A scholarly journal from the Centre for Baltic and East European Studies (CBEES) Södertörn University, Stockholm.
Issue 2026, 1: Download.
Kevin Deegan-Krause is Associate Professor of Political Science at Wayne State University. He is the author of Elected Affinities: Democracy and Party Competition in Slovakia and the Czech Republic (2006) and co-editor of The Structure of Political Competition in Western Europe (2010) and the Handbook of Political Change in Eastern Europe (forthcoming), and the co-editor of the European Journal of Political Research’s Political Data Yearbook
Tim Haughton is Senior Lecturer in the Politics of Central and Eastern Europe at the University of Birmingham and the 2011-12 Austrian Marshall Plan Foundation Fellow at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies. He is the author of Constraints and Opportunities of Leadership in Post-Communist Europe (2005), the editor of Party Politics in Central and Eastern Europe: Does EU Membership Matter? (2011) and the co-editor of the Journal of Common Market Studies’ Annual Review of the European Union.
More than anything else, the avant-garde is the area of the production of the past: the colossal amounts of memoirs, artefacts, and photographs that are accumulated in archives — in different kinds of archives, including personal ones, but also state archives, and many others of different kinds.
Irina Sandomirskaja in a conversation with philosophers Jean-Luc Nancy and Peter Trawny on the subject of nationalism and cultural heritage.
There is an emerging regime of international law for protecting cultural heritage that focuses on three things: (1) conflict resolution between disputing parties, (2) safe return of cultural objects to legitimate claimants, and (3) criminal justice meted out to individuals who have acted in bad faith, mala fide.
The property of the disappeared first becomes mere “things” without name, use, or status. Then they turn into museum artifacts of ethnographic, aesthetic, or historical value (at least those of them that are not stolen by the “conquerors” nor rejected by the experts). Then, again, with the collapse of the museum project, what used to be displayed as cultural heritage turns again into “just things”. They burden their custodians who only wish to get rid of them.
In general, social disasters always result in the disproportionate excess of things: while humans perish en masse, artifacts survive in the form of market commodities and museum exhibit; as human life extinguishes in catastrophes, the life of objects gets more and more active in market exchanges, expropriations, and lootings. The history of Eastern Europe in the 20th century has witnessed many such episodes.
Expressions such as “geographical imaginaries” and “utopic worlds” are used to lead people to dream about distant lands, very different from Latvian society and its cultural scene. Based on these premises, the role of the Survival Kit Festival is to bring these imaginaries close to contemporary society in Riga, leading to a transformation of the conception of geographical and mental borders.
In June 2019, scholars came together in Belgrade for the CEEISA-ISA Joint Conference to discuss international relations in the age of anxiety. The current increase in international populist discourse and far-right movements and the democratic regression in Central and Eastern Europe were the focal point of the discussion. Questions that arose revolved around whether there are any prospects for reconciliation as a way to de-escalate the violence in the world.
Perpetuating peace will be a lifelong commitment in Kosovo and many other regions of the world. But for five weeks in historic Pristina, a group of former strangers became friends, collaborators, and confidants, telling stories of our truths, discussing our histories, and spinning worlds from words. Peace, for a while, persists.
De Baets and his Network of Concerned Historians do an admirable job of raising awareness of the risks that professional historians face, and the political misuse of history. As the annual reports reveal, these dangers to academics are increasing and spreading in lockstep with the growth of authoritarian and populist politics.
The history of revolutionary Petrograd covers the period between the two times when the city changed its name, in 1914 and 1924. During this period, it came to witness a world war (not accidentally called the Great War) and two revolutions, as well as cold, famine, and destruction. Even though difficult to assess, the consequences for museums and collections, both private and public, were enormous, as they were for a variety of art institutions and, even more so, for private persons such as collectors, artists, art critics, and so on.