A scholarly journal from the Centre for Baltic and East European Studies (CBEES) Södertörn University, Stockholm.
Issue 2022, 3-4: Download.
Features offer in-depth accounts of issues related to the region without prior peer-review process.
If we scratch the surface of this idyllic image of co-existence in the village of Tsopi, we may better understand what the limits are to the good relations among neighbors. This is especially interesting in light of the second Nagorno-Karabakh war, that broke out in 2020. In January 2022, the author stayed in Tsopi with an Armenian family to learn more about their life and the lives of the other villagers.
Civil society in Ukraine is, although under severe stress, very active and plays an important role in providing people with their basic needs and safeguarding their human rights. Civil society in Ukraine is still functioning even in a situation of full-scale invasion and warfare, with constant shelling and unpredictable attacks on infrastructure and Ukrainian civilians. How is this possible?
Statistics show that around 40 000 Russians escaped through Finland from the day that President Putin declared the mobilization and during the nine days that followed until the border closed. I am on my way to Karelia, a region along the southern part of the Finnish-Russian border where some of the most intense battles between two countries took place during the Second World War. As I write this October 2022, the atmosphere around the border is tense, the relations between the two countries are colder than in a long time, and people on either side of the border have difficulties even seeing each other. That, however, has not always been the case...
The independent Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta is known for its critical and investigative coverage of Russian political and social affairs. Their former editor-in-chief, Dmitry Muratov, received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2021. Kirill Martynov is now editor-in-chief for Novaya Gazeta Europe, operating from Riga, Latvia. He is the newspaper’s former political editor, a political scientist, and a former associate professor at Moscow State University. In an open lecture at Södertörn University November 22, Kirill Martynov discussed Russian journalism in exile and the new chapter in Novaya Gazeta’s life.
There are several recent reports highlighting a worrying trend towards what one could call attacks on democratic values such as independent media and academic freedom.
More beehives do not help the world’s wild bees — on the contrary, scientists warn of the competition that may arise. But agricultural landscapes with smaller farms and natural pastures are home to both wild pollinators and honeybees. Slovenia’s beekeepers have understood this — and now they want to show the way forward for the rest of the world.
The deinstitutionalization as a policy shift introduced an entirely new principle of care in contemporary Russia. It brought the right to live in a family to the center of the care system, seeing residential, collective care as being harmful to children. The analysis shows that children left without family and placed in institutional care are mainly “social orphans”, meaning that their parents are alive but deprived of parental rights.
From 1958, the lyric character of the diary entries becomes more intense. On the other hand they gain a further dimension of universality. They can be interpreted as saying that he would like the personal to remain even less known, and that the poeticizing is a means of concealment. Both may be equally true. If Markings were a fictional diary, one might say that the foreshadowing of death was a structural feature
Feminist comic art in Sweden, Finland, and the Baltic Sea region raises the question of whether it is possible to find a common denominator for feminist comic art. Are feminist comics connected by certain aesthetic qualities or themes? Is there a shared conception of feminism that is recognizable in the comics produced in the Baltic Sea region? The answer to both questions is ”no”. As much as there is an exchange of ideas and aesthetic influences between artists in different countries, there are local varieties specific to countries and individual artists. Furthermore, variations in contemporary conceptions of feminism seem to depend on varying historical conditions and experiences in the different countries.
Discussions about the assessment of historic events have always had their place in the public discourse in democratic societies, whereas totalitarian regimes such as the Communist one preferred an official version of history that is not up for debate. This is why a conflict-prone memory boom in the CEE was to be expected after the fall of the Iron Curtain. The only recently intensified trend is to fight memory wars with the means of memory laws, i.e. by using laws prescribing and proscribing certain representations of historic events as a weapon to protect one’s national collective memory from divergent interpretation by others. Such approach to governing memory wars are detrimental to the neighborly relations, i.e. turning them into un-neighborly ones.
Baltic Worlds covers; the Baltic Sea Region, Eastern Europe, Russia, Caucasus and the Balkan area.