A scholarly journal from the Centre for Baltic and East European Studies (CBEES) Södertörn University, Stockholm.
Issue 2026, 1: Download.
Associate professor in sociology at Mälardalen University and is currently affiliated with the Uppsala Centre for Russian and Eurasian Studies as senior research fellow. Her current research explores processes of marginalization in rural Hungary from an intersectional perspective.
Analyzing Competitive Victimhood: Narratives of Recognition and Non-recognition in the Pursuit of Reconciliation, Çağla Demirel, (Doctoral dissertation: Södertörn University, School of Social Sciences, 2023). 187 pages
At home or abroad? Chișinău, Černivci, L’viv and Wrocław: Living with historical changes to borders and national identities. Bo Larsson, (ed.) (Lund: Universus Academic Press, 2020), 560 pages.
A sketch for the cover of the second East German edition to Pippi Langstrumpf (1988) showing a girl standing on her head on horseback is the starting point for this article. It was drawn by Cornelia Ellinger, only one year before the fall of the Berlin wall. The sketch becomes a starting point for a discussion of humor and materiality in the reception of Pippi in the GDR.
This essay presents the little-known story of the first western package tour to the postwar Soviet Union along with neverbefore-seen photographs from the journey. It also introduces the digitized Oddner archive, which contains an abundance of visual sources on the Soviet Union of 1955.
The material landscape of the Baltic states has dramatically changed with the start of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine: the Ukrainian flag, or its distinctive blue-yellow, has saturated the public space. In places once reserved only for the national flag, the Ukrainian flag flies right next to it. Building facades, windows, and walls serve as new surfaces for the display of the yellow and blue. The periodic, holiday-driven appearance of national flags has given way to the constant show of Ukrainian flags.
The paper examines Russia’s cultural expansionism that extends beyond the military invasion in Ukraine since 2014. In the first part, I trace Russia’s systematic efforts to seize and manipulate Ukrainian heritage, often under the guise of protection. I also touch on the role of museums in this expansion, where they are used to preserve collections through coercive acquisition and to promote a Russian-centric narrative. The second part of the article delves into the historical relationships between Russia and Ukraine, especially in the context of the Soviet era’s museum infrastructure. Overall, the text calls for new concepts and international efforts to critique Russia’s actions and protect Ukrainian culture.
The war crimes committed by the Russian Federation against Ukrainian children include physical harm (murders, injury, mutilation, child abuse, rape), violations of the rule of law (illegal imprisonment; denial of children’s rights to education, security, and access to humanitarian support; abduction; illegal transfer to custody), psychological damage, destruction of educational institutions’ resources, and using children for propaganda and military purposes.
Nearly three decades after the end of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, thousands of people are missing and mass graves are regularly found. Relatives still search for knowledge about their loved ones in the midst of secrets, rumors and ethnonationalist denial. As the country struggles to come to terms with this dark legacy of the war, art has emerged as a space for recognition of the lingering presence of absence of the missing.
Call for Abstracts (until January 31, 2024) for the Special Issue of Baltic Worlds "Sounds in times of war. Popular Music, (contentious) politics and social change since Russia's war on Ukraine"
Current research tell us that we are presently facing a global wave of autocratization. Gradual declines of democratic attributes characaterize political regimes worldwide. Technology opens up for democratic interaction, but also makes it easy to spread fake news. Freedom of expression is in peril. Universities all around the world encounter repression of academic freedom. To discuss these and other challenges, Linnaeus University (in Växjö) organized a digital conference on A Questioned Democracy, on November 15, 2023.