A scholarly journal from the Centre for Baltic and East European Studies (CBEES) Södertörn University, Stockholm.
Issue 2026, 1: Download.
León Poblete, PhD candidate at the Department of Business Studies at Uppsala University, Sweden. Currently working on his doctoral dissertation in which he studies the dynamics of business-to-business relationships and complex business networks in industrial markets. The Swedish defense and security industry is the main empirical context in his research.
H. Richard Nakamura, assistant professor at the Centre for International Business Studies at the School of Business, Economics and Law at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, holds a PhD in International Business Studies from Stockholm School of Economics, Sweden. His research concerns international business, management and entrepreneurship, especially regarding cross-border mergers and acquisitions and foreign direct investments in the Baltic Sea and East Asia regions.
In a panel discussion and workshop organized by doctoral students and Södertörn and Uppsala Universities, we set out to explore how the idea of the Anthropocene encompasses – and disrupts – various temporalities and spatialities, as seen from these various angles.
The article considers the emergence of nationalisms during the period of the downfall of socialist regimes in Eastern Europe and concentrates on the formation of Slovene nationalism through the spyglass of historic narration. The Slovene case may provide some general lessons as to how, in national narrations, history is retroactively homogenized: all significant landmarks of Slovene history that now form the core of the narrative presented at the time the major breaks with the then standards of Slovene national identity.
In 1969 the Situationist group re-installed a copy of a statue of Charles Fourier on an empty plinth at Place Clichy in Paris as a gesture of commemoration of the events in May-June 1968 in Paris. The article will discuss the event and use it in an analysis of the ongoing monument wars that took off in the summer of 2020.
This essay takes the novel The Museum of Unconditional Surrender by Dubravka Ugrešić as a starting point for a discussion of why the notion of a post-Yugoslav or post-communist cultural memory seems to be a contradiction in terms. The manifest impossibility of forming a collective post-Yugoslav memory provokes a reflection on how cultural and collective memory has been used in post-communist Eastern Europe to historify the communist past, which further has served the revival of a nationalist agenda. Ugrešić offers a counter memory, if we understand the term from Foucault as something that escapes the forming of identities. Finally, I suggest the notion of negative memory, as introduced by Reinhardt Koselleck, as a more apposite term for approaching memory in the post-communist sphere and in the unfolding catastrophes of the modern world.
What concepts can we apply to understand the current wave of new monuments? In this article I suggest labeling them post-monuments, related to the commissioning body’s implied interest in what is commemorated, on the one hand, and the possibility of making amends, on the other. The concept builds on the one suggested by James Young in the early 1990’s “counter-monuments” regarding the German memorial culture of the time. I address how post-monuments can be seen as a future-oriented rectification, repair, and response.
Partisan and decolonial ecology is a notion addressed by Andreas Malm and Malcom Ferdinand respectively, in their texts on the Caribbean maroon partisans – the emancipated slaves – who moved to the more mountainous parts of the islands that were still covered by dense vegetation. This concept is here taken to another historical context, that of Yugoslav partisans’ fight against the fascist occupation in the Second World War. I engage in reading an array of partisan artworks that point to fascist domination/war over nature juxtaposed to emerging solidarity among humans and animals/nature. From poems and short stories to drawings and graphic art material, the subject matter of forest as a site of resistance and political subjectivity emerges. Diverse animals, pack of wolves, birds that continue to sing despite the thorny branches, the figure of the snail as the affect and attitude of resilience – these become “comrades” in the struggle, mobilizing nature in their fight against fascism.
The study of monuments tends to focus on human agency, in the form of political history, war history, antagonism, trauma and so on. Aesthetic qualities are often seen as superficial and fetishized qualities that belie the impact of the monument in a regional context. The rurally situated monuments of former Yugoslavia, however, must be seen through their extraordinary qualities as works of art, carrying an agency of their own. Rather than restricting the meaning of their impact, their aesthetic qualities and impact in the environment allow them to speak to us today from a new horizon.
This special section in Baltic Worlds is the result of a workshop engaging with the politics of aesthetic historicizations, through the grid of the monument.
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.