contributors

Articles by Edward Kasinec and Nathaniel Knight

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. 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).

6. 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.

7. 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.

8. 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.

9. Russian internet news sites, 2008–2018. RHETORIC IN TEXT AND INFORMED AUDIENCES

   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.

10. Historical analogies in the Ukrainian media discourse at the time of war Framing stories about national resistance, international support, and crimes of the occupation army

    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.

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