The aim of this study is to explore the experiences of those who observe war from a distance and to gain insights into how war affects communities and societies at a distance from direct hostilities. We compare the reactions to the outbreak of war both behind (in Lviv—considered a safe city in an invaded country) and beyond (in Wrocław, Poland, which neighbors Ukraine) the frontline. These cities represent

A growing body of research argues that development assistance bolsters authoritarian regimes in Africa, but its impact on regime dominance remains underexplored. This article traces the material legacy of an ambitious rural development project in Ethiopia, including its ideational elements, and reveals its consequences for the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), the incumbent

This article introduces a special issue on Paraguay’s stalled democratization and enduring authoritarian legacies following the fall of Alfredo Stroessner’s dictatorship. Despite formal political reforms, the country remains dominated by elite rule, institutional fragility, and clientelist governance, reinforced by the near-continuous hegemony of the Colorado Party. The article surveys key turning

This paper examines the Dread culture that emerged during and after the Grenada Revolution through the lens of a pro-revolutionary song and memorial inscription to assess how different memories commemorate the event. This paper puts forth the central argument that Dread culture signifies a resistive memory aesthetic that define the people’s experiences with the Grenada Revolution. It locates organic

The traditional narrative of Europe’s first wave of democratization is that elites extended the franchise in response to revolutionary threats and reformed majoritarian electoral systems to limit rising working-class parties. This stylized account does not fit early twentieth-century South America, where democratization was driven by internal competition within incumbent parties, without strong working-class

This article discusses development theories concerning agro-extractivism, providing a perspective from the Global South based on a brief historical and current review of Paraguay’s relationships with international markets These types of relationships are referred to as enclave economies; the concept denotes the exploitation of natural resources without ties (or with very weak ones) to national economies

This study examines Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s visual transformation on the social media platform Instagram after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. While the populist style often involves politicians artificially triggering perceptions of crises to underscore their unique leadership qualities, the crisis Zelensky faced was undeniably real. Therefore, I argue the existential threat

The process of democratization in Central and Eastern Europe has been shaken by the growth of counter-hegemonic narratives contesting the Western-type model of liberal democracy. The “illiberal turn” in Poland frequently targets progressive values, manifesting as a cultural war around the meaning of the signifier “normality.” This article focuses on an illiberal neo-traditionalist discourse coalition

This introduction to this special issue of Modern Italy explores how the emphasis on fascism in recent scholarship and public discourse risks its mythification and cultural rehabilitation, and urges a rebalancing of historiography to highlight the pivotal role of the Italian Resistance in shaping Italy’s democratic identity. Marking the eightieth anniversary of Italy’s liberation and the thirtieth

This article reviews the evolution of the representation of Italy’s ‘Catholic partisan’. In essence, this involved adaptation of the model of the Catholic soldier, who was able to kill out of love and ‘without hatred’, to the context of a civil war. With particular reference to the case of the central Veneto, this examination looks back to earlier Italian experiences during wartime to help explain

We analyze how new technologies can be used to foster individual engagement that limits deliberation and reduces people’s capacity for political action within parties. We present the results of an analysis of the case of the Argentinean Propuesta Republicana (PRO). Using data from in-depth interviews with key actors—party elites and political consultants—we show that new technologies helped to mobilize

This article examines the shifting rural social relations in Paraguay’s soybean complex, with a specific focus on the role of farmer cooperatives in the commercialization of Paraguay's agriculture. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in the departments of Itapúa and southern Alto Paraná in 2021 and 2022, this paper adopts an agrarian political economy perspective to argue that cooperatives in Paraguay serve

Initially, kin-states introduced ethnic cards to strengthen ties with kin-minorities. Today the ethnic card has transformed into an important and effective tool of migration policy, aimed at attracting new immigrants and potential future citizens. Its purpose has changed from reinforcing identity and cultural ties with a diaspora to encouraging the holders to settle and filling labor and demographic

During the first two decades of the twenty-first century, the Paraguayan Chaco suffered profound social, productive, and ecological transformations due to investments that, through deforestation, expanded the agricultural frontier for the production of livestock and grains. This article analyzes the factors that made the Paraguayan Chaco an attractive location for capitalist expansion as well as the

Scholars of deservingness emphasize the attitudes of host societies toward migrant communities and inter-ethnic stances of migrant groups but not in-group perceptions of deservingness. Based on interviews with Ukrainian citizens who received temporary protection in the Czech Republic and Poland after the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, we show that participants classified the fleeing

This paper empirically tests whether populists in power or economic wellbeing influence civil society and civic culture. It conceptualizes civic culture broadly by focusing on citizen mobilization and evaluation of both national and supranational political institutions. The longer populists hold government positions, the stronger their control over civil society organizations, affecting participation

Remittances following economic and wartime migration are behind the huge number of remittance houses and entire remittance landscapes that have grown up in Kosovo in recent decades. The houses emulate the style and comfort of the villas of European and American suburbia but also in many respects reflect the local life style, the traditional life of (joint) families, but also the dramatic changes that

Environmentalism and pro-environmental behavior are widely thought to correlate with political attitudes. In particular, both empirical and anecdotal evidence suggests that left-leaning individuals have more favorable dispositions toward environmentalism and practices that are regarded as environmentally friendly. We test this hypothesis using election data from Hungary. The main novelty of our result

Since its inception in 1831, the French Foreign Legion, a specialised unit within the ranks of the French military, has played a prominent role in the wars of both colonisation and decolonisation. This article seeks to trace the origins, development and eventual decline of an Italian and international ‘Legionary issue’ regarding the recruitment and employment of Italian volunteers in a foreign military

This article analyzes Paraguayan economic elites and the construction of their political practices, based on the study of three livestock agricultural sector business organizations: the Union of Production Trade Associations, the Rural Association of Paraguay, and the Paraguayan Chamber of Exporters and Marketers of Cereals and Oilseeds. The article examines the political profile of the groups, whose

In the autumn of 1934, Bishop Johannes Geisler of Brixen/Bressanone denied two Italian-speaking priests, Carlo Torello and Giuseppe Ricci, permission to teach within his predominantly German-speaking diocese. In response, Benito Mussolini threatened to expel all Church representatives from the state education system and, by extension, to unravel the recently signed Lateran Accords. Untangling the motivations

Botswana's parliamentary democracy features a weak parliament that is ineffective in law making and executive oversight. Conventional explanations emphasise a dominant party system that emerged following independence, lack of operational independence from the executive, and the poor capacity of parliament as factors that undermine its effectiveness. Using a novel dataset that is based on interviews

Clientelism is a deeply ingrained informal political institution in Paraguay and a source of continuity relative to political reforms and social and demographic changes, particularly democratization and the advent of electoral party alternation. This article examines Paraguay’s post-dictatorial politics (1992-2023), engaging with critical juncture and institutional change theory to analyze continuity

Understanding the current situation of Paraguayan contributory social security—particularly, its low coverage, institutional fragmentation, and socioeconomic segmentation—requires considering the role of economic elites in policy implementation. Given the potential effect and influence social protection can have on people’s security, economic autonomy, and income redistribution, this social protection

This article examines the appropriation of opposition policy proposals undertaken by the Czech minority governments led by Andrej Babiš and his technocratic populist party, ANO. The article defines policy appropriation and then assesses its theoretical and empirical underpinnings within the broader context of a technocratic populist government. This is followed by a discussion of Babiš’ premierships

The business service sector, of which call centers make up a large share, has emerged as an important driver of growth in central and eastern Europe. This article explores how young employees in call centers in Romania interpret their labor market positioning, how they engage with the structures that shape their working lives, and how they mobilize values to make sense of complex labor processes and

Building on Margaret Levi’s theory of fiscal contract (1997), this article argues that people are primarily motivated to pay tax by governmental legitimacy. According to Levi, the agreement assumes the provision of collective services which focus on the needs of society; if services respond effectively to public interests, taxpayers reimburse them with their taxes. Put another way, under the fiscal

The aim of this article is to analyse the Italian Nuova Destra. The first part examines the birth of the Nuova Destra within the current of the Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI), referring particularly to Pino Rauti, a founder and leader. Following the experience of the magazine La Voce della Fogna and the Hobbit Camps, the first publishing initiatives of the Nuova Destra – Diorama letterario and Elementi

This article analyzes the way in which traumatic memories of the Soviet past are communicated in Estonian- and Russian-language women’s literature published in Estonia. The representation of the past in these works does not support the claim that the collective memories of Russian and Estonian communities are antagonistic and incapable of “agreeing to disagree.” Focusing on women’s prose written in

This article assesses the state of Indigenous rights in Paraguay through the year 2022 to show how latent authoritarianism and agrarian oligarchies threaten to roll back ongoing efforts to support the country's democratic transition. Recent civil society efforts to map Indigenous lands and make georeferenced data about those lands free to access online presuppose that greater transparency about the

The literature on Paraguay’s political regime labels it as an incomplete or flawed democracy without systematically analyzing how Paraguay is actually governed. The concept of multicracy can describe Paraguay’s political organization and analyze Stroessner’s rule and the post-Stronato period. The governability of Paraguay’s democracy is weak, various kratiae (powers) intervene in policymaking, and

The history of multinational East-Central Europe is increasingly viewed through a colonial lens. This article contributes to the ongoing discourse about the applicability of colonial frameworks by looking at the cultural connotations embedded in urban street names by dominant elites. Between the 1860s and 1914, street naming emerged as a tool for demarcating territories, asserting authority, and popularizing

Politicians whose political careers appear finished rarely make successful comebacks. Slovakia’s Robert Fico was propelled back to power when his party, Smer-SD, won the 2023 parliamentary elections and was able to form a coalition government. An election victory for Fico, however, seemed unthinkable in 2018 when he resigned as prime minister amid large-scale protests, and even more unlikely in 2020

This article explores radicalization processes among the Belarusian opposition-in-exile using resource mobilization theory. Drawing on the case of the post-2020 opposition, exiled in the European Union and recognized by the West as a privileged interlocutor and “legitimate representative of the [Belarusian] people,” it identifies the stages of its radicalization in response to repression in Belarus

This study explores gender differences in public issue salience—the relative importance that men and women place on various public issues—focusing on how assets like wealth, education, and marketable skills shape these priorities within the Czech social context. This study is rooted in Iversen and Soskice’s theory of assets as well as in the Iversen and Rosenbluth’s theory of political preferences

This article examines Paraguay’s lack of progress in meeting the UN Agenda 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) through the conceptual framework of state capture. It argues that the current model of economic development, based primarily on soya and meat production, is unsustainable in economic, social, and environmental terms and almost exclusively serves the interests of a small elite. The example

As the weight of the agro-industrial model of agriculture becomes abundantly evident, the role of seeds inserted into either capitalist or agroecological production models has become a central way that scholars and activists conceptualize food sovereignty struggles. This is no less the case in Paraguay, where peasant and Indigenous movements like CONAMURI articulate that having seeds is a political

When did fascism end? Did it end in July 1943, with the fall of Mussolini from power, or in April 1945, with Liberation Day? The argument of this article is that fascism was not simply a historical experience but a political form that attempted to transcend Italy’s social and political fractures with fantasies and unrealistic but nevertheless captivating expectations. Its hypnotic contagious power

The Ugandan military has played an outsized role in Uganda’s national politics for decades. Since 1995, the Constitution of Uganda has allocated 10 seats in the Ugandan Parliament to members of the national army, the Uganda People’s Defence Forces (UPDF), which is considered one of several ‘interest groups’ represented in the legislature. The unusual arrangement of including soldiers in parliament

The article examines the patterns of turnover of Latin American legislators. It contributes (1) by introducing a large original dataset of turnover rates in 204 elections between 1985 and 2023 based on manually coded lists of all Latin American legislators elected since 1985, (2) by describing the cross-national and temporal patterns of turnover in Latin America, and (3) by examining empirically the

The enforcement of labor informality is subject to electoral motivations, and political parties on the left and right have different incentives to do so. While leftist governments are more lenient not to harm their informal electorate, right-wing incumbents face an electoral dilemma: the part of its constituency that benefits from informal work is in favor of a permissive attitude, but another section

In 2006, the government of Congo built a $10 million glass and marble mausoleum to house the remains and to celebrate the legacies of the French colonizer, Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza. This extravagant commemoration sits uncomfortably alongside global calls for the removal of memorials celebrating colonial figures. This article analyses how ordinary people construct their own narratives to contest colonial

Under what conditions do South American states create regional institutions that consolidate or undermine the liberal international order (LIO)? To address this question, we compare two cases of contestation of the LIO through counter-institutionalization in the domains of migration and election monitoring, both of which are closely related to the LIO’s core political principles. We argue that the

The 'villa in the jungle' metaphor, conventionally associated with Israel's former Defence Minister Ehud Barak, is one of the most referenced metaphors in Israeli political discourse. Its perpetuation has contributed to the fixation of two co-constitutive collective identities: Israel as an exemplary democratic society amidst a violent and backward Arab neighbourhood. This article examines an often-overlooked

This article is about Central American asylum seekers from the perspective of dependency theory and Gramscian international relations. It argues that Northern Central American asylum seekers are fleeing the contradictions of the hegemonic US-led neoliberal development model that depends on migration and remittances as its main source of hard currency. This article is grounded in structural/conjectural

The US recently implemented novel spatial strategies of border control that repel asylum seekers to Mexico, forcing them to await the opportunity to request asylum or asylum proceedings. The turning back and expulsion of asylum seekers at the US-Mexico border transforms northern Mexican border cities into spaces of extraterritorial containment where asylum seekers form informal migrant camps and face

Based on a critical geopolitical analysis, this paper addresses the convergence of refugee policies and migration control policies in southern Mexico within the framework of border externalization and internalization. I posit that the border process in this region responds to both political and military interests espoused by the U.S. as well as Mexican governments. The refugee system is a device though

The Spanish asylum system and refugee reception program demonstrate persistent problems involving initial access to asylum and the processing of applications; access to assistance from the reception system; and the process of integration of asylum seekers, which is characterized by social segregation. This article analyzes these issues and seeks to explain them by looking beyond the immediate circumstances

During the Second World War, hundreds of thousands of American soldiers of Italian origin were drafted into the US military and sent to fight overseas against the Axis powers. For many, this was an opportunity to demonstrate their loyalty to the country and remove suspicions raised by Italian communities’ ties with the Fascist regime. The prospect of fighting in their homeland aroused mixed feelings

Decision-makers within the US immigration system have long looked skeptically on asylum claims based on persecution by street gangs. We draw on ethnographic research conducted in San Pedro Sula, Honduras to argue that this skepticism and the corresponding legal precedents rely on an incorrect understanding of the issues at stake. Our evidence, considered in light of recent scholarship on violence in

Over the last decade Honduran Garifuna have increasingly appeared among the millions of Central Americans arriving at the US/Mexico border to claim asylum. This is striking because unlike other Hondurans, Garifuna have a long history of largely documented US-bound migration. Recently, however, they have been transformed from transnational migrants into asylum seekers by being caught between “accumulation

Governments deny people’s internationally recognized rights to asylum by preventing them from arriving in territories where they may request asylum and by using case law to restrict eligibility. While research tends to focus on either deflection or restriction tactics, this paper builds on studies that examine the interaction between them. To further examine the interaction between these “bordering”

This paper argues that Venezuela’s hunger crisis was caused by the collapse of the country’s import capacity. Evidence is presented to support the hypothesis that the key driver of the decrease in caloric intake was the decline of more than nine-tenths in oil revenues, which sparked an economic contraction and forced the economy to undertake massive cuts in imports of food and agricultural inputs.

Working as a researcher, expert witness, and refugee shelter worker quickly raises questions of whether such engagements are reinforcing institutions and structures of power that reproduce racism, economic and social inequality, militarization of our borders, and foreign and immigration policies of violence and exclusion. At the same time, engaged methods of research inside institutions such as U.S

This article focuses on how the Mexican state remains unable to protect certain categories of people based on particular identity characteristics. I draw on examples of gang-related corruption within the police and the judiciary, as well as the impact of cultures of violence and impunity on vulnerable categories of citizens, especially women and girls. I also explain some of what expert witnesses can