Romania Archives - Public Seminar

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 ...

Europe & Central Asia

How Banning Abortion Will Transform America

The Texas ruling takes us one step closer to the state surveillance of Ceaușescu’s Romania

September 7, 2021 • by Maria Bucur and Kristen R. Ghodsee

_____ Across the United States, Republican-controlled legislatures are outlawing abortion, with the hope of bringing the issue before a sympathetic Supreme Court. If they succeed in revoking women's reproductive rights, the U.S. will quickly become a different society—one resembling Communist-era Romania. “It was a horrible time,” recounts one Romanian gynecologist, referring to the period ...

How Banning Abortion Will Transform America

Democracy

Confronting the World Wide Threat of Right Wing Authoritarianism

If we don’t hang together, we will surely hang separately

February 3, 2021 • by Jeffrey C. Isaac

Our effort to create and nourish a “world-wide committee of democratic correspondence” began long before the coronavirus laid waste to our world. And as a world-wide network, our efforts have always involved a strong online component. For the web affords our far-flung group many opportunities for the sharing of ideas ...

Confronting the World Wide Threat of Right Wing Authoritarianism

Europe & Central Asia

Romania in 2020

Fighting Corruption Just Got Harder because of Trump

December 6, 2019 • by Maria Bucur

The big unknown for Romania moving into 2020 is its relationship with the United States. Though Romanians have become more anti-American in the last few years, they are still the second most pro-American post-socialist state in Europe (Poland is in first place). Since 1990, the U.S. ambassador has played a ...

Europe & Central Asia

The Romanian 2019 Presidential Elections

Populism on the retreat

December 5, 2019 • by Maria Bucur

Romania was one of the post-communist countries to join the neoliberal bandwagon slower than the Visegrad group and made it to EU membership just when the 2008 global crisis was about to break. For over a decade after the end of the brutal Nicolae Ceausescu dictatorship, old communist apparatchiks together ...

The Romanian 2019 Presidential Elections

Feature

European Parliament Elections Viewed from Central and Eastern Europe

June 19, 2019 • by Veronica Anghel

While the current wave of Euroscepticism and nationalism is a challenge for the European project, this also presents the European Union (EU) with an opportunity for further consolidation: the EU now has clear cut internal “enemies.” More so than an abstract sense of purpose, enemies provide a strong incentive to ...

Feature

A Ray of Hope

Romania’s Results in the EU Elections

June 12, 2019 • by Maria Bucur

In the case I know best, Romania, the elections demonstrated a sustained and even rising commitment to the principles of rule of law, the EU as a democratic institution, and trust in the possibility of launching new political parties. It is a case worthy of attention because it offers hope ...

Blue Monday

The Whole World Is Watching?

Thoughts on police violence in the streets of Bucharest and the streets of Portland, Charlottesville, Ferguson, and Chicago 1968

August 13, 2018 • by Jeffrey C. Isaac

“I merely took the energy it takes to pout, and I wrote some blues.” -Duke Ellington This past Friday night, August 10, a major demonstration was held at Piata Victorei in downtown Bucharest to protest the widespread corruption of the SPD government, led by Prime Minister Viorica Dăncilă, and by the ...

Feature

Thoughts on Violence in the Streets of Bucharest and on the Civic Defense of Romanian Democracy

August 12, 2018 • by Jeffrey C. Isaac

This past Friday night, August 10, a major demonstration was held at Piata Victorei in downtown Bucharest to protest the widespread corruption of the SPD government, led by Prime Minister Viorica Dăncilă, and by the party’s leader and power-behind-the-throne, Liviu Dragnea, himself convicted of corruption charges and separately for 2012 ...

Thoughts on Violence in the Streets of Bucharest and on the Civic Defense of Romanian Democracy

Blue Monday

Bucharest Reflections on Political Corruption

Romanian Echoes of Trump

June 18, 2018 • by Jeffrey C. Isaac

"I merely took the energy it takes to pout, and I wrote some blues." -Duke Ellington Everything is political. But not everything is political in the same way. In liberal democracies the law is the outcome of contests of power and political negotiations that are uneven and yet constrained by constitutional procedures; ...

Bucharest Reflections on Political Corruption

Blue Monday

Memory, Forgetting, and the Bluest Kind of Blue

Bucharest Reflections on the 20th Century

June 4, 2018 • by Jeffrey C. Isaac

"I merely took the energy it takes to pout, and I wrote some blues." -Duke Ellington Memory, Forgetting, and the Bluest Kind of Blue: Bucharest Reflections on the 20th Century I am writing this while drinking my second cup of strong cappuccino on the veranda of Bon Pain, a wonderful small French patisserie in ...

Feature

Sex in the Time of Communism

The ripple effect of the #metoo campaign

December 7, 2017 • by Maria Bucur

My first sexual experience was on a bus in Bucharest. I was 7, surrounded by a throng of people. Like many other kids who lived in the communist bloc, I had parents who worked full time, which meant that I mostly went to school alone. I also came back from ...