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Ten years before the collapse of communism, there were warning signs that the Soviet Union's economy was becoming crippled. Soviet authorities controlled and influenced the Russian Orthodox Church and they jailed leaders of the church in all East European countries. The fall of the Berlin wall created a turning point in Christianity in 1989. More than 8 000 Russian Orthodox Churches were reopened between 1990 and 1995. The nineties could be described as a time of hope regarding religious revival in Eastern Europe. In this paradigm shift, freedom of religion became officially recognised as a basic human right and a multitude of denominations became free to compete for followers. In Prague, Cardinal Miroslav VIk had ministered clandestinely to Catholics while officially working as a window-washer during communist rule. He was known by the people as the "generous pastor." After the Velvet Revolution, he became bishop and later cardinal in the Czech Republic. In many East European countries, religion and national identity are closely entwined. According to the Pew Research Centre report on Christianity, in Eastern Europe there was a sustainable increase in religious activities from the early 1990s until 2017. The fall of the Berlin wall had a significant influence on South Africa. It helped South Africa in its democratic process. The once dominating neo-Calvinistic control of society was replaced by a new paradigm of democratic freedom and an equal religious stance by the new government elected in 1994. ; https://upjournals.co.za/index.php/SHE/index ; am2019 ; Science of Religion and Missiology

Going against both the naive techno-optimism of 'greening business as usual' and a resurgent 'catastrophism' within green thinking and politics, The Politics of Unsustainability offers an analysis of the causes of unsustainability and diminished human flourishing.

This is a challenging time to be an academic with an interest in either the economy or the environment: we are being deluged with an over-supply of bad news. From the evidence of accelerating climate change to the increasingly desperate policies of 'fiscal stimulus' and 'quantitative easing' it is difficult enough to keep up with the jargon, never mind the policy. Academics tend to spend their careers looking backwards, analysing what is already safely established and categorized. The present crisis has deprived us of that luxury. Now more than ever our insights and our information are needed

Like buses, crises (including the opportunities that can also accompany them) seem to come in threes. First, since June 2016 we have Brexit and now, July 2020, the real possibility of a no-deal Brexit since the landslide election of Boris Johnston's Conservative party in December 2019. Second, the Covid-19 pandemic and the uneven manner in which governments, populations, businesses, trades unions etc. across the devolved administrations in Great Britain and the Republic of Ireland have responded, have devastated lives, communities and economies. And finally, looming above both of these in terms of urgency and negative impact potential, is the planetary crisis – climate breakdown and the erosion of the life supporting systems of the earth. But not only do we face all three, they are also interrelated in complex and unpredictable ways such that addressing one of them could have impacts on the others. This is the trilemma of the turbulent times we live in. And this list does not include another connected crisis: the rise of right wing populism, xenophobia and 'post-truth' politics and 'fake news' Lest you get too depressed too early in reading this, there is some good news. The good news is that we have seen some progress on green issues. The climate crisis in particular has crept up the political agenda. This can be observed in the rise of social mobilisations such as Extinction Rebellion and the Youth Strike for Climate movements which unexpectedly just emerged in the last year. We can also point to the 'green wave' which saw support for Green Parties across Europe increase in the 2019 European elections, and the rise in Green Party support in local and parliamentary elections in the Republic and Northern Ireland in 2019-20. In particular I want to draw attention to the rise and importance of non-state actors and action, issues and forms of cooperation (existing and potential) across these islands organised around responding to the planetary crisis at local and global scales. Too often the media, academia, think tanks and public discussion focus on the state, corporations/business, large organisations such as churches, trades unions to the neglect of civil society, localised political actors and agency. This article will provide some commentary on the 'usual suspects and themes' of how Brexit, the pandemic and the planetary crisis may impact governmental and policy coordination and cooperation across the different levels and dimensions of 'big P politics', inter alia, political parties, national and devolved governments, significant business sectors such as agriculture, tourism, ICT etc. However, I wish to mostly concentrate on more local, non-electoral, non-policy, often more confrontational, oppositional, decentralised and grassroots forms of 'small p politics' now discernible around our planetary calamity. But this is not to discount, undermine or ignore the importance of nation-state level and especially more local state/council level politics and initiatives. As the pandemic has demonstrated in times of crisis such state action is vital, but we need to reconnect state action with civil society and localised mobilisation.

This article focuses on green non-ecological critiques of orthodox economic growth and offers a distinctive green republican political economy argument in favour of democratising production as part of the 'just transition' to a sustainable, regenerative economy. Democratising production could, by enabling the realisation of some of the internal goods of work, reduce ecologically damaging orthodox economic growth. The article then proceeds to critically analyse the dominant conception of 'work as disutility' within both the history of modern political economy and more importantly within neoclassical economics. This (mis)conception of work is one that both neglects to recognise the internal values of work, frames a 'productivist and growth' oriented view of human labour which is used to justify 'despotic' workplace management practices. Hence liberating the macro economy from the imperative of endless growth, and at the micro economic/workplace level liberating production from capitalist productivity, could simultaneously enhance human freedom and flourishing and ecological sustainability.

The flag protests in Northern Ireland (2012–13) offer an opportunity on the one hand to examine the politics of dispossession, national identity, decline and political violence in loyalist areas in Belfast. On the other, they are an opportunity to examine of hope, leadership and change within working class loyalism – not least, around the re-imagining of what Britishness can/could or perhaps should mean in post-Agreement Northern Ireland. This article offers an activist-academic perspective on and interpretation of the meaning and potential of those protests around how they reveal both a fracturing and potential for rethinking Britishness. It suggests the possibilities and limits of an inclusive, civic, rather than ethnic, national identity, and a sense of Britishness sufficient to the task of agonistic (as opposed to antagonistic) engagement and contestation with Irish nationalism and republicanism. By antagonistic I mean relations that are characterised in whole or part in terms of 'friend-enemy' thus containing within them the possibility of violence, while by agonistic I mean oppositional relations that do not contain this threat of violence. Agonism (from Greek agon, meaning 'struggle') emphasises the potentially positive aspects of certain (but not all) forms of political conflict. It accepts a permanent place for such conflict, but seeks to show how we might accept and channel this positively. It is also to affirm the legitimacy of one's political adversary and their objectives even if one fundamentally disagrees with those objectives. The article argues that an agonistic conceptualisation of democracy and democratic change understood as non-violent disagreement (as opposed to consensus and agreement) is a more accurate and useful understanding than a conceptualisation of democracy and politics as either agreement or antagonism. In this way one can interpret the flag protests as vacillating between a legitimate democratic agonistic politics of struggle and contestation and an illegitimate, reactionary antagonistic politics of violence and threat.

The conjoining of civic republicanism and green politics is a new but timely response to understanding and navigating a path through and beyond our turbulent times. A green republican analysis our contemporary condition–climate breakdown, rising inequality, the crisis of representative democracy–sees the structural and ideological imperative (tyranny) of endless economic growth as one root cause. From a green republican perspective economic growth has now passed a threshold where it has become a threat, both to the sustainability/longevity of the polity, but also common goods and human flourishing. This paper identifies and analyses key components of the growth imperative, such as debt-based consumerism and non-democratic workplaces, as well as more widely discussed requirements of growth to externalise ecological and social costs, and growth's dependence on cheap and secure sources of fossil resources. It argues that these components of growth pose serious risks to liberty as nondomination, the securing and protecting of common goods, rough equality and securing the ecological conditions for the republic. Therefore, these 'green' concerns should be also concerns for republicans. The paper looks at one recent strategy that has been proposed to help move societies beyond climate breakdown and carbon-addiction–namely the 'Just Transition' discourse and set of policy proposals. The paper offers a green republican account of the Just Transition strategy for a post-or low carbon economy in which equality, justice and democratic participation are central.

his article critically examines and problematises the 'taken for granted' status of economic growth within modern politics and political economy. It views economic growth is an ideology and structural interest of the capitalist state, one that serves the interests of a specific class or elite rather than, beyond a threshold, the interests of a majority in society. The article outlines some of the historical and institutional origins of economic growth as a core state imperative. It focuses on the immediate post-WW2 period, the Cold War, and the role of the OECD (and its predecessor the OEEC) in systematically disseminating and promoting GDP growth in Western European countries as a key part of the US led competition of the 'free capitalist world' against the Communist bloc. The article suggests that economic growth is s a powerful idea that has become a keystone of the (initially Keynesian-based) political ideology of growth, which in turn enabled and empowered state and supra-state institutions, and acted as a legitimating ideology throughout capitalist societies.