contributors

Articles by Alexandra Dmitrieva and Zhanna Kravchenko

1. The ethos of resistance in Belarusian rock. The 2020 protests and Russia’s war on Ukraine

   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.

2. Slushai Bat’ku! Popular music, politics and the legacy of Belarusian Vokal’no- Instrumental’nyi Ansambls (VIAs)

   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.

3. Doctoral Thesis. Review Series 2025:1 ”Digital spaces are often the only venues where dissent and mobilization can take place”

   Alesia Rudnik is a political scientist based in Sweden, originally from Belarus. Her research has been published in journals such as Europe-Asia Studies, Communist and Post-Communist Studies, Media, War & Conflict and Internet Policy Review. She is also a regular contributor to Baltic Worlds (see for example the co-authored article with Malin Rönnblom in BW, vol. 17, no. 4, 2024). She currently serves as the Director of the Center for New Ideas, an independent Belarusian think tank operating in exile. She previously led a Belarusian diaspora organization in Sweden and was awarded “European of the Year 2022” in Sweden for her civic engagement. Rudnik’s academic work focuses on the relationship between people and technology in the context of political protests under authoritarian regimes. On September 12, 2025, she defended her doctoral dissertation in political science at Karlstad University, titled Machinery of Dissent: People and Technology in Political Protests in Autocracies. In conversation with Baltic Worlds, Dr. Rudnik reflects on research in Sweden concerning Belarus, the 2020 Belarusian protests, and the role of digital platforms in mobilizing protest movements within authoritarian contexts.

4. The concerns of historians

   Network of Concerned Historians Annual Report 2025, contains news about the domain where history and human rights intersect, in particular about the censorship of history and the persecution of historians.

5. Tracing developments in 14 East European states since 1989 until today.

   East Central Europe since 1989. Politics, Culture and Society, Sabrina P. Ramet and Lavinia Stan, (Routledge: London and New York, 2025), 388 pages.

6. Åland’s autonomy. A particular case

   Reflexioner från landet som icke är – Sju essäer om oss människor och vårt samhälle [Thoughts from the land that is not – Seven essays about us human beings and our society] Bjarne Lindström, Hangö, Libraria, 2024, 172 pages.

7. NARRATING THE CHILD Childhood and the Baltic Sea

   arrating the Child and the Baltic Sea, the 2nd International Conference of The Graphic World of Children Date and location: May 19–21, 2025, Södertörn Univeristy, Stockholm, Sweden. Organizer: Lisa Källström (Södertörn University). Advisory board: Maheen Ahmed (Ghent University), Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer (University of Tübingen), Birgitte Beck Pristed (Aarhus University)/ The Graphic World of Children).

8. SOLIDARITY ISLANDS IN A SEA OF VIOLENCE Reflections on memory, genocide, and the summer of 2025

   The interdisciplinary research centre Places, Identities and Memories’ (PIMs) Annual Conference “Spaces of Victimhood in Eastern Europe” Date and location: June 18–19, 2025, the University College London (UCL). Organizer: Jessie Barton Hronešov. and Paweł Bukowski, School of Slavonic & East European Studies (SSEES) UCL. Memory Studies Association’s (MSA)Annual Conference “Beyond Crises:Resilience and (In)Stability” Date: July 14–18, 2025. Organizers: Charles University and the Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague.

9. The dynamic of the periphery. The eastern forests of the early 1990s from a Swedish perspective,

   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.

10. The climate shift. Icebreakers versus the art of sledge driving,

    President Trump wants to build 40 new icebreakers to conquer the ice around Greenland, according to the news, May 2025. Interestingly, Finland might play a part in the production of these ships.1 There is a deep historical dimension here and in this essay I return to a time before the icebreaker, that is, before the 1850s, and look into how we related to ice and snow then. It turns out that in the centuries preceding the late 19th century, people in Sweden had an overwhelmingly positive attitude towards ice and snow. In fact, these elements were crucial for the whole Swedish society. Today it is the opposite, as the icebreaker illustrates. I argue that between these two historical temporalities lies the climate shift, which has an ontological dimension to it.

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