A scholarly journal from the Centre for Baltic and East European Studies (CBEES) Södertörn University, Stockholm.
Issue 2026, 1: Download.
Michaela Pixová is urban geographer and a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of sociological studies, faculty of social sciences, Charles University, Prague, with a focus on the role of urban activism and citizen participation in urban planning. She is the vice-president of the activist organization Prague Watch.
Arnošt Novák teaches environmental sociology at Faculty of Humanities at Charles University in Prague. He has been involved in autonomous activism since the 1990’s and he is member of autonomous social center Klinika.
The Museum of Contemporary Art in Skopje has created a new program named ‘Radical Education’, designed by Tihomir Topuzovski and Kumjana Novakova. The program started on October 17, 2018 with a lecture “The Art of Political Imagination” by professor Stephen Duncombe. It continued on October 29 and 30 with a workshop by Forensic Architecture, an independent research agency.
This article focuses on the blackmailing of the Jews during the Nazi occupation of Lviv, Galicia. Despite a considerable amount of attention from historians to the Shoah in Lviv, this issue is still one of the few unstudied problems. Based on the carefully collected source materials, the author reconstructs the main features of this phenomenon, its evolution, its local specifics, and the main types of blackmailers and the methods of their activities.
After announcing her presidential campaign in October 2017, Sobchak, perhaps unsurprisingly, was represented in mainstream Russian media as an “unruly woman”19 who was transgressing the existing patriarchal norms and rules, and she was explicitly reminded by male journalists and TV anchors of the “real” and “traditional” role a woman is supposed to play.
Professor Olga Kryshtanovskaya comments on the current situation around the future presidential successor in Russia and the potential political upheavals connected to this issue. Olga Kryshtanovskaya is a professor at the State University of Management in Moscow and a leading Russian sociologist with a specialization in elite research
In less than 15 years, activist journalists have enjoyed a vertiginous career in Ukraine, from a persecuted and marginal minority to one of the most influential social groups and key actors in the political field. This was certainly facilitated by the technological shift that made media work more cost-efficient and less resource-demanding. But the transformation could also only happen because the culture had a long tradition of journalists taking a stand against authorities, and the idealized figures of an honest publicist, a passionately engaged writer, and a resistance fighter were familiar and readily accepted by the public.
The academic community is international, and this solidarity crosses borders. Angelika Sjöstedt-Landén is one of the founders of the network FEMACT, that aim to fight the limiting space for academic freedom. We asked her to explain more about the initiative.
The Constitution for Science aims to flatten the structure of Polish science. This can result in easier management, both in economic as well as in political terms, but what is actually at stake is a restriction of academic freedom.
Democratic backsliding has been an abiding and pervasive concern across the post-communist region for almost a decade. Data from the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) dataset corroborate this phenomenon and show that one of the contributors to this decline is a narrowing of freedom for academic and cultural expression.While not being the sole driver of this recent backsliding trend, the opportunity for open academic and cultural exchange does remain an important principle of basic electoral democracy.
Student protest as a form of mobilization from below, excluding categorically political organizations like opposition parties and NGOs, has changed the perception in Albanian society about protesting and decision-making. Public opinion regarding the protest in December of 2018 has had the same value as the student movement in 1990—1991 when the system changed, and Albania became a democratic country, and the students are once again bringing hope to Albania!
Inaugurated in October 2012, the statue was one of the first publicly-funded right-wing monuments to adorn a public square in postwar Hungary, and only one example of the current Hungarian government’s determined campaign to reformulate public discourse and memory politics.