Charlie Bertsch / 31 May 2023

The Better 1990s

Bettie Serveert’s Palomine

As I stumbled into the kitchen to turn on the coffee pot, the world outside the window painfully bright, I suddenly heard the voice of Bettie Serveert’s Carol van Dijk in my head: “Down under lock and key/There’s a brain tag to every secret”. I just couldn’t figure out why.(...)

Drasko Duranovic / 09 Mar 2023

The Struggle for Montenegro

Moscow’s Hybrid War

For the Kremlin, controlling Montenegro is an opportunity to have its own proxy in NATO. For Belgrade, it’s a chance to regain the territory, which declared independence in June 2006.(...)

Josh White / 06 Mar 2023

Contrarian Right

The Story of Spiked

Spiked is the home of professional contrarians who live to cause outrage at liberal middle-class dinner parties. The magazine’s name is a reference to ‘spike’ in journalese.(...)

Heather Allansdottir / 15 Aug 2022

Universitet Lessons

Russia After the Arab Spring

In 2015, I moved to Moscow to spend a year teaching human rights. I lasted five months. As my former students from that time are arrested for protesting the Ukrainian war, here are some reflections on what I learned about the evil of Putin and the kindness of Russians.(...)

Heather Allansdottir / 25 Jul 2022

Odesa Mama

Utopia by the Sea

The Russians have struck Odesa again, this time mere hours after reaching a deal with the Ukrainians. Though spared the worst of the war, an attack on Odesa is an attack on the best of Ukrainian and Russophone culture alike.(...)

Natalie Sarkic-Todd / 28 Jul 2021

Antifascist Montenegro

Eighty Years of Resistance

Montenegro is a study in contrasts: a proudly traditional culture that adopts the latest technology and trends with ease; a rugged, mountainous topology that drops dramatically to the gentle Adriatic Sea via modern highways and old, winding roads; and a climate of baking dry heat in the summer, turning to cooling rain and snow-topped peaks in the winter. (...)

Casualties of war. Martyrs' Memorial Cemetery Kovači, Sarajevo.
Heather Allansdottir / 09 Sep 2019

Sarajevo to the West

Susan Sontag’s War

When Zdravko Grebo, a legal scholar at the University of Sarajevo, died this year, it seemed to many Sarajevans the end of an era: the last of his generation, of dissident, socialist anti-fundamentalist Bosnian thinkers who embodied the best of Yugoslav dynamism and spoke to the hope – as Sarajevo has often stood for – that Europe can carve out a space between totalitarianism and late capitalism alike.(...)