Albena Azmanova

Albena Azmanova is associate professor in political and social thought at the University of Kent’s Brussels School of International Studies. Her most recent book is Capitalism on Edge: How Fighting Precarity can Achieve Radical Change without Crisis or Utopia (Columbia University Press, 2020).

Albena Azmanova

The nascent paradigm shift in the EU

Albena Azmanova 28th April 2020

Emergency action to enhance healthcare and unemployment insurance might signal a paradigm shift for the union from market integration to providing public goods.

Whose is the European Green Deal?

Albena Azmanova 11th March 2020

The challenges of social and environmental injustice are as intense as ever. But which social forces can act as the agents of change?

The big Green New Deal and its little red social question

Albena Azmanova 30th October 2019

Why does environmental promise always fall short in practice? A new answer to the social question can bridge the gap.

Syriza And The 21st Century Left

Albena Azmanova 4th May 2018

Costas Douzinas’ Syriza in Power (Polity, 2017) carries a wondrous resemblance to Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince (1513). The latter is penned by a state official turned humanist philosopher; the former by a humanist philosopher turned an accidental state official. Both works scrutinise without moralization the world of politics at a critical historical juncture – the experimentation with republican rule […]

Abuse Of The Rule Of Law In The EU

Albena Azmanova 24th October 2017

Spanish Premier Mariano Rajoy is about to suspend Catalonia’s autonomy, and EU leaders have ruled out involvement in the crisis, with the justification that the Spanish government is acting to “restore the constitutional order”. There seems to be a consensus among the European leadership that Madrid’s handling of the 1 October Catalan referendum is completely […]

Living, working and Covid-19 (update April 2021): mental health and trust decline across EU as pandemic enters another year

The third round of Eurofound's Living, working and Covid-19 e-survey, fielded in February and March 2021, sheds light on the social and economic situation of people across Europe following nearly a full year of living with restrictions. The report analyses the main findings and tracks developments and trends across the 27 EU member states since the survey was first launched in April 2020. It pinpoints issues that have surfaced over the course of the pandemic, such as increased job insecurity due to the threat of job loss, decline in mental wellbeing, erosion of recent gains in gender equality, fall in trust vis-à-vis institutions, deterioration of work–life balance and growth of vaccine hesitancy. The results of the survey highlight the need for a holistic approach to support all the groups hit hard by the crisis, to prevent them from falling further behind.

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Discover the new issue of the Progressive Post!

The EU finds itself increasingly compressed between intensifying global rivalries and global issues urging collective responses. Global topics and the EU's approach to them are the core of the latest issue of the Progressive Post.

‘Strategic autonomy: challenges and pitfalls’ is the special coverage of this issue, while one of the dossiers highlights the EU's relations to its most important ally: ‘EU-US: love no more’. 'Cheerleading exercise', on COP26, and 'Eastern discomfort', about the gloomy situation of progressive parties in central and eastern Europe, are also part of this edition.

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WSI policy brief: the formula for a social Europe

The strengthening of the social dimension of the EU is back on the agenda of European politics. The European Pillar of Social Rights, the revision of the Posted Workers Directive and the initiative for a European minimum wage are interpreted by some as a turning point. However, the road to a more social Europe is still very long. Against that background, this paper formulates a social Europe thus: social minimum standards plus a reconfiguration of the internal market and economic and monetary union in a manner compatible with the pillars of the European social model.

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Reshaping the Work–Life Balance Directive with Covid‑19 lessons in mind

The Covid-19 pandemic has disproportionately affected women, threatening to reverse progress towards gender equality. It has made the need to address longstanding structural disadvantages affecting women even more evident and pressing, including the fact that women continue to perform a greater share of unpaid care work. This paper argues that the Work–Life Balance Directive 2019—the key EU legal instrument that seeks to address the labour-market disadvantages of those with caring responsibilities, the majority of whom are women—should be revisited in the aftermath of the pandemic.

The directive provides for certain entitlements to leave and flexible working arrangements. The paper proposes how various aspects of the framework could be strengthened in order to promote its gender-equality objectives in a more effective and transformative way, and to confer recognition on the social and economic value of unpaid care work. It also points to other key measures that must complement the directive to ensure a cultural shift towards equal distribution of care work between men and women.

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