As Azerbaijan takes up the six-month chair of the Council of Europe, the deteriorating human-rights situation in the Caucasus state exposes its disregard for its rights obligations and risks further complication by the crisis in Ukraine
Central Asian dictators close down the space for domestic political opposition. But politics is still present, only it has moved offshore.
Behind the crisis in Ukraine lie deeper changes that are transforming the global economic and and political order, say Giovanni Bavia & Ernesto Gallo.
A quarter century after Mikhail Gorbachev supervised the collapse of Europe’s cold-war division, a world of new dividing lines is emerging—with Vladimir Putin playing an active part in inscribing them.
The takeover by anti-Damascus rebels of an Armenian village in northern Syria, near the border with Turkey, has triggered a propaganda war which focuses on the position of Syria's Armenians. This highlights core aspects of Armenians' experience since the 1915 genocide, says Vicken Cheterian.
"This project stays dynamic when people take the Complaints Choir as a tool and make use of it in their own context and modify it. That’s the spirit of open source." Hilde C. Stephansen interviews the founders of the choir for Participation Now.
Fighting racism in Europe is not easy when Europe has two hands tied behind its back—debilitated by neo-liberal policies on the one hand and the securitisation of minorities on the other.
The planned vote to transfer Crimea from Ukraine to Russia will plant the seeds of greater conflict in the peninsula.
The dangerous stand-off with Russia over Ukraine is also a display of the west's skewed perceptions and moral vanities.
Despite many weeks and months having passed since protests erupted in Ukraine in late November 2013, the west has continued to act like a passive and awe-struck bystander.
The tumult in Ukraine marks a wider crisis of the corrupt post-Soviet model. The impact will be felt most acutely in Russia itself, says Krzysztof Bobinski.
Many civilians were killed in the war between the newly independent states of Armenia and Azerbaijan in the early 1990s. But the disputed period raises larger questions of common suffering, says Gerard Libaridian, adviser to Armenia's president at the time, who reflects on one incident that casts
