A scholarly journal from the Centre for Baltic and East European Studies (CBEES) Södertörn University, Stockholm.
Issue 2025, 4: Download.
Manager for the Nordic Spaces programme, Centre for Baltic and East European Studies, Södertörn University. Research fellow at the Department of Humanities, Mid Sweden University. Leader of the Distant News and Local Opinion project.
Finished his PhD thesis, which dealt with the history of the concept Public opinion, at Umeå University in 2006.
Academics for Peace, the majority of whom are women, mostly working on women’s and gender issues, had been facing trial on charge of “propagandizing for a terrorist organization” for signing the Peace Petition since December 5, 2017.
This article explores recent developments in Turkey in the light of the newly emerging literature on anti-gender movements in Europe, with the ultimate aim of assessing the prospects of the emergence of a feminist politics strong enough to challenge the threat. Today, Turkey is one of the leading countries where an authoritarian regime combined with a blatantly anti-gender equality agenda has recently been on the ascendant. The Turkish case displays many characteristics shared by right-wing populisms and strongly illiberal regimes, yet it also represents a particular instance where we don’t see “anti-gender movements” as such.
The issue in this essay concerns patriarchal culture in Russia and whether this might have been a factor for why the #MeToo movement did not appear to resonate in Russia. The #IAmNotScaredToSpeak campaign, which began in 2016, was denigrated by many, predicting that it would die out rather quickly. The campaign, however, has remained a part of the discourse in Russia.
In recent years, “traditional values,” increasingly articulated in accordance with the Christian Orthodox canon, has moved to the center of Russian official discourse. The author argues that the ideology of “traditional values” corresponds mainly to the interests of the Russian state in union with the Orthodox Church and reflects Russian imperial and authoritarian traditions rather than popular customs and beliefs.
The author argues that stigmatization of “gender” as ideology has become a central element of political discourse in Hungary since 2010 — resulting in the ban of the MA in Gender Studies in the Official Gazette on October 12, 2018. For a critical reading, the author situates the strategic attack in relation to three junctures of meaning-making of “feminism” and “gender” since the system change in 1989 that have eventually crystalized into the commonsense discourses of “gender ideology” and “gender-craze” of right-wing populism.
The author argues in this essay, that one of the main achievements of the Black Protests is that they have not only offered powerful examples of active rejections of the exclusionary articulation of “the people” as articulated by the illiberal regime and conservative Christian movements, but also an alternative collective identity — another, feminist and transnational version of “the people” — that has proven effective in mobilizing broadly nationally and transnationally on democratic issues far beyond sexual and reproductive rights.
In this issue (2020:1), there are several examples of scholars investigating contemporary feminist mass-struggles from this point of view, asking whether these are examples of or have the potential for forming a feminist populist movement that can effectively counteract neoliberal and authoritarian regimes.
The contributions to this issue (2020: 1) of Baltic Worlds aptly show that in country after country the representatives of the right-wing parties join ultraconservative groups and religious authorities in attempts to limit women’s reproductive rights, undermine the legitimacy of gender studies as a field of scientific inquiry, and viciously attack sexual or ethnic minorities.
Presidential elections were formally held in Poland on Sunday, May 10, 2020, but in practice no election took place and no ballots were cast. The distinction between what happens formally and what takes place in practice has become more and more important for Polish politics and public life.
We can all agree that this pandemic is hard to manage and that the saving citizens’ life is the most important issue to deal with initially, but let us reflect on the consequences of the responses. The pandemic experience and the lockdown in Albania, among other perspectives, can be analysed by answering two main questions: 1. What is the socio-economic cost of the lockdown for almost 3 months? 2. What are the implications for the democratic system, is the freedom challenged?