This article engages with political region building by examining the diverging conceptions of the Baltic Sea region since the 1970s. It maps the fuzzy geography arising from the enmeshment of territory with a multitude of frameworks for regional action. After 1989, the region became the object of interregional and neighborhood policies established by the European Union, with shifting territorial delimitations according to various internal and geopolitical needs of the day.
By
Norbert Götz
This paper deals with the dilemmas scholars can run into when they encounter the conflict between political activists and what can be proven by evidence. The dispute with historians revolves around what the anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot terms “Silencing the past”. This is certainly true in the case of the Roma and genocide. What complicates the case is that a long-standing memory is part of a still ongoing political activist campaign to build a recognized memory for all of Europe’s Roma.
By
David Gaunt
This paper analyzes how the Serbian rapper Marčelo and the Bosnian rappers Edo Maajka and Frenkie have – from their first steps in hip-hop culture – tried to build a common understanding of postwar sentiments and to diagnose newborn societies in the Balkans. It is argued that Balkan hip-hop is a form of cultural activism that mobilizes people for social change. These rappers have become postwar public intellectuals who aim to provoke social change and have contributed to how these societies have moved on after violent conflict.
By
Dragana Cvetanovic
Georgian capital and several buildings that were important parts of the cultural heritage have been demolished in recent years. Repairing is both cross-cultural and culturally relative; it has similarities across the world and differences based on tradition and affordances. In this sense, the specificity of repair is not that it happens but rather that it highlights the values attached and its aesthetics and moral implications.
By
Francisco Martínez
The practice of mandatory recourse to linguistic experts’ opinions in cases pertaining to racial, ethnic, and other types of hatred and hostility, has caused the vast development of different approaches to the analysis of the texts. During last ten years, numerous methods for identifying “verbal extremism” have been recommended. It has been suggested that the evolution of Russian legal linguistics has not yet resulted in a “common theoretical basis for linguistic investigation in court that is shared by all experts”. The current status of the proposed approach to studying texts in order to identify “hostility and hate” demonstrates both the difficulty of establishing a general theoretical basis for forensic linguistics as a whole and the contradictions that arise in applying the numerous methodologies that exist in Russian science for studying “extremist” texts.
By
Dmitry V. Dubrovskiy
Even though the EU’s conditionality per se did not make Lithuanian people more tolerant, it may have created the conditions for winning hearts and minds in the long run. Despite the fact that the majority of LGBT persons continue to hide their sexual or gender identity (in 2012, 81% did so at school and 55% at work), the problems they face are no longer invisible, and even backlash-like developments contribute to sparking a debate. On June 18, 2016 a march for LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) rights, known as the Baltic Pride parade, took place in Lithuania’s capital, Vilnius.
By
Ausra Padskocimaite
This paper presents the constitution of the “political” in two cases of political squatting in Hungary after 1989: the Centrum squatter group’s occupations in 2004–2006, and the homeless advocacy group The City is for All’s occupations in 2013–2014.
By
Agnes Gagyi
This paper explores the scope, causes, flourishing, and decline of squatting in Lithuanian society during the period of 1990-2002. Drawing on 16 in-depth interviews conducted with squatters in Vilnius, newspaper articles and legal documents, this paper shows that squatters made contributions to the city with their cultural capital, creating local subcultures and making the urban space more attractive.
By
Jolanta Aidukaite
The case of late Soviet and early post-Soviet squatting helps to elucidate how squatting is structured in regard to public-private relations and what the political component of squatting can be in a society not based on private property. The self-help occupying of vacant flats was not restricted to subcultures.
By
Tatiana Golova
Two Polish cities, Warsaw and Poznań, are studied in the article to examine how external structures are handled and used by squatters in these two settings. The aim is to analyze opportunity structures that condition the emergence and development of squatting and how squatters respond to and utilize these opportunities.
By
Dominika V. Polanska and Grzegorz Piotrowski
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Baltic Worlds covers; the Baltic Sea Region, Eastern Europe, Russia, Caucasus and the Balkan area.