Transform! Europe

Ceuta shows the breakdown of every kind of solidarity of the European Union — solidarity with people striving for a better life as well as solidarity between the Member States. “The symbolic centre of Europe is Lampedusa because it is there that every day the corpses of illegal immigrants coming from Africa are washed up. On this small island it is decided which kind of Europe we want to have.” Henning Mankell, 2008 In summer 2026, Ceuta has become the symbolic centre of Europe.

The response to the climate refugee issue still has a long way to go, and the issue was barely on the agenda of the COP17 conference held in Mongolia: concrete protection for climate-displaced people remains elusive. “Migration in response to environmental changes has been a constant throughout human history and represents a rational adaptation strategy,” the UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres once said as he was still the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.

Australian political ecologist Ariel Salleh challenges the idea that today’s planetary crisis is simply the result of human activity. Through an ecofeminist lens, she traces its roots to interconnected patriarchal, colonial and capitalist relations. Who said Anthropocene? Certainly, the Anthropocene idea has not been without its critics. Building on Paul Crutzen’s original focus on fossil fuel emissions, the concept was broadened substantially by scientist Will Steffen and colleagues.

As the planetary crisis deepens global inequalities, domestic workers – many of whom are migrants – remain largely overlooked in climate policies and debates on ecological transition. This article examines how recognising, protecting and investing in domestic work can address both social and environmental inequalities. Just Transition, a trade-union framework for re-orienting climate policies from the perspective of workers and their communities, has not included domestic workers so far.

The tragedy at Ceuta exposes the human cost of weaponised migration and a European border regime that denies safe routes and fundamental rights. Between 30 and 31 July, around 72,000 people entered Ceuta irregularly, marking the largest wave of migration ever recorded at the Spanish-Moroccan border. In barely 24 hours, tens of thousands of men, women and children, many of them minors, swam around the Tarajal and Benzú breakwaters, or tore down sections of the border fence.

We have come to the current state of planetary emergency because of the lie that although climate change is already happening, we still have time to address it and save ourselves. Now, as life as we know it is increasingly lost, we need urgent action. The earth is boiling and the super El Niño is rapidly intensifying. Asia, parts of the United States, and coastal Africa are currently experiencing historic heavy rainfall and catastrophic flooding.

Not only does the reform of EU asylum policies infringe on the human rights of people on the move, it also aims at defining the EU sphere of power irrespective of geographic borders. “Send them back,” chanted right-wing MEPs after the new return regulation passed the European Parliament on 17 June 2026. This low point of parliamentarian behaviour celebrated the probably lowest point of the ongoing reforms of EU asylum and migration policies, the Return Regulation.

Learning from Latin America: understanding not only its economic and political experiments but also the unique political culture behind them. Over the past two decades, Bolivia has been in the spotlight in Europe and other parts of the world primarily because of its unique economic and social transformation, which formed part of the two tides of left-wing politics that have swept across almost the whole of Latin America over the last quarter of a century.

In his literary works, Bertolt Brecht criticised social injustice, denounced National Socialism and kindled hope for a more humane, socialist society. Seventy years after his death, remembering Brecht also means revisiting his insistence that art should question existing power relations and imagine a different society.

As the recess of the European Parliament begins, this article reflects upon one of the most dramatic achievements of the far right in Europe of the past year: the return regulations for migrants and asylum seekers. How come it was supported by the Christian Democrats and what can be done to end what is now brazenly called “the age of deportations” by the far right. This decade, we have regularly witnessed scenes reminiscent of the darkest chapters in European history.