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May 2025

A braided stream of histories in the Polish “Recovered Territories”

Agata Tumiłowicz-Mazur

Agata Tumiłowicz-Mazur explores Karolina Ćwiek-Rogalska’s Ziemie. Historie odzyskiwania i utraty (Radio Naukowe, 2024), a study of Poland’s post-1945 border shifts, German expulsions, and Polish displacement.

May 2025

The global reach of America’s “reactionary spirit”

Nick Warmuth

In this in-depth review of Zack Beauchamp’s The Reactionary Spirit: How America’s Most Insidious Political Tradition Swept the World (PublicAffairs, 2024), Nick Warmuth explores how a distinctly American reactionary tradition now threatens democracies worldwide.

May 2025

Stuck between the West and the Global

Ferenc Laczó

In this incisive Long Read, Ferenc Laczó critically engages with Globalizing Europe, edited by David Motadel (CUP, 2025). Laczó highlights the volume’s intellectual ambition and scholarly range, while probing its limitations— particularly a lack of a sustained effort to engage with the rich and growing global historical scholarship that meaningfully incorporates areas outside of the northwestern “core.”

March 2025

A pluralistic look at Soviet engagement with World Literature

Nikolaos Paraschis

Nikolaos Paraschis provides an in-depth review of World Literature in the Soviet Union edited by Galin Tihanov, Anne Lounsbery and Rossen Djagalov (Academic Studies Press, 2023). Paraschis writes that this indispensable volume provides an excellent opportunity for an entirely new framework for historically and theoretically discussing “World Literature.”

March 2025

The past and present of the history of racism in Romania

Cristian Cercel

Cristian Cercel provides an in-depth reflection on Marius Turda’s new book În căutarea românului perfect. Specific național, degenerare rasială și selecție socială în România modernă, published by Polirom in 2024. Cercel writes that the book seeks to stir a debate on the relevance of eugenics and racism for implicit and explicit understandings of “true Romanianness”.

November 2024

Left-wing agency and the question of social morality in Russia 

Veronika Pfeilschifter

Veronika Pfeilschifter provides an in-depth reflection on Ilya Budraitskis’ Dissidents Among Dissidents (Verso Books, 2022), elaborating on how Budraitskis’ study can be positioned in larger debates regarding dissidents and the philosophical underpinnings of political violence.

May 2024

Global Easts as Problem Spaces

Eun-joo Lee

Eun-joo Lee reports on the Global Easts conference, organized by the Critical Global Studies Institute (CGSI) and the Global Easts Consortium, which took place at Sogang University in Seoul, South Korea from 17 to 19 January.

May 2024

Oil, climate and war: The curse of the petrostate

Alexander Etkind

What is the connection between oil, war, and the climate crisis? In this Long Read, Alexander Etkind explores the tendency of authoritarian petrostates, such as Russia and Iran, to launch wars and to downplay climate change.

March 2024

Creolizing Transylvania in an inter-imperial framework

James Morris

James Morris explores Anca Parvulescu’s and Manuela Boatcă’s book Creolizing the Modern: Creolizing the Modern: Transylvania across Empires (Cornell University Press, 2022), arguing that if to “creolize” is in part to complicate and challenge national mythologies, then it is important to confront nationalism’s racist language.

February 2024

The lure of central and eastern European innocence: a response to Laczó and Bejan

Hans Kundnani

Hans Kundnani’s book Eurowhiteness (Hurst, 2023) elicited two critical reviews on the pages of the CEU Review of Books. Here Kundnani responds to Ferenc Laczó’s and Raluca Bejan’s Long Read pieces.