A scholarly journal from the Centre for Baltic and East European Studies (CBEES) Södertörn University, Stockholm.
Issue 2025, 4: Download.
PhD in international relations; researcher at the Finnish Institute of Foreign Affairs, Helsinki. One of her ongoing research projects is “Russia’s Foreign Policy and the Quest for Leadership in the Eurasian Economic Space (2011–2013)”.
Kulturarv: en begreppspolitik [Cultural Heritage: the politics of the concept], Johan Hegardt and Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback, (Södertörn philosophical studies, 2022), 124 pages.
Bakom och bortom järnridån. De sovjetiska åren och frigörelsen i Baltikum och Ukraina [Behind the Iron Curtain and Beyond. The Soviet Years and the Emancipation in the Baltics and Ukraine]. Li Bennich Björkman. Stockholm: Appell förlag. 465 pages
The Kaliningrad Region. A Specific Enclave in Contemporary Europe Eds., Arkadiusz Żukowski and Wojciech T. Modzelewski (Paderborn: Brill Schöningh, 2021) 336 pages
A Taste for Oppression — A Political Ethnography of Everyday Life in Belarus Ronan Hervouet: (New York, Oxford: Berghahn, 2021) 254 pages. (Original: Ronan Hervouet: Le Goût Des Tyrans. Une Ethnographie Politique Di Quotidien En Biélorussie (Lormont: Le Bord de l’eau, 2020) 281 pages
The conference From the grassroots to policy and back: Putting just transition to practice gathered social scientists who in different ways struggled with the tensions implied in the concept of “just transition”. The conference took place in Katowice, Poland, in many ways at the epicenter of the transition.
Referendums have been extensively analyzed from multiple perspectives and different studies have discussed their various features and types and how different actors use them. However, little attention has been paid to investigating the reasons why political elites (i.e., European presidents) initiate referendums. Thus, this article explores the intentions and aims by analyzing 18 referendums called by European presidents from 2000 to 2020. Secondary sources, such as media reporting, official documents, and scientific works, have been analyzed using a comparative case study approach. The results indicate that presidents usually have strategic objectives when they call referendums, and that the initiation of a referendum is influenced by the anticipated short- or long-term effects that could result from the referendum.
This article compares Swedish and German social work, including policy documents, and discusses the policies of these two countries regarding the implementation of children’s rights in social work practice. The analysis focuses on two main concepts that are used in social work practice: the concept of a child perspective in Sweden and the concept of participation in Germany. This study aims to investigate the ideas, values and guidelines mediated by political institutions to social workers in the field. The results showed that both the Swedish and German policy documents gave the distinct impression that the concepts had been properly implemented and formed part of child welfare practice. In the Swedish context, the idea of both making children visible and the formal aspects were highlighted, whereas in Germany, participation was related to an educational discourse. However, it is argued here that the discourses suggest that there is unequal relationship between children and adults, and we conclude that social workers must contribute to the child’s status as an active subject.
This paper is based on two arguments: First, “grim storytelling” only gives access to part of the story and therefore needs to be supplemented with “better stories” — stories that generate an understanding of human potentiality, creativity, resilience, interconnectedness and shared “vulnerability”. Second, the tendency towards “grim storytelling” in critical social sciences constitutes a major limitation for the possibilities of imagining and enacting the very transformations that Europe most urgently needs in order to enhance the European project.
The article deals with samizdat writing in the GDR, which could not be published legally. Thus, authors published their critical texts on handbills and smaller booklets. The article shows forms of distribution and focuses the analysis on individual examples and actors.
One out of four, and 1941 are two numbers everyone who went through the Soviet and post-Soviet schools in Belarus is familiar with. The former stands for the statistics of the Belarusians who died in the Great Patriotic War, the latter marks the year this war began. However, when I first came to Europe as a teenager, I was amazed to discover that no one actually knew either of my people’s heroism or our great victory. The war, as I found out then, did not even start in 1941 — nor was it defined as “patriotic”. Rather it was everyone’s — “world war” — with patriotism not attributed to nationalities.