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 full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russia in February 2022 has exacerbated Russian nationalism, as reflected in popular music and its reception on digital media. This article explores the role of gender and sexuality in formulating and negotiating ideas about the Russian nation since the start of the full-scale invasion, focusing on the circulation and reception of the songs and music videos by the Russian singers Shaman and Tatiana Kurtukova. Both performers occupy a significant place within a broader landscape of Russian popular music and are popular on social media platforms, where users generate content that features their songs. The analysis focuses on the ways (dis)identifications with Russianness in and through popular music are performed and highlights popular music’s symbolic capacity to naturalize normative ideas about gender and sexuality as well as the war in Ukraine.
By
Kirill Polkov
October 23, 2025
How is war legitimated and delegitimated in music videos? We seek to answer this question using the example of depictions of Russia as a homeland in contemporary music videos. Advancing a multimodal, sound-oriented method to analyze music videos, we engage with the interplay of sound, moving images, and lyrics. How is homeland performed in music videos? Analyzing music videos and performances by Sobor (Ukrainian pro-separatist), Shaman (Russian), and Zemfira (in exile), we find that violence remains hidden in pro-war performances, while emphasizing a Russian-Soviet way of life. Depictions of traditional food and binary gender roles play a central role in pro-war, imperialnationalist renderings of homeland while performances mixing Russian food with hand grenades and questioning traditional femininity subvert such romanticization.
By
Anna Schwenck and Anastasia Bondarenko
October 23, 2025
This article, based on the analysis of media, video production and songs, as well as semi-structured interviews, pursues three objectives. First, it analyses Belarusian rock musicians’ modes of protest engagement in the context of the 2020 Belarusian post-electoral protests and the 2022 Russian war of aggression against Ukraine. Second, it situates their engagement within the Belarusian underground rock artistic tradition that took root in the 1980s, but which was updated in waves as new impulses were given to protest. Finally, it provides an overview of four types of social logics that have historically contributed to the protest politicization of Belarusian rock music.
By
Yauheni Kryzhanouski
October 23, 2025
Being once a central component of Soviet popular culture, the Vokal’no-Instrumental’nyi Ansambls [Vocal-Instrumental Ensemble] (VIA) repertoire has become a shared heritage across today’s former Soviet republics. While portrayed in the media as a depoliticized historical phenomenon, some music groups still active today like the Soviet Belarusian VIAs Pesniary, Siabry, Verasy and Charaunitsy have in part also become entwined with domestic politics.
Focusing on Belarus, this article explores through virtual ethnography and a multimodal critical discourse analysis the intersection between popular music and politics. It especially focuses on how Belarusian president Aliaksandr Lukashenka, drawing on populist strategies, champions artists like the mentioned VIAs that support his ideology. Over his 30-year rule Lukashenka has promoted a national identity based in part on Soviet nostalgia. The mentioned VIAs are not only important drivers of contemporary Belarusian national identity, but they also provide a bridge to the Soviet past. Not only are they (in) directly supported by Lukashenka and the Belarusian state, they in different ways also support Lukashenka and were thus notably absent in the protests following the contested presidential elections in 2020.
By
David-Emil Wickström
October 23, 2025
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
Issue 2026, 1: 
Baltic Worlds covers; the Baltic Sea Region, Eastern Europe, Russia, CentralAsia, Caucasus and the Balkan area.