“How To Raise Your Child’s IQ” – by Professor William Maxwell, an Inspiration Exchange discussion series event to be held under the auspice of Michael and Kitty Dukakis Centre for Humanitarian and Public Service at the American College of Thessaloniki on Wednesday, May 9, at 5 PM in the Bissell Library. All Revolutions are born […]

By Helena Smith, The Guardian, Athens A few months before submarines became the talk of Athens, Yiannis Panagopoulos, who heads the Greek trade union confederation (GSEE), found himself sitting opposite Angela Merkel at a private meeting the German chancellor had called of European trade unionists in Berlin. When it came to his turn to address […]

Hellenic Elections Greek Post-Election Coverage 2012 Rolling coverage of Greek parliamentary elections and their aftermath May 2012 Tuesday 00:08 A lot of tension today in the media and, one imagines, in Athens, Brussels, and in the markets. According to the Guardian’s live business blog, by the end of the day certain traders were already working […]

By Mark Lowen, BBC News, Athens It is rare for citizens to try to take their government to court, and even more so for a Western European government to be taken to the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague. But that is what one group based near the Greek capital is now attempting. And […]

By Evangelos Kontos Experiencing these difficult days in Greek society first hand makes any person regardless of their political views, economic status, education, feel uncertain for the future, for the days to come. This uncertainty can transform to fear instantly and fear brings always his best friend with him, panic. A society in panic is […]

By Krysta Kalachani Athens, May 13, 2012. Nothing about Athens and the rally. No news in the hashtags and no photos, and I thought that when I went there it was late, but I guess people were very few really. Yup! I can imagine, I myself was on the track again with the motorbike… Believe […]

By Simon Bensasson The following is a set of assumptions which provide, to my mind at least, the broader context in which the current Greek crisis is situated. (a)     There is a global problem caused by an imbalance of consumption/production. Parts of the world consume more than they produce whilst others consume less. The issue […]

By Anna-Maria Konsta In today’s insecure globalized world, where state and supranational structures seem to be collapsing, there are good reasons to reconnect citizenship with the city, especially if we focus on a “bottom-up” approach of citizenship and on citizenship as practice and participation. Contemporary urban theorists emphasize a number of characteristics of cities and […]

Parallaxi, a free-press magazine inThessaloniki who began the well known “ThessalonikiAllios” are organizing the 2nd annual effort to clean up the city ofThessaloniki. Thessaloniki Allios willbe reviving an area of Thessaloniki that has been left abandoned for a longtime, the coastline from Aretsous until Macedonia Airport. One mission will be to clean up the coastbehind […]

By Konstantinos Bouas The ongoing administrative reform effort is one of the most critical issues of concern for administrative science in Greece.  Considering the longstanding structural weaknesses of the public administration, as well as the explicit commitments of the Greek State deriving from the Memorandum, it is easy to realize the urgency of immediate and effective […]

By Marten van Heuven The author is a retired senior US diplomat with extensive experience in European affairs. He contributed this note in response to an invitation by Politis for thoughts on the trans-Atlantic dimensions of the crisis in Greece and the eurozone. I find the situation in Greece and in Europe unsettling, in part […]

By Kathryn Lukey-Cout​socostas* Globalization has us readily accepting goods from other lands into our homes. But can countries absorb imported citizens just as easily? Whenever I join the crowd to criticize a line-jumper in a queue in Greece, someone inevitably tries to muzzle me with the classic insider-outsider putdown: “You’re not Greek.” Apparently, only locals […]

By David Wisner I first drafted this note over a year ago. If anything, the tendency I described, and its implications for the future of Greece and the EU, are all the greater. A worldly Greek acquaintance likes to tell the following anecdote. Foreign investors of a bygone era come to Greece, only to lose […]

By Kostas A. Lavdas Greeks know a thing or two about politics. But the reasons why they do – the conditions that help nurture a political culture prone to intense politicization – are diverse and, at least some of them, divergent. In fact, as I have suggested elsewhere, political development in modern Greece can be […]

Choose4Greece is an online application which calculates voters’ ideological congruence with political parties for the June 17 elections in Greece. Choose4Greece II represents an update, which takes into consideration the changes in the Greek political party landscape, on the initial application that was launched because of the significance of the May 6 general election and […]

Students and faculty from Anatolia and ACT, and the Dukakis Center took part in two clean up activities in Thessaloniki on the weekend of June 9-10, 2012. First, a group of volunteer citizens helped clean up the beach behind the Hondos Center in the Florida shopping center, part of a city-wide initiative led by Thessaloniki […]

By Panagiotis Karkatsoulis Politis wanted to post the names of those ministers who recently tried to amend legislation agreed to by the Greek government in exchange for the next tranche of aid from the Troika. When we could not find what we wanted online, we approached internationally renowned expert Panagiotis Karkatsoulis, who responded as follows. […]

By Dimitris Diamantis and David Wisner “So many candidates, so little time to choose,” reported one interlocutor to us in early May. How can one decide about new parties and about personalities that had until recently resided more or less in the margins of national politics? We have been asked several times how we would […]

By Ruth Sutton The Greek electorate voted with the less practical parts of their bodies in May… their feet, hearts and gall… and not so much with their heads. The two parties (and their dynasties) that have dominated the political scene for decades desperately needed a wake-up call, but will voters risk instability in order […]

By Maria Kyriakidou On  March 5, 2012 the Dukakis Center co-hosted a workshop on women’s biographies, life stories and autobiographies. The workshop consisted of panels regarding the research methodology on gender and biography, specific historical examples from a European and South-East European context as well as presentations on local history, with a brief historical account […]