A scholarly journal from the Centre for Baltic and East European Studies (CBEES) Södertörn University, Stockholm.
Issue 2024, 3: Download.
Articles written by
The Future of the Soviet Past: The Politics of History in Putin’s Russia Anton Weiss-Wendt & Nanci Adler, eds., Bloomington, Indiana University Press 2021. 258 pages.
De Baets and his Network of Concerned Historians do an admirable job of raising awareness of the risks that professional historians face, and the political misuse of history. As the annual reports reveal, these dangers to academics are increasing and spreading in lockstep with the growth of authoritarian and populist politics.
This is a very interesting discussion that Kimmo Granqvist moderates here. It is unusual to have scholars reflecting on the potential of their discipline, so this is a great occasion for Romani studies. If one looks at the contributions closely, one can see the emergence of a struggle by scholars to wriggle their way out of a long-standing and narrow agenda created for the study of “gypsy” issues and to demarcate a wider territory called Romani Studies.
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.
Tony Judt with Timothy Snyder, Thinking the Twentieth Century, New York 2012, The Penguin Press, 414 pages
Roumen Daskalov, Debating the Past, Modern Bulgarian History – from Stambolov to Zhivkov, Budapest: Central European University Press 2011 367 pages, Original Bulgarian edition 2009
Baltic Worlds covers; the Baltic Sea Region, Eastern Europe, Russia, CentralAsia, Caucasus and the Balkan area.