Dominik K Cagara

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Dominik has worked in journalism since 2015, following a successful career in peacebuilding and project management. He dreams of writing textbooks for Caucasian minority languages and one day might b

Abkhaz Language

Abkhaz, Avar, Chechen, and Ossetian hit Google Translate

by Dominik K Cagara

•2 min read

Four previously unavailable languages of the Caucasus — Abkhaz, Avar, Chechen, and Ossetian — have been made available on Google’s translation service. Friday’s addition of 110 new languages was the first time new languages of the Caucasus have been included in Google Translate since May 2010, when Armenian, Azerbaijani, and Georgian were added. It is also the first time the four new languages have been made available through any machine translation service. The addition is the latest step i

Georgian homophobic protesters separated from an anti-violence rally by police with the leader of the Polish conservatives, Jarosław Kaczyński in the background. Illustration: Dominik K Cagara/OC Media.

European Union

Opinion | Will Georgia follow Poland in the global right-wing revolution?

by Dominik K Cagara

•5 min read

Many Georgians rushed to blame Russia’s interference for this week’s homophobic violence in Tbilisi. However, Poland’s democratic decline offers a better framework to understand what the future holds for Georgia. When a priest from the Ertatsminda Church, some 50 km west of Tbilisi, found out I was Polish, he became very enthusiastic. He told me he loved the Polish president, Andrzej Duda, for declaring that marriage was a union between man and woman, and for fighting against the ‘LGBT agend

Democracy

Opinion | You can’t counter disinformation without strong media

by Dominik K Cagara

•4 min read

We’re stuck in a vicious circle of democracy degradation. It’s no wonder that others are trying to exploit it to their dark aims — but it’s a wonder how misunderstood the role of the media is in solving this tangle. In late May, an Armenian website pushing conspiracy theories and lies (‘fake news’) hit the global headlines after an investigation by OpenDemocracy revealed it had mistakenly been financed by the US Government. Although the website wasn’t funded under a countering disinformation

Chechnya

Dead Europeans are only news sometimes [Opinion]

by Dominik K Cagara

•7 min read

Twenty-seven Europeans were executed en masse in a single night earlier this year. The lack of international reaction to this reveals not only what’s wrong with humanity, but even more acutely — the media. Chechnya’s leader Ramzan Kadyrov has managed to troll us all again. In a sneak peak of an interview with American TV channel HBO, he said that there were no gays in Chechnya, but if there were, Canada should take them in order to purify Chechen blood. He also said that Russia had nuke

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