Frieder Otto Wolf: Reflection on the Case Studies

1. What do I want (and not necessarily expect) from case studies?

They should help us to become aware of complexity and even excess – where reality goes beyond the effects of over-determined structures, showing us, how a specified, singular society evolves under the impact of strategic interventions (of neo-liberal policies which follow a general pattern, while varying it). In these cases, the case studies should exhibit, how the singular societies of Eastern Europe have evolved under More

Judith Dellheim: Reflections from the Perspective of Socio-Ecologic Transformation

In the beginning I have to come back to the quartet of the 4+2 connection. Globally, energy related activities produce around 63% of climate-damaging emissions and around 77% of all CO2 emissions. Around 28% of climate-damaging emissions and 36% of CO2 emissions stem from electricity generation and heating. Transport accounts for around one quarter of climate-damaging emissions. The transport sphere depends on oil for 96% of its energy; oil is responsible for over 95% of the emissions caused by transport. More

Joachim Becker: Enlarging the EU Sphere of Influence Eastwards – Or: The Dialectics of Integration and Disintegration

In the face of the austerity-induced depression of the domestic markets in the EU, the EU and its main powers bank on the expansion of economic relations beyond the EU and free trade agreements. The coalition agreement of social democrats and Christian democrats in Germany, the dominant EU power, is characteristic of this thinking. It is extremely brief and unimaginative in its paragraphs on the EU, but dedicates detailed and highlighted paragraphs on the Germany’s economic relationship with so-called emerging economies and on EU free trade agreements More

Tina Schivatcheva: The Great Leap Westward – China and the Land grabs in Ukraine and Bulgaria

The recent global rise of food prices has predicated the explosion of land-grab practices at a global geo-economic scale.  In Eastern Europe, although the post-socialist ‘great transformation’ entailed the commodification of the land, unsettled land ownership and undeveloped land market offered, at best, only a short-lived and tenuous protection from land-grabs.  The global financial crisis impacted particularly strongly the resource-dependent, export-oriented economies of Bulgaria and Ukraine. More