The latest political and geopolitical developments, both local and global, seem to confront us with a threatening double horizon: an accelerated slide towards fascism, or an equally implacable retreat into imperialism - with all the overlaps, complicities and continuities between them. We have, thus, on the one side, a Western democratic establishment that can only articulate its immediate future by renouncing the last remnants of a distributive state and democratic appearances, in a general arms race that promises nothing but authoritarianism and austerity at home, and devastating inter-imperialist conflicts on a global scale. On the other side, a populist insurgent bloc with deep roots and complicity in the very systems and apparatuses of Euro-Atlantic democracies, which no longer shies away in explicitly claiming its reactionary character, and which promises, just as grimly, a harsh regime of austerity and authoritarianism at home, coupled with an equally provocative and bellicose attitude abroad, only in the name of a different set of values.

This, then, is the horizon towards which our age seems to be accelerating. The fifth edition of the "Ecologies of Emancipation" summer school aims to investigate the conjuncture of this imminent impact with the horizon: how did we get here, and what more could be done to delay the impact or divert its direction? In addition to the reflections of immediate politics and geopolitics, the school also aims to articulate historical and cultural approaches - about the origins and manifestations of fascism and imperialism in history, their cultural representations and the theories that have tried to explain them - as well as queries that address the phenomenon of contemporary fascism and imperialism through reflections of political economy, law, sociology, philosophy.

The school was dedicated to undergraduate, graduate and doctoral students from faculties of social sciences and humanities.

The Summer School “Ecologies of Emancipation” was organized by tranzit .ro/Cluj and the Faculty of Theatre and Film of the Babeș-Bolyai University within the project “Philosophy in Late Socialist Europe: Theoretical Practices in the Face of Polycrisis.”