Excavations on Letná Hill uncovered a forgotten 1950s labour camp linked to Prague’s Stalin Monument. Preserved architecture and artefacts reveal the daily life of workers, driven less by physical violence than by ideological pressure and social consequences, shedding new light on forced labour and material culture in communist Czechoslovakia.

Despite intensive study, the socioeconomic and political structuring of the Southern Caucasus Kura-Araxes cultural tradition remain poorly understood. Here, the authors explore the results of integrated geophysical survey and excavation at Artanish 9 in the Lake Sevan highlands (Armenia). They document a small, densely built site enclosed by monumental walls—an anomaly in highland Kura-Araxes settlement systems—offering new insights into sociopolitical diversity. Through examination of spatial organisation, architecture and storage facilities, Artanish 9 reveals the adaptive strategies of highland communities and the complexity of Early Bronze Age settlement systems in the Southern Caucasus.

This article investigates the 2022 Yahidne war crime, during which Russian forces confined approximately 368 civilians, including 69 children, to the basement of the local school. Drawing on Jacques Derrida’s concept of hauntology, the authors explore satellite images of unfolding events and the enduring material traces of the occupation—drawings, abandoned toys, military rations, propaganda newspapers, spent military equipment and damaged infrastructure. They consider how these traces contribute to processes of collective memory and to the transformation of the site’s significance through public memorialisation, reflecting on the role of contemporary archaeology in documenting and interpreting material legacies of recent conflict.

This article examines a monumental structure in the North Pontic Steppe that was repurposed as a burial mound in the late fourth millennium BCE. The authors argue that this repurposing reflects a pattern of Yamna appropriation of ritual spaces, conceptualised as a ‘continuity of sacred spaces’.

The promise of cleansing judiciaries of judges who are unfit for democracy and rule of law paradigms has been central to judicial reforms for European post-communist countries approaching the Europe they imagined. Thrice already in the past 30 years, Central Eastern European (CEE) and Southeastern European countries (SEE) applied extraordinary accountability mechanisms for judges. The latter promised to be the exceptional and ultimate stretch for the judiciaries, a one-time necessary precondition for them to be able to transition out of the past and into the ‘fully fledged independent and accountable’ judiciary prescribed transnationally. From one round of judicial reforms to another, shaped by different requirements of transitional societies in Europe, judicial cleansing operations have returned to fix the same persisting problem of judicial integrity-building. This article aims to show these measures are not to be exclusively relied upon to instate sustainable independent and accountable courts, precisely because of the risks related to their extraordinary nature, their problematic rule of law exceptions, and the leeway for abuse they create in critical junctures as products and enablers of transition.

Ostrów Lednicki was a centre of the Piast dynasty (tenth–fourteenth centuries AD), laying the foundations for the development of the Polish state. A collapsed tenth-century wooden fortification associated with Bolesław the Brave (the first king of Poland) and its unique sculptural element provide insights into early-medieval construction techniques.

Social reproduction scholars have made headway in integrating the analysis of capitalism, class, gender, and care. We offer two contributions to this literature. First, we provide a novel framework with insights into companies as sites of decommodification, shaping childcare cost distribution and affecting childbearing rates. Second, we extend social reproduction research geographically to the oft-overlooked region of Eastern Europe. Eastern Europe is home to 15 of the world’s 20 fastest-declining populations, with low fertility as a prime cause. We argue that privatization catalyzes commodification, raising work intensity and financial-temporal uncertainty and eroding collective resources for social reproduction, thereby impacting childbearing. We explore this mechanism quantitatively by employing four distinct definitions of privatization across two datasets: one covering 52 Hungarian towns (1989–2006) and another spanning 29 postsocialist countries (1989–2012). We shed light on the details of the mechanism through a qualitative analysis of 82 life-history interviews in four Hungarian towns, surveying the lived experience of privatization.

Does candidate gender matter for vote choice? Whereas experimental research suggests an average preference for female candidates, observational studies tend to find null effects. In this note, we address the recent debate on how to measure voter preferences on the aggregate and the individual level. We argue that candidate gender preferences exist, but that whether and when they are revealed varies between and within voters. Drawing on an observational design and using data from over 500,000 individual ballots in Lithuanian elections, we employ multilevel regression and exponential random graph models to show how voters' candidate gender preferences are distributed across the electorate and how they vary in size and direction. We find that about half of all voters prefer either male or female candidates. Whereas preference for male candidates tends to be revealed in the first and second preference votes, preference for female candidates is first revealed in lower preference votes. Our results help explain contradictory findings in the literature and illustrate how observational data and methods can be used to assess voter preferences within electorates.

The COVID‐19 pandemic led to widespread fear among the population. Early studies suggested that this resulted in exclusionary attitudes and increased support for discriminatory policy measures. We still lack an understanding of the longer‐term, potentially erosive consequences that COVID‐19‐specific anxieties may carry for citizens' commitment to liberal democratic norms. In this research note, we present evidence from an original experiment in which we manipulate individuals' cognitive accessibility of their fears related to COVID‐19. We implemented this experiment in Hungary and Romania – two cases where illiberal attitudes are most likely to amplify under conditions of fear – a year and a half after the outbreak of the pandemic. The results show that our intervention is successful in elevating respondents' levels of worry, anxiety and fear when thinking about infectious diseases like COVID‐19. However, these emotions do not carry secondary effects on individuals' levels of right‐wing authoritarianism, nationalism or outgroup hostility, nor do they affect preferences for specific discriminatory policy measures aimed to fight a potential resurgence of COVID‐19. We discuss these findings in light of the literature on the demand‐side determinants of democratic backsliding and the consequences of emotions on political behaviour.

Thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and over a decade after its reunification, the European Union (EU) is experiencing increasingly more challenges toward its unity. The EU has experienced a number of crises in the early 2000s, the breakaway of one of its members in 2019, and is challenged by the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. The latter crisis exhibits, on the one hand, the need for social coherence and unified policies, and on the other, has prompted the physical closure of borders, and divergent responses by domestic political elite. One such reaction—the adopted strengthening of power for Hungary’s Prime Minister—has prompted an international outcry and re-heated the debate of the democratic backtracking of some of the new EU member-states. Analyzing the process of European Enlargement and the changing sentiments about European Integration in a number of East European countries, this symposium brings to the fore important questions about the relationship between Eastern and Western Europe. Although there is a general consensus that both the East and the West have benefited and continue to benefit from their reunion, it is nevertheless the case that the quick assimilation of liberal values has led to policies seen as threatening the liberal democracy model of the EU that we need to address in order to preserve the stability of the Union.

How do international nonprofit organizations influence political party formation in new democracies? Despite recent analyses of external influences on economic-restructuring, less attention has been paid to international assistance to political parties. Contrary to the scholarly literature stressing preexisting socioeconomic cleavages, I argue that new parties may emerge around political cleavages during rapid change; international assistance may encourage new parties to adopt organizational forms and issue areas lacking historical precedent, which are subsequently adapted to mobilize domestic public support. To demonstrate this claim, I contrast assistance by U.S. political party affiliates to parties in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, where similar revolutionary movements emerged in the name of “civil society” in 1989 but diverged, with a Western market-oriented party in the Czech Republic and populist semidemocratic party in Slovakia winning subsequent elections. The divergent paths highlight the limits to applying Western models of party organization across contexts and the need for democratic actors to be strengthened beyond founding elections.

One of the key reasons for the scholarly and policy concern about the rising levels of ethnic diversity is its apparently detrimental effect on the production of public goods. Although numerous studies have tackled that issue, there is still much ambiguity as to the precise micro‐level mechanisms underpinning this relationship. In this article, a novel theoretical explanation for this relationship is proposed, building on the social resistance framework. This proposition is tested using a new cross‐sectional public opinion survey covering 14,536 respondents in 817 neighbourhoods across 11 Central Eastern European countries. Analysing national minorities defined by postwar border changes means one can overcome the endogeneity problem faced by research based on immigrant groups. The findings show that it is the combination of a minority group's discrimination and its spatial clustering that makes minorities reluctant to contribute to public goods. The article constitutes a novel theoretical and methodological contribution to the research on the effects of diversity on public goods provision.

Think tanks in the former Soviet bloc face the stark challenge of sustainability. To survive and prosper, they have to be increasingly entrepreneurial and business-like and have to actively seek contracts from government and the international donor community. In this context, this paper discusses the diversification strategies of four think tanks identified to be particularly entrepreneurial in developing new lines of work. This includes commercial activities similar to those of consulting firms, and tapping the business community for donations by offering seminars or other products. The paper reviews how these institutions identified and assessed various opportunities, and how they promoted a new line of work. It also explores the rewards—financial and other—and the challenges that are created by the new types of work within the organizations.

This article deals with the main obstacles in the way of conducting field research in Eastern Europe. Focusing on Ukraine, the article confronts a number of research design rules with the post-Soviet reality. Taking into consideration cultural and political factors, the article seeks to highlight the challenges that await researchers. Thanks to personal experience acquired in Ukraine, the author points to some of the potential difficulties, as well as opportunities awaiting political scientists conducting research in the region.

Preliminary results from the first archaeological excavations of Early Modern mercury-production sites at Idrija, Slovenia, confirm the use of ceramic vessels for mercury roasting following the techniques described in Agricola’s De re metallica, which was published in 1556.