A scholarly journal from the Centre for Baltic and East European Studies (CBEES) Södertörn University, Stockholm.
Issue 2026, 1: 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)”.
The Swedish National Commission for UNESCO and the Young Academy of Sweden arranged a symposium “The Shrinking Academic Freedom in Europe” November 9, 2018 in Stockholm. This symposium was one of many that have been organized lately on the topic threats to academic freedom, which can be seen as a sign and an acknowledgement that there is cause for worry.
Scholars at Risk (SAR) is an international network of institutions and individuals whose mission it is to protect scholars and promote academic freedom. We ask five questions to Lauren Crain, Director of Research and Learning at Scholars at Risk.
Gleb Yarovoy is a professor of political science and is currently based at the University of Eastern Finland in Joensuu. His dealings over the years with his former main employer, Petrozavodsk State University, says something about the situation for Russian academics of today.
Independent scientific and professional organizations began to suffer especially after the introduction of the so-called law on “foreign agents”. Ideological control over science, together with espionage, begins to directly influence the state of academic rights and freedoms. The topic of human rights has almost disappeared from teaching, and research in the field of queer sociology is in fact banned. However, the most vulnerable are those who either teach or demand respect for human rights at the university, and then the loss of employment is the result of a direct ideological confrontation with the rector, such as for the author of this text.
The elections in Lučani took place in the time of an increasingly intense atmosphere in society. The debate between opposition parties and the regime does not exist, yet there is an aggressive exchange in the media. The violence took to the streets when an opposition leader was brutally beaten just before the opposition rally.
December 9, 2018 marked a historic day in Armenia’s modern era as people went to the voting stations for a snap parliamentary election. The result rendered a landslide victory (70.4%) to acting Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s My Step (Imkayl) coalition. The election was a consequence of the power shift which occurred nine months earlier in April 2018, during a popular uprising dubbed as the “Velvet Revolution”.
Salomé Zourabichvili used to be a French diplomat, now, as Salome Zurabishvili, she has become the president of Georgia: it is like a fairytale - quite a success story!
In Romani Studies, the second half of the 19th century witnessed a great migration of the Roms from the two Rumanian provinces of Wallachia and Moldavia as a result of the abolition of slavery (also called “Emancipation”, which ushered in the massive liberation of the Romani slaves in 1856 at the initiative of the Prime Minister Mihail Kogălniceanu). However, this period is still poorly explored, particularly from a linguistic and ethnologic point of view.
Mobility and regionalization: Changing patterns of air traffic in the Baltic Sea Region in connection to European integration. Jan Henrik Nilsson, Geographia Polonica 2018. Vol. 91:1, pp 77–93.
During 1918 all three Baltic countries managed to escape the Russian grip and enjoyed some two decades of independence before they came under Russian/Soviet rule again. Despite the fact that the loss of their independence lasted for the following 50 years, all three countries celebrate their centenary this year. So how are the past 100 years described? During my years as a journalist in Vilnius, one of my major interests was precisely the way in which the country portrayed its own history. Over the years I pinpointed facts and covered aspects of this history that were not often highlighted in official speeches or by mainstream media. In the following I will focus on two topics in the case of Lithuania — the Soviet period and the Jews.