ABSTRACT The debates over cyberspace and digitalization and their impact over sovereignty have recently had lively discussions in the literature of international relations. This sovereignty debate in the periphery of Europe regarding cyberspace is emerging and it has become an area in which national authorities have sought to claim their share. The paper analyses cyberspace and digitalization and how they have affected the understanding of sovereignty over cyberspace and how they have transformed the state in a specific country case study in the periphery of Europe. It achieves this by focusing on Albania. Cyberspace and digitalization have emerged as priorities for domestic politics, in which Tirana has endeavoured to act by applying the norms emerging internationally and they have been sources for the new role of Albanian institutions domestically. Albanian actors appear to have been less responsive to cyberspace responsibilities, by considering that Albania is not a powerful and rich enough to be a target of cyber attacks. In conditions where it has been responsive, the focus has been more on issues that concern general digitalization politics.

ABSTRACT Although Belarus is one of Russia’s strategic partners after the outbreak of the war in Donbas relations between the two states were increasingly tense. Since 2014, Alexander Lukashenko has refused to recognize the annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation and has tried to mediate the conflict by hosting peace talks in Minsk. Moreover, in 2018 and 2019, he refused Vladimir Putin’s proposals to deepen integration with Russia within the Union State. However, since the beginning of post-election protests and the imposition of harsh sanctions by the West, Alexander Lukashenko has tried to retain power and get closer to Russia. That is why he made a series of concessions to his Russian counterpart agreeing to adopt a new military doctrine of the Union State and to organize the military drills “Allied Resolve” on the territory of Belarus. This article examines how the Belarusian president reacted to Vladimir Putin’s attempts to lure him into the Russo-Ukrainian war throughout 2022. The paper shows that although initially, Alexander Lukashenko succumbed to Putin’s pressure to allow the Russian army to use Belarus to invade Ukraine, afterward he acted cautiously, avoiding at all costs the direct involvement of the Belarusian army in the war.

ABSTRACT The article opens with materials from the author’s research among east Slavs in Poland: a close-up portrayal of villagers classified as Ukrainians in the Polish People’s Republic, some of whom had no developed national consciousness; and an equally brief account of a postsocialist project in a nearby city, in which the boundaries between rival peoples were clearly drawn. Explanations for inconsistencies between individuals and enduring tensions between groups must be sought in the complicated history of this ethnic borderland. Collective identities and peoplehood are plastic. Outcomes are shaped by many factors: language and religion are fundamental, but account must also be taken of the contingencies of imperial politics, violence, industrialization, and the aspirations of intellectuals. The distinction between historical and non-historical peoples is found to be useful, but neither Ernest Gellner’s theory of nationalism nor conventional accounts of colonialism have much traction in this case. The implicit presentism of those who sacralize state boundaries at one point in time in the name of “sovereignty” has affinities with the functionalist presentism developed by Bronisław Malinowski in very different, non-European contexts. While that paradigm has few adherents nowadays, Malinowski’s posthumous critique of the state and “political sovereignty” is salutary for understanding the ongoing catastrophe in Ukraine.

ABSTRACT The decision of the Constitutional Tribunal in October 2020 has severely curtailed women’s reproductive rights in Poland. Mass protests ensued. This article focuses on the untold story of a productive rupture that channelled the protesters’ efforts into a mass legal mobilization against the tribunal’s judgement to the European Court of Human Rights. These applications, known as the “Women’s Complaint,” were filed by over one thousand Polish women. Triangulating between analysis of interviews with human rights lawyers and feminist activists, and the legal reasoning of the petition, this article’s original contribution traces the evolution of the Women’s Complaint from a reproductive rights dispute to a challenge to the government’s authoritarian backsliding to better understand the relationship between social conflicts and legal mobilization. Reproductive rights and democratic values are inextricable; threats to one reinforce threats to the other. The Women’s Complaint is about women standing up for their reproductive rights and – in effect – spearheading a much broader rights-based litigation against authoritarianism.

ABSTRACT Research on sustainability in museums typically focuses on one dimension of sustainability, with little research on a holistic understanding of sustainability. Research on how museums align with sustainability is not a new topic, but rare in the context of contemporary art museums. The paper aims to analyse how European contemporary art museums have incorporated sustainability into their mission statements. The study uses a qualitative discourse analysis method to examine the content of the missions of 50 European contemporary art museums. From a regional perspective, in general, an openness towards sustainability and a holistic approach is less visible in the mission, but more so in non-CEE countries. Environmental management, economic stability and innovative, proactive behaviour are also stronger in non-CEE countries. In terms of societal roles CEE museums are primarily concerned with educating society, while non-CEE museums are already playing the role of the agent of change in social transformation.

ABSTRACT The article investigates the issue of the eight-hour workday and its application from the early 1890s – when it first appeared on the Bulgarian organized labour movement’s agenda following the decisions of the Second International – to its adoption in national legislation as well as by the International Labour Organization in 1919, and finally, the enforcement of the eight-hour day in the Bulgarian textile industry between the two world wars. This article explores continuities and changes in the struggle to adopt and enforce the eight-hour day, conceptualizing them as parts of a single negotiated social process. The article employs a gendered and multi-scale approach to explore how working time limits were negotiated on and between the shop floor, the national political stage, and in international labour organizations by diverse social groups such as (un)organized (women) workers, trade unions and labour activists with various political affiliations, the state through its labour inspectorate, as well the International Labour Organization. The article goes beyond the gender-neutral language of legal documents, instead arguing that the eight-hour day was conceptualized differently – with some variations depending on women’s life-course stage and social circumstances – and held particular importance for women workers.

ABSTRACT The essay discusses women’s food riots in the Hungarian territories of the Habsburg Empire during World War I between spring 1917 and summer 1918. While the existing literature has primarily focused on urban contexts in a variety of European countries, this essay analyses the Hungarian countryside with a focus on small towns and villages where and around which inhabitants were mostly agrarian workers. The agrarian population was especially hard hit by the increasingly coercive wartime economic measures, and especially by the high cost of living and the break-down in food supply. Using archival sources and news reports, the article approaches food riots as a form of labour activism signalling (agrarian) women’s efforts to improve their desperate living and working conditions and, thus, as a local political response to the international and national political and economic crisis that unfolded in the Dual Monarchy shortly before its disintegration during the second phase of the Great War. It pays particular attention to participants’ social/ethnic background, agendas, and repertoires of action, including the antisemitic character of some of the riots and authorities’ reaction to these uprisings. The essay, thus, also examines the interactions between members of local-level (un)organized activism and regional and national governance.

ABSTRACT As climate change continues to affect countries worldwide, scholars have begun considering the impact of environmental stress for political instability in industrialized countries. This paper analyzes the risk of social unrest in various European political systems in relation to the interaction of environmental stress and electoral institutions. We use a spatially and temporally disaggregated dataset to examine the possible relationships between environmental stress and social unrest in all European Union member countries from 2000 to 2020. We find that there are stark differences between the observed interaction of majoritarian electoral features and environmentally induced unrest in those European states with a history of Communist rule or climate vulnerability versus the rest of Europe. Overall, these results suggest that electoral systems play an important but heterogenous role in the understanding of climate change and political unrest.

ABSTRACT This article examines the far-right discourses on gender in Greece focusing on two historical moments, namely the period between 1936 and 1941 when Greece was governed by the authoritarian regime of general Ioannis Metaxas, and the period between 2010 and 2022 which was defined by the Greek-government debt crisis, the Covid-19 pandemic and the 2021-2022 global energy crisis. It aims to demonstrate the instrumental logic lurking behind the gender rhetoric employed by the Far Right and bring to the fore both points of convergence and divergence. With regards to the Metaxas regime the article discusses the contradictions marking the official propaganda on women which seems to oscillate between deeply rooted conservative ideas on women’s role on the one hand, and the promotion of new ideals of femininity on the other hand. Fast-forward to today, the article examines the ways gender issues are manipulated by the emerging Alt Right in Greece. Via the theoretical lens of femonationalism and homonationalism, the article brings to the fore the contradictions between the breakthroughs with regards to feminist and LGBTQI demands on the one hand, and the systematic attempts to reintroduce an ultra-conservative agenda with regards to gender issues in Greece on the other hand.