Intersections. East European Journal of Society and Politics

International Organisations legitimation in the media in Eurasian post-socialist countries

Krzysztof Rybinski — 2025-01-09

The paper presents the first-ever big data analysis of International Organisations (IOs) legitimation in the media in Eurasian post-socialist countries. We use text mining and regression analysis to quantify intensity, tone, and narrative in the media as three critical dimensions of legitimation. The model is applied to a corpus of 1.3 million newspaper articles from six countries and twelve IOs. We show that contrary to earlier studies covering established democracies, the tone of articles on IOs is predominantly positive. Articles mentioning influential domestic politicians contribute to the delegitimation of the IOs featured, except in Poland.

Understanding the discourse of the Visegrad Group during the migration crisis

Tofig Ismayilzada — 2025-01-09

The Visegrad Group countries' political stance was not well received by most European Union member states when the migration crisis began. The discourse of the heads of state or other official representatives of Visegrad group countries had an unfavourable view of migration and recognised it as a security rather than a humanitarian one. The article explores the Visegrad group discourse during the European migration crisis. This study stands out because it examines the collective discourse of the Visegrad Group during the migration crisis rather than analysing each country separately. Three significant terror attacks in recent EU history have been incorporated into the analysis to see if they have increased the prominence of securitisation in the discourse of the Visegrad group. As the result of the Qualitative/Quantitative Content Analysis, we find out that after the Charlie Hebdo Attack, the Visegrad Group discourse on the migration crisis began incorporating the security dimension. Following the terror attacks in Paris, the securitisation dimensions of the migration crisis intensified and remained through the end of 2016. Our findings show that the communication style in the Visegrad group countries' declaration statements supports the security and terrorism linkage with migration.

Harmony expired: Why did the main mouthpiece of Latvia’s minorities fail during the 2022 parliamentary election?

Kiryl Kascian — 2025-01-09

Latvia is a small European state with a significant minority constituency. Minorities form a significant element of its political landscape, characterized by a cleavage between ethnic Latvians and the so-called Russophones. For over a decade, the political representation of Latvia’s minorities was dominated by Harmony, an integrationist social-democratic political party that mobilized the electorate beyond ethnic cleavage. This study analyzes Harmony’s campaign messages delivered by the party’s key figures during the 2022 parliamentary election to identify the drivers of failure. It argues that Harmony’s tactics overlook the challenges of political rivals, including those with similar constituency characteristics. The analysis of the sustainability of Harmony’s electorate includes a comparison of the party’s electoral performance during all campaigns from the 2006 to 2022 parliamentary elections, with a specific focus on Riga and Latgale, the party’s electoral strongholds. This finding suggests that integrationist parties are increasingly vulnerable to changes in the political environment caused by altered domestic and international political contexts.

From civic mobilization to armed struggle: Tracing the roots of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict

Hayk Smbatyan — 2025-01-09

Prior to the outbreak of the first Nagorno-Karabakh war in 1991, the South Caucasus region had been seeing a gradually amplifying mass mobilization of ethnic Armenians, turning into a civil uprising known as the Karabakh movement. This paper examines the dynamics through which the civic movement evolved into a violent armed conflict, consequently nailing down the groundwork of what is now known to be one of the most intractable conflicts in the post-Soviet region. To trace the processes that translated cross-ethnic relations into mass mobilization, the study builds upon qualitative primary data, coupled with an extensive examination of secondary evidence. The study identifies motivating factors such as economic, political, and socio-cultural horizontal inequalities across ethnic lines as the core drivers of collective grievances. Repressive state measures as well as the Soviet glasnost and perestroika policies are observed as enabling factors further boosting the legitimization of the civic movement claims. This paper subscribes to a context-bound approach of studying intractable conflicts, and by addressing the theoretical gap between data on objective inequality and data on perceived inequality, marries local knowledge of rather marginalized conflicts with the wider academic discourse.

Solidarity work, duty to care, and commoning during the pandemic crisis

Violetta Zentai — 2025-01-09

The article explores civic solidarity acts during the first lockdown of the COVID-19 pandemic. Based on qualitative research conducted in Hungary largely online, we explore how solidarity work initiated civic collaborations which reconfigured human efforts, time, and labour to mitigate crisis conditions in multiple ways and shaped the political potentials of solidarity practices. The inquiry captures different reasonings and practices in managing the division, valuation, and responsibilities in solidarity work. It also examines how the sense of the duty to care became an essential component in the pandemic operation of solidarians. We identify three different modes of articulating and organizing the duty to care in response to crisis conditions which embraced various engagements with the principles of commoning in solidarity spaces and beyond: reparative, sheltered, and transformative modes of commoning. Our inquiry also contributes to the discussions on the transformative potentials of civic experiments in collective solidarity actions in societies governed by an authoritarian regime, such as Hungary.

The role of capital income in the Hungarian income distribution from 2007 to 2021

Judit Krekó — 2025-01-09

Capital income represents a significant and growing share of total income at the aggregate level in most countries. However, the link between capital income and overall income inequality is not clear, as it is influenced by the distribution of capital income among individuals and its overlap with labour income. Using administrative personal income tax data, we explore the characteristics of taxable capital income in Hungary for the period from 2007 to 2021, and assess its role in overall income inequality. Capital income, which accounted for 8 to 12% of total taxable income in the period under review, was distributed among just 5 to 7% of taxpayers. The highest income percentile held 74% of capital income, while the share of the highest income decile exceeded 90% in 2021. Given its concentration at the top of the total income distribution, capital income significantly increased income inequality. By decomposing the change in inequality measured by the Gini index, we show that although the increase in overall income inequality is largely attributable to the growing concentration of labour income, capital income also exerted a major influence during this period. In our simulation, we demonstrate that an increase in the share of capital income within total income would lead to a notable increase in inequality.

The criminalization of informal patient payments in the Hungarian healthcare sector

Máté Julesz — 2025-01-09

Informal patient payments represent a semi-legal phenomenon in many countries with a low GDP. This institution does not only exist in post-communist states. It is also rooted in the Chinese, Indian, Greek and African healthcare cultures. In Hungary, from 1 January 2021, informal patient payments constitute a crime of corruption. The only opportunity for patients to express their gratitude towards healthcare workers materially is in the form of a gift of small value provided after care. Hungarian doctors’ salaries have been greatly increased, though nurses have not been remunerated in similar measure. Corrupt payments in the Hungarian healthcare sector are prosecuted; however, they are difficult to detect. Covert agents thus create situations in which doctors and nurses might be trapped. Positive general prevention should ultimately be stressed. Certainly, taxing legal gift-giving would promote transparency in the Hungarian healthcare system.

Quo Vadis? Communication Law

Andrea Buday-Sántha — 2025-01-09

The research framework is provided by the information society, where the role and importance of communication has increased, in both economic and legal contexts. Meanwhile, the communication law has developed into a new interdisciplinary, plural, sui generis branch of the science of law that integrates normative acts related to communication into the legal system and is capable of independent value articulation. The aim of the research is to facilitate the development of the topic by providing its definitions and presenting the context and challenges of the topic. At the same time, it points out that the rise of social media, robotics, COVID-19 and the Russia-Ukraine war are bringing about regulatory changes that require new solutions. In addition to reviewing the international and domestic literature on the topic, the author bases his findings on previous empirical research too. According to the research conclusions, the wide-ranging innovative application of information technologies and the suppression of abuses are desirable, which presupposes the further development of the legal environment, the communication law, and the elaboration of legal developments mapping out the changes. As a result of the research, it makes specific recommendations for this and develops the related theoretical areas.

Communicating community

Olena S. Dmytryk — 2025-01-09

This article explores the interrelation between the lives and politics of trans* people in former Soviet countries and the development of the Internet. I argue that while there were possibilities for communication and connection for trans* people during Soviet times, the arrival of the Internet expanded these possibilities. Turning to media archaeology as a methodology, I investigate how early versions of the Internet shaped (digital) trans* communities and how these communities influenced knowledge production. I show that early Internet trans* users were involved in collaborative mutual aid practices that were fostered by the digital cultures of the time, Internet architecture, and earlier offline cultures. Focusing on a case study from Ukraine, the article highlights how trans* Internet users were (and continue to be) active contributors to global knowledge production and medical and technological innovation, fostering a collective ethos vital for trans* communities. I also point to the impact of the Internet’s evolution and geopolitical changes on contemporary trans* communities.

The 'silent' sexual revolution of men seeking same-sex desire under Albanian communism

Kristina Millona — 2025-01-09

Despite the growing sexuality-related scholarship on Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), the history of

non-normative sexualities under state socialism remains theorized mainly through totalizing narratives.

These problematic discourses have contributed to the theorization of LGBT+ experience in the CEE

region solely through narratives of oppression, criminalization, and persecution of homosexuality,

therefore emptying the history of CEE from any development of LGBT+ activism and by invisibilizing

further the existence of non-normative sexualities. I argue that in contrast to the framing of the West as

a homoerotic paradise, there were also differing forms of political resistance concerning sexual

freedom in the Eastern Bloc’s republics. For this reason, I depart from Western-centric understandings

of conventional forms of political organizing and take as a vantage point the cruising areas where men

sought to fulfill same-sex desires under the oppressive regime in communist Albania. Drawing on

ethnographic fieldwork, I conceptualize these urban spaces not only as areas of sexual encounter but as

grounds of political resistance, therefore ‘queering’ the forms of grassroots politics within the geo-

temporality of state socialism in Albania

Gender complementarity and sexual deviance in late Soviet Lithuanian expert and pedagogical texts

Rasa Navickaite — 2025-01-09

The article analyses how the sexual education and other expert sexological/psychiatric/forensic texts produced in late socialist Lithuanian SSR promoted ideas of gender complementarity and difference and how these ideas were intertwined with homophobic rhetoric. In line with similar developments both East and West of the Iron Curtain in the same period, the experts warned about the dangers of homosexuality and argued that the proper gender roles are declining in a modern society, but have to be protected for the sake of marital happiness and healthy society. While focusing on the particular context of the Western borderlands of the Soviet Union, the article pays attention to the transnational knowledge flows and demonstrates the connections between eugenic, social constructionist and other modern theories as they got taken up in socialist discourses of gender and sexuality.

National identity and ageing

Anna Shadrina — 2025-01-09

This article explores how Belarusian political actors, speaking from diverse civilisational perspectives, discuss the place of older citizens, particularly less privileged women, in society. It demonstrates how the persistent logic of Cold War geopolitics animates social hierarchies in territories positioned between Western and Russian influences. Through an analysis of state-controlled and opposition media, I find that the official national project and the ethnocentric concept of Belarusianness share a discursive construction of ‘pensioners’ as an inferior Other. Invested in confrontation with the West, the autocratic regime claims moral superiority by representing ‘pensioners’ as objects of state care. Drawing on the narrative of suffering under communism/Russian colonialism, advocates of a ‘European’ Belarus discuss older people as obstacles to democracy. By exploring the narrative of ‘in-between-ness’, which champions a democratic Belarus that belongs neither to the Soviet past/Russia nor to the West but is connected to both, I argue that rejecting binary logic in national self-determination opens up opportunities for intergroup solidarity.

Politics of queer life writing in contemporary Poland

Antonina Tosiek — 2025-01-09

The article presents the analysis of the first comprehensive volume of memoirs Cała siła, jaką czerpię na życie. Świadectwa, relacje, pamiętniki osób LGBTQ+ [All the Power I Draw for Life. Testimonies, Accounts, Memoirs of LGBTQ+ People in Poland] (2022). It is a landmark volume in many respects. It is the first of its kind, a comprehensive (nearly 1,000 pages) selection of memoirs that were sent to a competition announced in 2020 by the LGBT+ History and Identities Research Laboratory at the Institute of Applied Social Sciences at the University of Warsaw. Therefore, they have become part of the long Polish tradition of diaries written for a competition announced by state institutions, a tradition dating back to the interwar period (diaries of peasants, Jewish youth, the unemployed, etc.). At the same time, the diaries were published at a very politically sensitive moment, when homophobia became an element of global politics, including the construction of East/West European distinctions. The published collection of diaries thus becomes a unique, autonomous and empowered voice of the LGBTQ+ community from Central and Eastern Europe in a contemporary, hostile, geopolitical context.

Book Review

Juan Cristóbal Demian — 2025-01-09

Editorial

Maria Mayerchyk — 2025-01-09