parable of queer suffering and resistance in Putin’s Russia

October 22, 2025 • by Katherine Kelaidis

For more than a decade, Russia—and its client states like Chechnya—have carried out the brutal persecution of sexual and gender minorities, particularly gay men, with tacit approval from the Russian Orthodox Church. This violence is framed as a defense of “traditional family values,” part of a nostalgic vision of Russia ...

Education

Intellectual Violence

The militarization of education in Russia

October 22, 2025 • by Andrei Kolesnikov

In the age of mature Putinism, violence and control, accompanied by a new morality based on so-called “traditional values,” have become crucial instruments for managing Russian society. The use of the education system and cultural institutions to indoctrinate the population—above all young people—is a form of violence, only intellectual rather ...

Europe & Central Asia

Germany Holds Up a Mirror for America

The rise of the AfD, “Alternative for Germany,” now the nation’s most popular political party

October 6, 2025 • by Bruno Heidlberger

On May 2, 2025, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio posted on X that Germany was “not a democracy, but a tyranny in disguise.” True extremism, he said, lay not in the “popular AfD” but in the “deadly immigration policy of the establishment with open borders, which the AfD rejects.” Rubio's ...

Europe & Central Asia

What’s Lost Along the Polish-Belarusian border

In an ancient forest, tourists and people on the move walk parallel paths

June 26, 2025 • by Inga Hajdarowicz

On the narrow roads of the Białowieża Forest, the last primeval forest in Europe, military vehicles occupy the space with the roar of their engines. A line of cars on the forest road signals the presence of a mobile police checkpoint at the Polish-Belarusian borderland. A border guard carefully stares ...

What’s Lost Along the Polish-Belarusian border

Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence–Based Aesthetics of Dissent in Turkey

AI offers an opportunity for protest in a political environment where even seemingly innocuous content can carry risks

June 18, 2025 • by Selin Bengi Gümrükçü

The ongoing protests in Turkey, triggered by the detention of Istanbul’s mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu, following the annulment of his university diploma by Istanbul University, constitute the largest cycle of political mobilization Turkey has witnessed since the Gezi Park protests in 2013. Even though the mayor was in prison, his party, ...

Artificial Intelligence–Based Aesthetics of Dissent in Turkey

Activism

Leo Tolstoy Salutes the Student Movement in Russia

When Russian students decided to stop studying at the institutions where they get educated by the whip

May 15, 2025 • by Inessa Medzhibovskaya and Leo Tolstoy

Some lines written very long ago seem to have been written for the current moment. At the University of St. Petersburg in the spring of 1899, students protested the government’s policies and their pressure on university administration. Upon learning about student unrest and being urged by student delegates who were ...

Leo Tolstoy Salutes the Student Movement in Russia

Europe & Central Asia

Violence and Policing Minorities

Why do the Polish public trust the police?

March 12, 2025 • by Agnieszka Kościańska

Before the 2020 pro-choice protests [in Poland], the police maintained a high level of social trust despite a series of cases of excessive violence reported by the media. For instance, in 1996 the police entered a Romanian Roma camp in Warsaw at 2 a.m., demolishing it and arresting everybody they ...

Democracy

What Is Illiberal Democracy?

Scholars discuss Trump, Modi, and Erdoğan

February 20, 2025 • by Senem Aydin-Düzgit, Mark Frazier, Jeffrey C. Isaac and Pratap Bhanu Mehta

In November 2024, the India China Institute at The New School hosted the online panel "Trajectories of Authoritarianism in Democratic Regimes," which featured scholars Pratap Bhanu Mehta, Senem Aydin-Düzgit, and Jeffrey C. Isaac in conversation with moderator Mark W. Frazier about patterns of takeover, decay, and distrust of political institutions ...

Europe & Central Asia

Vladimir Putin, Man of Yesterday

While the global community dreams of the future, the Kremlin fixates on a retrotopia

February 19, 2025 • by Alex Rossen

In September 2024, the United Nations convened for the Summit of the Future. In it, diverse global communities came together to dream of the utopia tomorrow might offer. Yet as the Russian state declares its desire to restore the territorial holdings of the old Russian empire, these same global communities ...