southeastern europe

  Spyros A. Sofos , Simon Fraser University Azerbaijani forces attacked the breakaway and long-disputed enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh in September 2023. Less than a month later, and the region is now all but deserted. The declared aim of the attack was to eliminate the last forces of the Armenian-majority self-styled republic. The lightning “anti-terror operation,” as Azerbaijan called it , precipitated the collapse of the breakaway republic. Most importantly — given that it came after a debilitating blockade that lasted for almost nine months — it instilled fear among the Karabakh Armenian population. Many fled their ancestral homeland. As an endless convoy of cars transporting desperate refugees filled the winding road to an uncertain future away from their homes, regional entities were lining up to influence the future shape of the South Caucasus region on the border of eastern Europe and west Asia. The conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia has been unfoldi...

  INTERVIEW     13.09.23 19 ПРЕГЛЕДИ                                         At a time when Macedonia is under strong international pressure concerning the constitutional changes, and the region is waiting to see whether it will be coupled to the European locomotive, external views become a dire need for the country to position itself on the right coordinates during the geopolitical developments that will not leave us unaffected. After the interview with the German journalist and specialist on the Balkans Michael Martens, we present to you another conversation, this time with  Spyros Sofos,  whose research at the London School of Economics and Political Science has focused, among other things, on social insecurity, identity and collective action, as well as populism in Southeast Europe. He says that Bulgarian elites playing the nationalist card poses the...

by Spyros A. Sofos republished from  the Edge Hill University Institute for Social Responsibility website Recep Tayyip Erdoğan ’s 2018 presidential election victory appeared to seal his party’s domination over Turkey’s politics until the end of his term in 2023, or even 2028. Since this victory however, he has presided over an ailing economy. The Turkish lira has  plummeted , foreign reserves have shrunk as the Central bank intervened  to stabilise the currency , and external debt  mounted  until Qatar, in May 2020 gave the country’s economy  a temporary reprieve . Concurrently, a number of “rising stars” are waiting in the wings. These include the, 2019 İstanbul mayoral election winner,  Ekrem İmamoğlu , and former Erdoğan ally  Ali Babacan .  They are both preparing for the post-Erdoğan era by cultivating their charisma and political capital, causing concerns over Erdoğan’s re-election chances. Erdoğan sought to deflect at...

Originally published in openDemocracy #RethinkingPopulism by Spyros A. Sofos RETHINKING POPULISM.; At a time when new political actors are mounting electoral and increasingly systemic challenges to contemporary democracies in the name of the people, there is little consensus in what the phenomenon is among academics, political activists and citizens alike. openDemocracy has been featuring articles on populist phenomena for some years (Mudde, Rovira Kaltwasser, Mouffe, Marlière, Pappas, Skodo, Sofos, Stavrakakis and Katsambekis, Gerbaudo, Gandesha, Tamás to name but a few) and has been successful in stimulating a recurring interest. But despite or perhaps because of the extensive and thought-provoking research on populism, the term has come to denote a range of widely diverse phenomena. Our aim is to bring together voices that don’t often interact, either because they belong to different fields of work, or as a result of geographical distance, to contribute to a vigorous and co...

Originally published in The Conversation Just over two decades ago, Sophia and Mehmet met at a North London party. She, originally from Deryneia in the southern part of Cyprus, had just arrived to study at Middlesex University. He, born in Gazimağusa in Northern Cyprus, had joined his uncle’s family in London a little earlier. They almost immediately fell in love with each other. Soon after I met them in June 1997, Sophia told me that falling in love with each other seemed an almost impossible feat. After all, a shared life back in Cyprus would have been fraught with challenges. At the time, Sophia and Mehmet didn’t realise that back in Cyprus, the distance between the houses they grew up in was just over a mile – that they had on countless occasions watched the very same sunrise while looking for crabs at the same beach, divided only by a fence of barbed wire. They grew up in two different worlds, where distances were not measured in the same way as elsewhere. Geographical prox...