The next print edition of the Green European Journal will ask what culture and democracy can do for each other. We are open to essays, photo essays, interviews, graphic stories, and more. Send your pitch by Friday, 5 September 2025.
Culture and the arts are key to understanding the past, interpreting the present, and imagining the future. Amidst growing polarisation – and with politics caught up in a perennial crisis management mode – culture’s contribution to mutual understanding and social cohesion becomes even more essential to democracy’s survival.
Yet in the current political climate, European approaches to cultural policy and the arts seem narrowly focused on glorifying an imagined past or aimed at protecting an untenable status quo. The shift of priorities towards competitiveness and defence is reinforcing the neoliberal mindset that undervalues human activities not exclusively aimed at profit-making or hard security.
The rise of the far right also has major consequences for the cultural and creative sectors. When culture doesn’t conform to the ruling ideology or calls into question national myths, censorship and defunding are used as weapons of political blackmailing. To this end, cultural and artistic production is increasingly disqualified as “woke”.
Perhaps most disruptively, rapid technological advances deployed with little democratic oversight are further contributing to the precarisation of the cultural and creative sectors, while also raising existential questions around the future of human creativity, authorship, and imagination. Untransparent algorithms lead to the flattening of cultural content, the individualisation of cultural consumption, and the further nurturing of cultural and ideological bubbles. These challenges are made all the more serious by the fact that Europe does not own or control the rapidly evolving technologies it timidly tries to regulate.
The goal of this edition is to foster what both the green movement and the cultural and creative sectors identify as the prerequisite and essence of healthy democracies: dialogue, debate, and mutual understanding.
What should you write about?
Pitches can revolve around (but don’t have to be limited to) four thematic pillars:
- Culture and the ecosocial transformation: Understanding the ecosocial crisis as a failure of collective imagination. How can the arts help imagine, discuss, and deliver a just ecosocial transition?
- Examples of cultural and artistic initiatives or policies creatively tackling the ecosocial crisis
- How the arts and culture challenge the status quo by imagining alternative futures
- Building cultural power around the green project (e.g., Bruno Latour’s idea of an “ecological class”)
- Arts & culture and the European project: Critical analyses of the EU’s culture policies and broader reflections on the European project. For example:
- The emphasis on culture as heritage and as the defence of the “European way of life”
- The Creative Europe program and the Culture Compass initiative
- A European Artists Status and other ideas for a thriving arts sector
- Cultural geopolitics and reflections on EU cultural leadership as other global cultural leaders (notably Trump’s US) withdraw
- Facing the far right: The (far) right’s vision and use of arts and culture, from weaponisation of funding to the capture of cultural institutions.
- The far right’s occupation of cultural institutions such as museums
- Weaponisation of funding against dissenting voices/institutions
- Use of cinema and state-funded cultural production
- Positive examples of tackling polarisation and sparking participation through the arts
- Examples of how public authorities (especially at the local level) manage to strengthen the cultural sectors as budgets shrink and national priorities shift.
- Use of arts and culture for imperialistic projects (such as Russia’s in Ukraine) and examples of cultural resistance
- AI, creativity, and imagination: Technological advances and their implications for artistic/cultural activities and democracy. Possible angles include:
- AI implications for creativity, authorship, and imagination
- Attempts at reviving and strengthening a European public sphere in an era of tech-driven polarisation
- The implications on culture of Europe’s technological dependency on the US and China
- “Gigification” and precarisation of the cultural sector
- The decline of text/writing/reading in cultural production and consumption
Editorial requirements
We are looking for all kinds of contributions that stimulate debate, reflection, and imagination. We are open to any kind of format that works well on a printed page, from essays to interviews, photo essays, fiction, creative nonfiction, comics/graphic journalism, visual art, and more.
Pitches should be sent to editor-in-chief Alessio Giussani at: alessio.giussani@gef.eu.
The Green European Journal strives to be an inclusive space, bringing together a diverse range of voices and perspectives. We welcome contributions from everyone. Contributions from those belonging to the following groups are especially encouraged: women, people of colour, people with a physical or mental disability, LGBTQIA+ individuals, and ethnic, cultural, and religious minorities. Contributions from southern and eastern Europe and from outside the European Union are particularly welcome.
If you would like to make a submission but require some support to do so, we invite you to contact us directly. Send us a summary of your proposed contribution and introduce yourself before submitting a draft. We’re happy for contributors to write in a language of their choosing. Before contacting us, check our editorial guidelines carefully. Submissions may be published in print or online.
The deadline to send your pitch is Friday 5 September 2025.