A scholarly journal from the Centre for Baltic and East European Studies (CBEES) Södertörn University, Stockholm.
Issue 2018:4 Theme Academic Freedom under Threat Download.
Issue 2019:1 Power in Disguise. Looking for back issues of Baltic Worlds? Download as PDF here.
Independent scientific and professional organizations began to suffer especially after the introduction of the so-called law on “foreign agents”. Ideological control over science, together with espionage, begins to directly influence the state of academic rights and freedoms. The topic of human rights has almost disappeared from teaching, and research in the field of queer sociology is in fact banned. However, the most vulnerable are those who either teach or demand respect for human rights at the university, and then the loss of employment is the result of a direct ideological confrontation with the rector, such as for the author of this text.
In order to silence dissident voices within Belarusian higher education, students with uncomfortable political views are often expelled. International critique has resulted in a decrease in the number of expulsions, but the repression continues. The university administration merely has changed methods and nowadays focuses on the students with a capacity to lead others.
Democratic backsliding has been an abiding and pervasive concern across the post-communist region for almost a decade. Data from the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) dataset corroborate this phenomenon and show that one of the contributors to this decline is a narrowing of freedom for academic and cultural expression.While not being the sole driver of this recent backsliding trend, the opportunity for open academic and cultural exchange does remain an important principle of basic electoral democracy.
There is a significant discrepancy between the political potential of the EU and its actual position and role in the future development of Europe. In practice, the member states have maintained their power monopoly in the most essential policy areas.
Over 40 researchers representing countries spanning from Ukraine to the United States and from Sweden to Serbia gathered in Prague to explore the changing roles of rural and urban cultural heritages in post-socialist countries.
Usually, this triennial takes place in Lithuania, as it has since its foundation in the year 1979. But now, due to the celebration of the centennial of the restored three Baltic states, Kestutis Kuizinas, the leader of the Contemporary Art Centre, decided to suggest that they work collaboratively. Thematically, the 13th Baltic Triennial’s three-part format also shaped the way it was realized.
Among many topics in the concluding discussion, there were some reflections from the participants on how to relate to the changing definitions and redefinitions of concepts like regionalism and nation as well as the relevance of these ideas in a period of speedy change. A suggestion was that that the populations in the Baltic Sea region perhaps practice regionalism in everyday life but think in nation-state terms when it comes to politics, and this is but one of many challenges for historians and political scientists to address in future research.
“Postsocialist Revolutions of Intimacy: Sexuality, Rights and Backlash”, Workshop October 1–2, 2018. The workshop was organized by CBEES, Centre for […]
What the symposium emphasized was the processes that led to the emergence of the cultural techniques and institutions as well as the conceptual apparatus to deal in practice with the suddenly highly desired Russian cultural heritage. Another focus was on the reception of the Western tradition by the Russian educated society, which took place in parallel with, and sometimes conceptually intertwined with, the re-opening of the Russian tradition.
The Museum of Contemporary Art in Skopje has created a new program named ‘Radical Education’, designed by Tihomir Topuzovski and Kumjana Novakova. The program started on October 17, 2018 with a lecture “The Art of Political Imagination” by professor Stephen Duncombe. It continued on October 29 and 30 with a workshop by Forensic Architecture, an independent research agency.
This article focuses on the blackmailing of the Jews during the Nazi occupation of Lviv, Galicia. Despite a considerable amount of attention from historians to the Shoah in Lviv, this issue is still one of the few unstudied problems. Based on the carefully collected source materials, the author reconstructs the main features of this phenomenon, its evolution, its local specifics, and the main types of blackmailers and the methods of their activities.
After announcing her presidential campaign in October 2017, Sobchak, perhaps unsurprisingly, was represented in mainstream Russian media as an “unruly woman”19 who was transgressing the existing patriarchal norms and rules, and she was explicitly reminded by male journalists and TV anchors of the “real” and “traditional” role a woman is supposed to play.
Professor Olga Kryshtanovskaya comments on the current situation around the future presidential successor in Russia and the potential political upheavals connected to this issue. Olga Kryshtanovskaya is a professor at the State University of Management in Moscow and a leading Russian sociologist with a specialization in elite research
Baltic Worlds covers; the Baltic Sea Region, Eastern Europe, Russia, Caucasus and the Balkan area.