A scholarly journal from the Centre for Baltic and East European Studies (CBEES) Södertörn University, Stockholm.
Issue 2025, 2: Download.
Edward Kasinec is a Research Associate, Harriman Institute, Columbia University and, since 2014 Visiting Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University. His career includes service as Reference Librarian/Archivist and Staff Advisor in Exhibitions in several prestigious institutions. Since 1969, Kasinec has published more than two hundred refereed articles and books.
Nathaniel Knight is a Professor of History and Chair of the History Department at Seton Hall University. Has published extensively on issues of ethnicity, race and the history of the human sciences in Imperial Russia.
In a conversation with Irina Sandomirskaja, Luba Jurgenson explores how the epoch-making event of Russia’s war in Ukraine has led to changes in the research field Slavic Studies, particularly memory studies and the studies of camp literature. They discuss how ideas of repetition and the return of history have a new resonance, and how increasing concerns are impacting a historical consciousness that demands epistemic justice.
The societies in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) and Kosovo utilize dark (war) tourism to preserve and visualize memories of the 1990s conflicts and war crimes against civilians. Both countriesnhave developed numerous sites, mapped them, and integrated them into excursions and tourist programs. In BiH, dark tourism reflects collective trauma and a need to share experiences with others. Kosovan Albanians focus on reflecting upon the war and its consequences while constructing narratives about national history. A shared issue in both BiH and Kosovo is the dominance of a single perspective on the events of the 1990s, with Bosniaks and Kosovan Albanians promoting their versions of history while excluding the perspectives of other ethnic groups.
This paper focuses on the notions of “time” and “temporality” of nuclear waste, as well as the different time horizons implied by practitioners of nuclear waste storage. In doing so, the paper develops understandings of a key problem defining nuclear waste storage in C21: namely, how to communicate information and memory over the 100,000 years that highly radioactive nuclear matter remains a threat to organic life. This question is notable not least because it involves the proposition of communicating with “deep time” future scenarios in which contemporary representational systems are ineffectual, and even the existence of the “human” is in doubt.
CBEES Summerschool 2025, August 18-23 is now open for application. Apply before March 21.
With deep sadness, we have learnt of the sudden death of our colleague and friend Markus Huss. 2009, we all […]
This paper takes the 2018 InGRID input note as the point of departure for an elaboration on an additional layer of governance less known among some domain-specific scholarly circles but no less relevant for their overall exploratory work of the diversity of steering and consultation mechanisms put in place by the European Union (EU) to promote integrationist dynamics and certain goals enshrined in the EU policies.
Youth initiatives supported by the Council of the Baltic Sea States should contribute to the growing body of literature on youth engagement in the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals. ReGeneration 2030 and the Baltic Sea Youth Platform are presented to highlight future avenues for the development of these initiatives and what research approaches would help to acquire a more structured insight not only about the hypothetical potential of these initiatives but also the delivered value-added. These findings would help the United Nations to keep apace with the mindsets of younger generations which are underrepresented among the organisation’s staff. Likewise, youth deserves to be heard due to the socio-economic challenges it faces not only in the Global South but also in the Global North.
The section is an invitation to think further on the possibilities of implementing decolonial theory in the memory field of the countries that were dominated by the Soviet Union.
The process of decolonization in Ukrainian cities is significant because of the remaining socialist heritage. This includes architecture, urban planning structures, toponyms, and symbolic spaces. While this heritage is deeply implemented in the contemporary cityscape, it has also become the subject of criticism, particularly after the beginning of the Russo-Ukrainian War in 2014. Socialist cities such as Kharkiv, Zaporizhzhia, and Kryvyi Rig played a prominent role in shaping the urban landscape and were conceptualized by Soviet urbanists in the 1920s and 1930s. These cities were designed to gain complete control over the social and professional aspects of residents’ lives, reflecting the ideological ambitions of the communist party. This article explores the importance of socialist cities in the context of colonial heritage, examining the origins of the idea and its ideological significance.
The essay analyzes the role of Western art institutions in supporting and promoting imperialist views on both the cultural and political history of what once was the Russian Empire, then the Soviet Union, and then the so-called “post-Soviet” space while they universalized and homogenized the multiple, complex, heterogenic, interconnected voices that temporally and spatially fell within the boundaries of the Russian Empire in its various forms. It looks into the case of the market-driven umbrella terms of “Russian art” and “Russian avant-garde,” as presented in several exhibitions in major Western museums between 2016 and 2019, dedicated to the centennial of the October Revolution, often called the Russian Revolution. The research focuses on the artists connected to Ukraine. It attempts to do them epistemic justice by restoring the complexity of the interconnections, contexts, and traditions they grew out of and were inspired by, as well as the ones they reworked, deconstructed, and revolutionized. By referring to decolonial thinkers, it combines and compares how imperial thinking, frames of reference, and coloniality work in symbolic and knowledge production.