Peer-reviewed articles have all been through a peer-review process. We practice double-blind peer-review. All material is reviewed by two independent specialists at least at post-doc level. A prerequisite for publishing scientific articles in Baltic Worlds is that the article has not already been published in English elsewhere. If an article is simultaneously being considered by another publication, this should be indicated when submitting.
The article explores how Sweden’s engagement with the forests of the Baltics and Russia in the early 1990s was shaped by a discourse that cast these regions as peripheral. This discourse, we argue, revived historical narratives tied to 19th-century of Swedish forestry expansion toward the north, similarly, positioning the eastern forests a century later as underutilized spaces that could benefit from Swedish forestry expertise and modernization. We connect to historical phenomena and conceptualizations of center-periphery dynamics as a framework for our analysis. To identify narratives revolving around the forests in the Baltics and Russia under the center-periphery discourse, we conducted a qualitative thematic analysis of media sources from the Swedish forestry organization Skogen [The Forest] and Swedish regional and national newspapers from 1991 to 1994. In this article, we outline two key narratives that surfaced from our empirical findings. One narrative focuses on the notion that forest resources in the Baltics and Russia were finite and increasingly contested due to growing demand and restricted availability. The second narrative presents optimized forest management and professional forestry knowledge as solutions to these constraints, framing the eastern forests as potentially limitless if managed with the right expertise. We conclude our analysis of the historical narratives with a brief outlook on the recent developments of Swedish forestry portrayals of forests in the Baltics and Russia.
By
Janine Priebe and Toms Kokins
September 23, 2025
The short-lived apex of journalistic freedom that took place after Perestroika in the late 1980s and early 1990s has been followed by setbacks and stagnation of press freedom, in particular since Putin’s accession to power in 2000. Despite this, qualitative text analysis of commentary articles in some of the most important current Russian news sites strongly indicates that during 2008–2018, readers of news sites were increasingly addressed as active and knowledgeable citizens. Four case studies are examined to cast light on the period, using the following methods: focusing on argumentation analysis, exploring whether arguments are valid, and the means of persuasionused. The findings imply that a number of Russian Internet outlets have strengthened their role as advocates of the Fourth Estate. The results further indicate a sharp distinction between news sites utilizing traditional Western journalistic devices, and those employing a traditional Russian/Soviet journalistic approach. Thus, the social roles of the audiences were to a certain extent reinforced during the period investigated, 2008–2018.
By
Rutger von Seth
September 23, 2025
This article provides an overview of the historical parallels used in the Ukrainian media discourse reflecting the Russian-Ukrainian military conflict in the period from February 2022 to February 2025. The research highlights the role of analogy frames in depicting wartime dynamics, internal processes of national consolidation, and the search for international solutions to protect Ukraine’s sovereignty. Networks of analogies in media discourse, characteristic of Ukrainian political culture, are considered as a means of conceptualizing major components of the war scenario, in particular strategies of the military campaign, crimes against civilians and prisoners of war, and legal initiatives to hold the aggressor accountable. From a functional perspective, comparative resources in the wartime media are analyzed as a tool that supports basic cognitive and psychological needs of society members, such as confronting the challenges of a traumatic environment and searching for solutions under conditions of hostile activity.
By
Lyudmyla Payluk et al
September 23, 2025
The events in Ukraine prompted the countries of East-Central Europe to review their approach to the monuments and collective memory signs that have remained from the Soviet era. Although the region regards the dismantling of Soviet monuments in relation to de-Sovietization that started around 1990, the removal of the remaining Soviet artefacts from public spaces was also related to the international situation in 2013–2014 and 2022, almost thirty years after the collapse of the Soviet Union. As the dominant research of de-Sovietization focus on the elimination of Soviet monuments, i.e. by nature, a negative aspect of de-Sovietization based on the removal and dismantling of monuments, the article presents the concept of positive de-Sovietization based on the case analysis of Lithuanian monuments. The de-Sovietization process is considered dual: the removal of Soviet monuments is accompanied by the construction of the new ones establishing a new historical narrative and state’s identity. It can be defined as a positive aspect of de-Sovietization that makes its implementation complete.
By
Viktorija Rimaitė-Beržiūnienė
September 23, 2025
This article argues for the relevance of new materialist theories and onto-epistemologies in understanding the workings of political status. The issue of political status is interrogated at the confluence of the university’s status, the status of the Russian state through references to its “glorious” and “rich” history, and the materialities of the imperial cityscape of St. Petersburg. More specifically, I analyze how the spatio-temporal position of universities within the imperial cityscape of St. Petersburg plays out as a status-enhancing or undermining mechanism. The analysis in this article traverses three sites: St. Petersburg State University, St. Petersburg State Institute of Culture, and European University in St. Petersburg. The universities appear to be embedded within the imperial cityscape of St. Petersburg, which speaks to both the universities’ status and, more importantly, the idea of the state that lives in and through them, through the effects of beauty, glory, and rich history. However, while material durability allows the past to be actualized in the present, materialities are also subject to decay over time, leading to physical processes of deterioration and downgrading. This decay acts as a status undermining mechanism.
By
Iuliia Gataulina
April 16, 2025
In 2015, the Albanian government enacted a higher education reform accompanied by intense public disputes. This article employs the concept of hegemony to question: What political articulation became hegemonic in Albania’s higher education policy between 2010 and 2015, and what elements constituted such an articulation? It argues that the government’s articulation became hegemonic through its claim of establishing a regulated higher education market where all participants would compete as equals, thereby addressing all the challenges facing the sector that arose from the chaotic and tumultuous governance of the political opponent.
By
Pavjo Gjini
April 16, 2025
As the economic crisis in socialist Yugoslavia escalated in the late 1970s, the role of education, science, and technology in revitalizing self-management socialism and the economy became a hotly debated issue. Just as the number of universities more than doubled during the 1970s, they started to be criticized for producing unemployable graduates who burdened the economy instead of contributing to it, and for curtailing the upward social mobility of working-class youth. The paper examines the contemporary discussions of the economic purpose of higher education and presents “technocratic” and “anti-technocratic” positions in the debate which occasionally depicted the universities as responsible for the crisis, but also as potentially uniquely suited for resolving it– and thus reversing what many commentators saw as the country’s slide towards scientific, technological, and economic dependency and peripheralization.
By
Vedran Duančić
April 16, 2025
The article reflects if it is possible to decolonize memory in the former Soviet republics that have been gradually moving centrifugally towards different political allegiances. It is needed to go beyond the postcolonial/post-Soviet national optic and consider inter-imperial (Doyle) and non-nation-state post-imperial (Burbank and Cooper) models and other unrealized alternatives. The article focuses on coloniality of memory critically engaging with various concepts including “dismembering” (Thiong’o), “mankurtism” (Aitmatov), “Myalism” (Brodber), “multidirectional memory” (Rothberg), “double critique” (Khatibi), “species memory” (Kaiser and Thiele), and the “third way” (Wynter). It sets the goal of tracing possible paths for rethinking of what it means to remember in a human way and what it takes to engender a global mnemonic transversal network of solidarity for refuturing.
By
Madina Tlostanova
December 10, 2024
Over the past decade, social networking platforms have become an important communication channel for protesters in autocratic countries. In August 2020 and January 2021, the messaging application Telegram and social media platform Tik-Tok became platforms for protest mobilization and coordination in Belarus and Russia respectively. This article applies previous research within social movements and democratization studies about the use of Facebook and Twitter to instigate and galvanize protests in autocratic countries in order to explore how protest mobilization on newly politicized platforms such as Telegram and TikTok is manifested. For this purpose, we conducted a qualitative content analysis of 1,128 protest-related publications (posts) on Telegram’s channel NextaLive and 100 videos on TikTok. The conclusion provides an extended framework for analyzing political mobilization online and argues that social networking platforms can themselves be considered spaces that are commensurate with those of offline protest and not merely tools to stimulate democratic participation.
By
Alesia Rudnik and Malin Rönnblom
December 10, 2024
Music and Performing Arts is one of the fields Georgia can pride itself on internationally. While the country is in transition as it officially embarks on its long path to European Union membership, this study explores the process of Europeanization of higher music education in Georgia. Authors analyze how higher music educational institutions employ European projects for organizational change at a grassroots level and to what extent and in what way supranational and national policy instruments influence the outcome at the local – institutional level. This study categorizes Georgia’s higher music education sector into three major stages since the country regained independence in 1991 and uses structural, institutional, and organizational approaches for analysis of collected data. The findings suggest that significant challenges remain despite emerging European support in the cultural area and active cooperation between major stakeholders in the sector and their European counterparts.
By
Iveri Kekenadze Gustafsson and Nana Sharikadze
September 18, 2024
Issue 2025, 2: 
Baltic Worlds covers; the Baltic Sea Region, Eastern Europe, Russia, CentralAsia, Caucasus and the Balkan area.