A journal placing Europe in the world
By HÉLÈNE B. DUCROS | The featured scholars show how, in light of new emerging actors and stresses, Europe operates through a mix of hard and soft power policies and initiatives at various levels of governance, from the local to the EU and beyond.
By METEHAN TEKINIRK | There is reason to question whether the EU can preserve its appeal, performance, and role in the face of geopolitical change driven by Chinese ascent, American reevaluation of the traditional transatlantic relationship and free trade, and Russian attempts to capitalize on the gradual disengagement of the US from European security.
By HÉLÈNE B. DUCROS | In a fragmented world, the World Society Foundation was conceived as a loose network where research agendas are shared. It is not a school of thought, does not have a political or theoretical agenda, and does not impose concepts or methods. Instead, it adopts the stance of methodological pluralism, with a strong emphasis on empirical realities and analysis of the making of a global society.
By CHARLOTTE HALPERN | European cities became influential actors in global climate governance not because they offered a universal model to be replicated, but because they pioneered an integrated approach to urban mobility that linked climate, accessibility, and quality-of-life objectives while encouraging experimentation, policy learning, and adaptation across diverse urban contexts.
By JULIA KHREBTAN-HÖRHAGER | Situating European festivals within debates about Europe’s role in the world, the article explores their dual function as instruments of cultural diplomacy and soft power and as spaces for challenging dominant narratives.
By NICHOLAS OSTRUM | The history of strategic energy interdependencies between Germany and Libya can offer pathways forward for middle powers, whether individual European countries or Europe united, through the current moment of petro-political chaos.
By SERGIO LUIZ CRUZ AGUILAR |
By ELENI KAVVATHA et al. | The governance of Sámi territories has been increasingly shaped by the interaction between EU Arctic policies and the regulatory frameworks governing the European green transition. The Sámi experience shows that the green transition is not only about technological change but also about territorial political transformation resulting from new demands on the land and the distribution of economic opportunities and environmental burdens.
Translated by OLIVIA BAES and EMMA RAMADAN | And then, suddenly, we understood. This same sun that takes, gives. The sun takes from one place; in another, it gives. It removes, but it supplies. And what had happened was, finally, that it had supplied more than it had removed, thanks to the enormous input from glaciers and the Rhône, the Rhône that was swollen, bloated and overflowing, which had become like milk.
By ROMAN LORANC | Focused on lacustrine wetlands and the vegetation at the water’s edge, Loranc’s photographs convey a quiet and meditative space where natural shapes become geometric abstracts and the stillness of water exists through the movement of plant life, for an overall paradoxical, ambiguous, and solemn landscape.
This month’s recent book recommendations by GlobalEurope editors HÉLÈNE B. DUCROS, NICK OSTRUM, and OKSANA ERMOLAEVA. Read about the history of global practices of caste, the revitalizing of the fascist project by AI, and an Arctic community’s religious conversion as resistance to Russian state control.
Translated by ANTONINA W. BOUIS | Korol was transferred to Moscow by order of the Union Committee, had been quickly pulled out of Donetsk in the fall of 1991, when the Ukrainian Committee had already been dissolved, when the archives had been gutted and evacuated. Of course, he could not have imagined then that he would never return, that Marat village and the mine would soon be abroad, in another country.
Translated by KEVIN GERRY DUNN | Arturito, the nation’s pride and joy in the previous decade, the child who was shamelessly exploited by the regime, who flew the Spanish flag all around London, is subject to military disciplinary action for failure to appear at a conscription center.
By HÉLÈNE B. DUCROS | Higher education benefits when institutions learn from each other. Innovation is not always about inventing something entirely new. Sometimes it is about recovering valuable practices that institutions have forgotten. One of our central convictions is that innovation and renewal need each other.
By OKSANA ERMOLAEVA | Computational humanities begins from a provocative premise: culture, art, history, and human experience can be rendered as data, not to reduce their complexity but to uncover patterns, connections, and structures that conventional reading alone may never bring into view.
By Elizabeth B. Jones | Enshrined in the province’s constitution in 2013, the Vorarlberg (Austria) model of citizens’ assemblies, or Bürgerräte, offers more than two decades’ worth of experience with trust-building between local governments, the state parliament, and its approximately 275,000 voters.
By PAUL WARDE | Saelens argues that the “revolution” associated with higher expectations of comfort and increased use cannot have been driven by the properties of the fuels themselves but a cultural shift: the rise of a “bourgeois domestic culture.”
By EMSALE JAHIU-PALI | Scientific literacy has become one of the defining educational challenges of the twenty-first century. Contemporary societies need citizens who understand scientific evidence and engage thoughtfully with complex environmental and social questions such as public health, biodiversity, food security, and climate change.
Translated by NATHAN H. DIZE | It was the thirty-eighth year of independence, or 1842 for the rest of the world. Sixteen years ago, the government in Port-au-Prince, then Port-Républicain, the titular capital of the Island of Haiti, Kiskeya or Boyo, from north to south, from east to west, had agreed to a financial debt to the country of France.
By BERNHARD LANG | Lang captures images that show the impact of human activity on the natural environment. He is interested in the duality and balance between beauty and destruction.
This month’s recent book recommendations by GlobalEurope editors NICK OSTRUM, HÉLÈNE B. DUCROS, OKSANA ERMOLAEVA, and EDINA PALEVIQ. Read about the roots of a modern conception of energy economy, the literary forms nuclear disasters have taken, the origins of the twentieth century’s greatest dramas through the lens of modernity, and how religion became one of the main lens through which world politics is understood.
By ELIZABETH B. JONES | Denmark is home to longstanding models of community-building in the form of folk high schools, or Højskolerne. These are non-formal residential schools for students between 16 and 24 where the emphasis is on learning without exams, mandatory classes, and formal grades.
By EDINA PALEVIQ | In Austria, debates surrounding asylum, language acquisition, labor market participation, citizenship, and social cohesion frequently intersect with questions of integration. Language can create opportunities for participation, education, and employment, but it can also function as a requirement connected to important life choices.
By NICHOLAS OSTRUM | Dr. Taras Mahlay discusses the origins and changing roles of the Cleveland Maidan Association, the ways in which Ukrainians have innovated in medicine since the war started, the transformation of Ukraine’s medical culture, intercommunal solidarity, and the future of Cleveland Maidan after the war ends.
Translated by MICHELLE QUAY | That’s how the long hallway on our rudderless planet-ship abruptly transformed into the arena of slippers, pajamas, bowls of traditional aash-e reshte noodle soup, and debates over democracy, which took place at night in Fereydoon or Kalantar’s rooms, and sometimes got heated when others joined in.
By JIARUI ZHOU | In contemporary visual culture, clarity has become a measure of technological progress, and blur occupies an unstable threshold where visibility becomes uncertain, form loses its stability, and recognition is delayed. Has blur been too readily dismissed as technical failure or incomplete visual information?
By HEIDI HEIN-KIRCHER | The history of sexuality has become an essential category of historical analysis. in contrast to the Anglo-American history that provided its impetus, French history began to be explicitly examined from a gender perspective comparatively late.
By MARTINA PLANTAK | The emergence of Péter Magyar as the central opposition figure fundamentally altered the dynamics of Hungarian politics, leading to broad debates about democratic backsliding within consolidated democratic frameworks and regime resilience. The legacy of Orbánism continues to pose significant challenges for democratic reconstruction and political transformation in Hungary.
By MORITZ FÖLLMER | Achilles argues that constitutional patriotism was vibrant in Weimar Germany and that it was embraced both by political leaders in Berlin and by ordinary citizens in small towns. She conveys her appreciation of “civic habitus of democratic equality” but recognizes that this popular republicanism encountered some serious problems, describing how hostility to the Republic remained strong throughout the 1920s.
By PAUL O’KEEFFE and ADA FREANEY | Considering the overlapping crises shaping global food systems and food security, and the mismatch between the scale of global food production and human and planetary well-being, the urgency of food literacy is particularly evident. It extends beyond nutritional knowledge to encompass skills, understandings, and values that enable individuals to make informed, ethical, and sustainable decisions about food.
By EDINA PALEVIQ | The 2026 elections in Hungary are used to examine democratic erosion and renewal, as contributors focus on the internal decay of an illiberal regime, the reconfiguration of political discourse inside Hungary, and the strategic use by Orbán’s government of institutional leverage within the European Union.
By EDINA PALEVIQ | In 2026, the Hungarian election was important for the EU, because it could determine whether the Hungarian government would continue to delay or reshape EU collective decisions on issues of high geopolitical importance, as Viktor Orbán’s government had done.
Translated by JEFFREY ZUCKERMAN | At Birkenau there is nothing to do but walk. We approach the hills. Rays of sunlight still come down. On the ramp, a man plays at throwing a child up in the air. Every so often a security guard comes through on a Segway. Practically a supersonic roly-poly in a light-blue short-sleeve shirt who goes through a barbed-wire door and disappears behind a hut. We walk down the railroad tracks. The tracks built to receive Hungarian Jews.
By NESPOON | By bringing lace patterns into the public space, NeSpoon transforms a form historically associated with private interiors and luxury into a universal visual language accessible to everyone. Her works function as ornament, cultural research, and a quiet gesture of harmony in the shared space of the city and bridges centuries-old craftsmanship and contemporary artistic expression.
This month’s recent book recommendations by GlobalEurope editors HÉLÈNE B. DUCROS, NICK OSTRUM, and OKSANA ERMOLAEVA. Read about the enduring fascination of the ultra-rich for the Versailles aesthetics, the entangled riparian systems through successive empires in Mesopotamia, and the interactions between the Russian military and local populations in WWII.
By MARK BRUNO | Compared to its American counterpart, European hacker culture has been more influenced by the cultural memory of institutional violence and has developed a different set of instincts: skepticism of centralized systems, hostility to surveillance, and a conviction that technical expertise carries civic obligations.
By ELIZABETH B. JONES | One cannot overestimate contemporary Eastern Germans’ deep alienation from politics as usual and their weariness of change, despite their general support for the idea of democracy. For the AfD, there are clear advantages to framing the upcoming September election as a sure victory, the most obvious being that it reinforces a “why bother voting?” attitude among the undecided.
By JESSICA STOREY-NAGY | The Hungarian election outcome in favor of Péter Magyar’s Tisza party that led to the ousting of the autocratic Viktor Orbán in April 2026 was fueled by the creative discursive work of politicians and citizens.
By SAHIN GÖKSU | Turkey’s policy towards Turkish minorities abroad has followed a defensive, stabilizing basic logic. The aim has been to avoid the withdrawal of minorities from social spaces in countries where Turks have historically been present and limit external influences that could curtail Turkish minorities’ freedom of action there.
Translated by PHILIP ROUGHTON | The ups and downs of the country’s sheep were discussed as one might normally discuss the circumstances of better-placed people in society: unctuously and ceremoniously, but perhaps not always with deep feeling.
By DINO BOZONELOS and DANIEL VECCHIO | The process of decentering pilgrimage turns the discourse of the Camino on its head since it ultimately rests on the premise that religious travel involves not the travel of the pilgrim to the sacred but instead that of the sacred to the pilgrim.
By MANUELA ACHILLES | It is historically misleading to describe Eurovision as a peace project born directly from the ruins of WWII. It was established as a technical rather than a political initiative. Today, it is the largest cultural event bringing Europeans together on a single occasion to consume the same product. It is Europe’s biggest election.
By MANUELA ACHILLES and PETER DEBAERE | This year’s contest, with its official motto “United by Music,” takes place against a troubling geopolitical backdrop that is redefining Europe’s position in the world. This rapidly shifting context is characterized by the convergence of military conflict, economic realignment, and intensifying cultural contestation.
By MANUELA ACHILLES and PETER DEBAERE | Participation in Eurovision functions as a para-diplomatic practice expressing and constituting European belonging. It has functioned as a cultural register of political alignment, allowing countries to signal orientation toward Europe without formal institutional commitment.
By LUCA CIAN | Eurovision is not simply a song contest. It is one of the most ambitious experiments in brand-building anywhere in the world—one that simultaneously manages a global masterbrand, dozens of national sub-brands, and a fragile, emotional community called Europe.
By IVAN RAYKOFF | The European Song Contest invites audiences to recognize the strangeness of foreign cultures while discovering shared connection across difference. Its values of diversity and inclusivity are especially meaningful at a time when geopolitical conflict challenges Europe’s postwar order.
By CATHERINE BAKER | Eurovision has built a unique reputation as a space where queer and gender non-conforming musicians can be symbolically affirmed as representatives of their respective nations in front of an audience of more than 160 million viewers.
By ELLA JACKSON | Eurovision’s performances have increasingly combined standardized song structures with elaborate visual spectacle. While the contest partly reflects Anglo-American musical trends and global pop aesthetics, it also celebrates local and continental forms of Europeanness.
By ZVI GILBOA | Against the backdrop of recent controversies surrounding Israel’s participation in the Eurovision Song Contest, it is easy to overlook the extent to which Eurovision occupies a central place in Israeli cultural life.
By JOHN PICKLES | In making women’s stories central rather than treating them as add‑ons to the biographies of male leaders, Ioffe produces a rich genealogy of the Soviet and Russian twentieth century in which reproductive politics, everyday survival, and domestic arrangements are placed alongside the changing scope of professional roles women played in Soviet society.
