Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture

Special Issue Introduction

Identities Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture — 2025-10-15

This Special Issue of Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture is result of implementation of a project „Public Capacity for a Just Green Transition“ funded by the Bulgarian National Science Fund under contract KП-06 Н55/13 (period November 2021 – October 2025) by a research team at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology - Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. The main objective of the project is to contribute to tackling the complex task of achieving a “just green transition”. In order to do this, we analyze what is the capacity of the society to influence the formulation and implementation of adequate pro-development policies in the field.

Public Capacity for a Just Green Transition. The Collision: Justice – Social Realities

Maria Jeliazkova — 2025-10-15

The article discusses the concept of public capacity. It presents results regarding: what are the attitudes, values and beliefs regarding justice in Bulgarian society; what are the assessments of the current state along the justice - injustice axis; what are the expectations in this direction related to the green transition; what, according to popular attitudes, are the conditions for the green transition to be just. It concludes that as far as visions on just green transition are concerned, Bulgarian society is more homogenized, at least for now, than the various basic individual differentiations, socio-economic processes, and policies aimed at deliberate fragmentation of society suggest.

Public (lack of) awareness and civic (non) participation in the green transition in Bulgaria

Veneta Krasteva — 2025-10-15

The purpose of this article is to examine the state of some societal features that enable people to participate in decision-making processes, in order to increase the prospects for developing fair policies for Bulgaria‘s green transition. Through the lens of concepts of informed citizen (R. Dahl) and communicative rationality (J. Habermas), we use three dimensions of analysis: individual awareness, communicative environment, civic participation. Data obtained through qualitative and quantitative research methods were used in the text. The findings show significant deficits in all three dimensions we examine. This leads to a risk of adopting political decisions that do not meet socially acceptable compromises and justice requirements. The result is political decisions in regard to the green transition that, although legal, often remain illegitimate for the majority of Bulgarians.

The Green Frontiers of Capital: Decarbonization as a Market Reset

Jana Tsoneva — 2025-10-15

This article zooms in on expert pronouncements about the ongoing Green Transition (GT) in the Bulgarian energy sector. Drawing on 26 in-depth interviews, the article shows how decarbonization pundits marshal existing transitological expertise and inscribe the coal phase-out in a generalized market reform. In the process, they build a discursive bridge between decarbonization and liberalization of the energy system, while doubling down on key tenets of the European Green Deal that prioritize private investment in the GT. In the end, decarbonization emerges as a new frontier of capital accumulation, sidelining questions of justice – climatic as well as social.

Social intervention for energy solidarity: the WISE Project in Bulgaria

Milena Stateva — 2025-10-15

The article will present the Bulgarian component of the WISE – Women in Solidarity for Energy project as a social intervention for community building and feminist democratic learning, rather than a technical or policy-only initiative. It will argue that WISE functions as an embryonic infrastructure for collective care and civic imagination—a prototype of a pan-European movement for energy justice that transforms the very notion of “solidarity” from charity into mutual empowerment and political participation. Drawing on practice-based reflection, feminist theory, and social movement studies, the article will locate WISE Bulgaria as a living laboratory of how communities of care can emerge around material issues like energy poverty. It will link this to contemporary crises—ecological, democratic, and epistemic—and explore how feminist facilitation, storytelling, and social pedagogy turn “energy” from a technical problem into a social commons.

Captured States and Captured Societies

Douhomir Minev — 2025-10-15

The article explores the effects that undermine societies and their ability to function as autonomous social actors capable of identifying departures from their moral values and demanding compliance with them. The society’s responses to such impacts are also examined. Many societies’ replies demonstrate their ability to protect their identity, rationality, values, and judgments, as well as the social tissue that supports them, i.e. themselves. Furthermore, they defend states against capture by tiny small influential groups to establish social cohesion by weakening and capturing societies.