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Havingexploded on the margins of Europe, Chornobyl marked the end of the Soviet Unionand tied the era of postmodernism in Western Europe with nuclear consciousness.The Post-Chornobyl Library becomes a metaphor of a new Ukrainian literature of the 1990s,which emerges out of the Chornobyl nuclear trauma.

Eastern Europe has become an ideological battleground since the collapse of the Soviet Union, with liberals and authoritarians struggling to seize the ground lost by Marxism. InFantasies of Salvation, Vladimir Tismaneanu traces the intellectual history of this struggle and warns that authoritarian nationalists pose a serious threat to democratic forces. A leading observer of the often baffling world of post-Communist Europe, Tismaneanu shows that extreme nationalistic and authoritarian thought has been influential in Eastern Europe for much of this century, while liberalism has only shallow historical roots. Despite democratic successes in places such as the Czech Republic and Poland, he argues, it would be a mistake for the West to assume that liberalism will always triumph. He backs this argument by showing how nationalist intellectuals have encouraged ethnic hatred in such countries as Russia, Romania, and the former Yugoslavia by reviving patriotic myths of heroes, scapegoats, and historical injustices. And he shows how enthusiastically these myths have been welcomed by people desperate for some form of \"salvation\" from political and economic uncertainty. On a theoretical level, Tismaneanu challenges the common ideas that the ideological struggle is between \"right\" and \"left\" or between \"nationalists\" and \"internationalists.\" In a careful analysis of the conflict's ideological roots, he argues that it is more useful and historically accurate to view the struggle as between those who embrace the individualist traditions of the Enlightenment and those who reject them. Tismaneanu himself has been active in the intellectual battles he describes, particularly in his native Romania, and makes insightful use of interviews with key members of the dissident movements of the 1970s and 1980s. He offers original observations of countries from the Baltic to the Black Sea and expresses his ideas in a vivid and forceful style.Fantasies of Salvationis an indispensable book for both academic and nonacademic readers who wish to understand the forces shaping one of the world's most important and unpredictable regions.

By the end of the Second World War, many of the Polish cities—and especially their historic centres—were in ruins. This was caused by both bombings and sieges conducted by the Nazis and Soviets. The particular group of cities is associated with former German lands—now called the “Recovered Territories”—which were incorporated into the borders of Poland as compensation for its Eastern Borderlands lost to the Soviet Union. These cities started to be gradually rebuilt after the end of the war, although one can distinguish certain stages and types of interventions, varying from the restoration and idealisation of the pre-war townscapes (so-called “Polish School of Conservation,” which was developed along principles contradictory to the urban conservation theories of these times) to late modern as well as postmodern (called the “retroversion”) principles. This process is ongoing, meaning the reconstruction of the historic cities is not yet completed. At the same time, these processes were embedded within the changing political perspectives—varying from “restoration of destroyed heritage” through “providing modern living environments” up to the “theming urban spaces.” In some cities, various stages and approaches overlapped, creating unique palimpsests. The article focuses not only on the evolution of both politics and design paradigms but mostly on the interplay between them and, as a result, on the doctrine’s evolution. Consequently, these considerations allow presenting the similarities and differences in the evolution of the reconstruction of Polish cities to the cases known from Western Europe and provide the framework for understanding the contemporary urban design paradigms of Central and Eastern Europe.

Today we are witnessing a revival of the spirit of religious fundamentalism in the political discourse of the European Union countries. A discourse of violence unfolds in the form of a new alliance between religion and politics is present among some Western political leaders. These forms of political communication are facilitated, on the one hand, by the political discourse of the populist parties, and on the other hand, using communication technologies to transmit political messages. They occur despite the fact that one of the gains of the postmodern world was the secularization of public life, the rule of law and political communication. In order to understand what is happening to political constructions in the era of the development of artificial intelligence, we have resorted to the perspective on communication formulated by Aurel Codoban, one of the most important Romanian philosophers. An unavoidable theme is that of otherness and identity construction. Artificial intelligence cannot be constituted as an otherness in relation to which the human being can build his own identity or the identity of the community to which he belongs. However, in the digital age, communication constructs reality, and in this process, communication technologies and especially artificial intelligence can be instrumentalized in the construction of discourse that can lead to the construction of identity in general and political identity in particular. Everything takes place in the context of a dialectic of the sacred and the profane in which the development of communication technologies enhances the collaboration between the human being and artificial intelligence.

The case of the EU points to the need to re-conceptualise the relationship between self and other in the IR literature. I argue that the literature forces us into an artificial choice between the liberal constructivist approach of disregarding the constitutive role of difference in identity formation and the critical constructivist approach of assuming a behavioural relationship between self and other, and therefore cannot account for the diversity in the EU's interactions with various states on its periphery. I identify three constitutive dimensions along which self/other relationships vary to produce or not produce relationships of Othering: nature of difference, social distance, and response of other. I analyse how the EU's interactions with Morocco, Turkey, and Central and Eastern European states are situated differently on these dimensions, and evaluate the question of whether the EU is a postmodern collectivity based on these analyses.

This article is published as a tribute to the late Hungarian philosopher Agnes Heller, who died earlier this year. Heller was best known as a prolific writer and political activist whose academic work addressed a wide range of topics, including the status of reformist Marxism, modernism, postmodernism, democracy and aesthetics. The article comprises an introduction, outlining Heller's career as a political dissident and activist, academic philosopher and public intellectual, and an edited transcript of a discussion with Heller, conducted in 2010, focusing on her work on biopolitics. The discussion-interview reflects its historical moment both in the nature of the questions posed and in Heller's responses to them. Heller elaborates her thinking on this topic with particular reference to the following issues: the technical, moral and legal limits of biopolitics in relation to new biological technologies such as genetic engineering; the tension between conceptions of biopolitics as a type of identity politics and as a practice of governmentality and demography; Giorgio Agamben's theorising on biopolitics in Homo Sacer and Hannah Arendt's views on political representation and her distinction between the private and public spheres. Heller also addresses other themes that run through her oeuvre, such as the status and meanings of democracy, totalitarianism, minority rights, and the relationship between ecological science and politics. The conversational tone of the discussion provides a concise and accessible introduction to Heller's later work and conveys her sense of dynamic engagement with what continue to be urgent political and philosophical issues.

The armed conflict in the east of Ukraine brought about an emergence of a distinctive trend in contemporary Ukrainian poetry: the poetry of war. Directly and indirectly, the poems collected in this volume engage with the events and experiences of war, reflecting on the themes of alienation, loss, dislocation, and disability; as well as justice, heroism, courage, resilience, generosity, and forgiveness. In addressing these themes, the poems also raise questions about art, politics, citizenship, and moral responsibility. The anthology brings together some of the most compelling poetic voices from different regions of Ukraine. Young and old, female and male, somber and ironic, tragic and playful, filled with extraordinary terror and ordinary human delights, the voices recreate the human sounds of war in its tragic complexity.

This anthology presents translations of literary works by Ukraine's leading writers that imaginatively engage pivotal issues in today's Ukraine and express its tribulations and jubilations. It offers English-language readers a wide array of the most beguiling literature written in Ukraine in the past fifty years.