Essays are selected scholarly articles published without prior peer-review process.
A cursory reading of the literature describing yesterdays’ societies in the Stockholm Archipelago tells us that people in the archipelago heavily relied on fishing and small-scale farming for their living. With the arrival of modern industrialized society during the latter half of the 19th century, things changed, and other opportunities to earn a living appeared. However, there were and are certain circumstances in the Stockholm Archipelago that make it somewhat inert, preventing it from taking a place in the modern labor market.
Essay by
Christian Widholm
June 18, 2019
In the period between the two world wars, Swedish interest in the three Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania was in general extremely limited, whereas from the other side Sweden was seen as a geopolitically inactive power and consequently as a possible source of support and an ally against the Baltic states’ two greater neighbors, the Soviet Union and Germany.
Essay by
Thomas Lundén
June 18, 2019
The skitgrop system was, to use popular words by today’s politicians, a “world-class re-cycling system” and a commercial practice that helped Stockholm handle its problems with garbage and feces. But more important is that the skitgrop system demonstrates the archipelago population’s trust in future farming. When buying feces and garbage for fertilizer, large economic and physical resources were invested
Essay by
Johan Hegardt
June 17, 2019
This paper analyzes Soviet and Russian spy films with respect to maintaining and transmitting memories of the Great Patriotic War (1941–1945) in popular culture. The new Russian post-Soviet cinema (after the 2000s) about the “war spies” is considered not only with regard to its entertainment and ideological functions, but also with regard to its function as a “post-memory” of the traumatic experiences of the war and the Nazi occupation. The new Russian cinema about espionage and spies reinterprets the issues of dependent people, Stalinist repressions, and traumatic memories that were absent in Soviet cinema.
Essay by
Viktoriya Sukovata
June 17, 2019
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.
Essay by
Bjarne Lindström
March 7, 2019
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.
Essay by
Liudmila Voronova and Emil Edenborg
March 7, 2019
This essay describes the widening common space of neo-authoritarianism in Eurasia. Preliminary results of ongoing research show how Russia and the Central Asian republics of Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan synchronically introduced similar anti-democratic measures to restrict freedom of academia, civil society, and political participation in response to major social and political events such as popular uprisings, financial crises, and successful successions of state power. The goal of this essay is to introduce a theoretical framework for the comparative analysis of various types of hybrid non-democratic regimes not only in post-Soviet Eurasia, but also in other regions that experience democratic backsliding.
Essay by
Oleg Antonov and Artem Galushko
March 5, 2019
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.
Essay by
Dmitry V. Dubrovskiy
March 5, 2019
This paper presents a handful of ethnographic observations concerning the Romanian Romani people migrating to Poland in the 1990s. This migration wave, although not very well known in the world, became a very important factor influencing, among others, the perception of the Romanian Roms, the Romani people in general, and even citizens of Romania as such by Poles. For Romani immigrants, this was most often the first opportunity to stay abroad
Essay by
Sławomir Kapralski and Paweł Lechowski
September 6, 2018
In the year 1872, Chief G’psgolox from the Kitlope Eagle clan of the Xenaaksiala/Haisla people (in Kitlope Valley, British Columbia, Canada) decided to have a totem pole carved and erected. In 1928 the pole was cut down on behalf of a Swedish consul to be shipped to Stockholm the following year.
Essay by
Anders Björklund
June 18, 2018