A scholarly journal from the Centre for Baltic and East European Studies (CBEES) Södertörn University, Stockholm.
Issue 2025, 1: Download.
Essays are selected scholarly articles published without prior peer-review process.
The modern Russian state is built on random and unpredictable institutionalized violence, on fear and pain. Therefore, one of the most common reactions to the power abuse from the Russian government is to ignore the state and try to build your own little life.
"I was terrified and scared but more than ever before I felt that I am a Belarusian and I could not stay home. I can’t say that I felt exactly like a soldier preparing to die while protecting the Homeland, but a similar feeling overwhelmed me then." These are the words of one of the female protestors who took part in a street demonstration in Minsk on February 27, 2022. According to different estimates, between 1,000 and several thousand Belarusians came out to protest against the start of the war in Ukraine and against the referendum on constitutional change in Belarus.
This article highlights the development of modern food practices and food regulations in Sweden with special emphasis on food safety and food security from the late 19th century to 1950s. The results are linked to the wider discussion about modernization and societal change in Sweden and includes industrial organization in the agro-food sector, technological development, and the reality experienced by the population during decades that were heavily influenced by the consequences of two world wars and the rise of the welfare state.
According to the databases of Ukrainian Cultural Foundation and of Ministry of Culture and Information Politics in Ukraine, there were 389 crimes against cultural heritage on June 10, 2022. In the conditions of an ongoing war, it is impossible to be certain of any further damage; this general insecurity and vulnerability adds to general losses. In many towns in Ukraine people made efforts to secure their monuments, covering them physically and digitalizing them in databases.
In most post-communist countries after the breakdown of the USSR, memory legislation often aimed at constructing an identity of suffering under Nazism and the totalitarian Soviet regime, which relativized itself according to a cosmopolitan understanding of victimhood centered on the Holocaust memory. Regulations of memory, in this sense, were considered an indicator of democratic transition and an entry ticket to the European Union.
I would like to offer this remnant of a futuristic halo of the Soviet space program as a possible way to comprehend why April 12 never managed to become a full-fledged fantasy world of what Boym terms “restorative nostalgia” like May 9th, and to see which alternative ways to understand nostalgia it may open up.
Before the war, Ukraine was the main trade partner of Belarus, after Russia. Imports of Belarusian goods to Ukraine in 2021 are estimated at 5.4 billion US dollars. Therefore, Belarus has a great economic interest in stopping the war.
The outbreak of the war on February 24, 2022, was a real shock for the Russian science and higher education, and completely turned the situation upside down, even in comparison with the negative trends of the previous years.
A military endgame is taking place in Mariupol that could be an omen for Europe’s future to come.
Baltic Worlds has in this special section “New Age and alternative beliefs in socialist Eastern Europe” invited scholars from different disciplines to address topics relating to the diversity of new religious beliefs in Eastern Europe during the socialist era and beyond. The authors, five scholars studying the multiple expressions of New Age spirituality on their own material, propose to view New Age from various angles.
Baltic Worlds covers; the Baltic Sea Region, Eastern Europe, Russia, CentralAsia, Caucasus and the Balkan area.