Events Past

Series: Seminars and Colloquia

The essay Yuri Andrukhovych currently works on is an attempt at a consistent recollection and a fairly objective reconstruction of several significant cultural events that fundamentally influenced Ukrainian society nearly three decades ago.

Series: Panels and Discussions

We are all capitalists now. For the first time in human history, the globe is dominated by one economic system. In Capitalism, Alone, leading economist Branko Milanović explains the reasons for this decisive historical shift since the days of feudalism and, later, communism. Surveying the varieties of capitalism, he asks: How did capitalism become the dominant system in all parts of the world? And what needs to change for capitalism to deliver a more equitable future? 

Series: Seminars and Colloquia

Rather than seeing the ever more devious reaction formations of border policing and militarization, migrant detention, immigration enforcement, and deportation by state powers as if these were purely a matter of control, it is instructive to situate this economy of power in relation to the primacy, autonomy, and subjectivity of human mobility on a global (transnational, intercontinental, cross- border, postcolonial) scale. This is true, I contend, as much for refugees as for those who come to be derisively designated to be mere “migrants.”

Series: Lecture

It is difficult to define the concept of the border with rigour and precision; it is easier to make sense of it as an institution and a practice with the help of associated concepts, such as boundary, frontier, borderlands, etc. The border as a mode to protect and delimit a territory is old.

Series: Lecture

Albena Azmanova’s new book Capitalism on Edge puts precarity at the root of such social pathologies as the rise of populism and the inability of liberal democracies to effectively manage crises. The author observes that, while we have been discussing the crisis of capitalism in the aftermath of the 2008 financial meltdown, neoliberal capitalism has mutated into a new form, “precarity capitalism”, marked by the massification of political, economic and psychological insecurity.

Series: Seminars and Colloquia

In recent months, culture and the arts have suffered severely under pandemic-related restrictions. While artists, freelancers, independent projects, and even publicly funded cultural institutions are struggling for economic survival, we easily overlook the fact that—also in “normal times”—the autonomy of culture is increasingly being called into question. With respect to the immediate effects of this political and economic pressure on the arts, there is a major divide between cultural centers and those operating on the periphery. Most heavily affected by the asymmetric consequences of these pressures are not the trend-setter elites in cultural centers, or the publicly funded (non-)artists on the semi-peripheries, but all those who do not move to the cultural capitals. That is, those who decide to uphold cultural projects on the periphery—where they are most direly needed. Within Europe, there is also a significant East-West divide, not only in terms of the distribution of funding, but also in regard to the autonomy of art. This talk dealt with the situation of cultural actors on the periphery, confronted with emigration, poverty, de-/nationalization, walls, borders, ghettos, diseases, regime changes, and a new intra-European colonization.

Series: Seminars and Colloquia

Faranak Miraftab presented her most recent work in which she relationally theorizes realities of those living in slums and in camps in the era of intensified global displacements.

Series: Seminars and Colloquia

The lecture briefly presented the circumstances of the massacre committed in the town of Dvor during the Croatian Army’s Operation Storm, which crushed the secessionist Serb Republic of Krajina. In the early afternoon of August 8, 1995, nine (possibly ten) mentally ill and handicapped people were executed in Dvor’s primary school, where they had found shelter. Twenty-five years after the massacre, the killers have still not been prosecuted and it is even unclear to which army they belonged. In the vicinity there were both Croatian and Serbian units, while the Bosnian Army was only a few kilometers away. In addition, the massacre happened in front of Danish UN soldiers, whose base was on the school’s playground a mere 20 meters away from the massacre.

Series: Panels and Discussions

„Niemand ist sicher, bevor wir alle sicher sind“, warnen internationale Organisationen vor dem allerorts aufgekommenen Impfnationalismus. Denn mit den nun verfügbaren Covid-Impfstoffen stellen sich neue drängende Fragen: Wer bestimmt, welche Länder und Bevölkerungsgruppen überhaupt Zugang zu einem Impfstoff erhalten? Brauchen wir eine globale Impfstrategie, um den Wettlauf gegen die Ausbreitung von Mutationen zu gewinnen? Welche Lehren können wir aus früheren Pandemien und der Geschichte von Impfungen ziehen?

Series: Lecture

Im Mittelpunkt des Vortrags steht der widersprüchlich anmutende Begriff des „sanften“ Autoritarismus (soft authoritarianism). Er bezieht sich auf Demokratien, die in vielen Teilen der Welt von zunehmend autoritären Praktiken gekennzeichnet sind. Gegenwärtig werden liberale Werte wie Institutionen mit formalen, rechtstaatlichen Mitteln von durch Wahlen legitimierten Politikern unterminiert, die somit die Grundlagen von Demokratie von innen aushöhlen. Anhand von Beispielen wie voter suppression und gerrymandering in den USA, autocratic legalism in Polen und Ungarn sowie Angriffen auf die Pressefreiheit, auf zivilgesellschaftliche Organisationen oder die Universitätsautonomie in der Türkei, wird im Vortrag hinter die „sanften“ Züge dieser neuen Ausprägung von Autoritarismus geblickt. Ferner wirft der Vortrag die dringliche Frage nach den Möglichkeiten sowie Grenzen zivilgesellschaftlichen Widerstands gegen diesen weichgezeichneten Autoritarismus auf.