A scholarly journal from the Centre for Baltic and East European Studies (CBEES) Södertörn University, Stockholm.
Issue 2026, 1: Download.
Lise Meitner senior fellow at the Institute for Contemporary History at the University of Vienna. His research focus is on migration and media representation.
At the upcoming CBEES Annual Conference 2024 (Södertörn University, 28–29 November) there will be a roundtable discussion on academic area studies journals related to the Baltic Sea region, Eastern Europe and Central Asia, organised by Ninna Mörner (Baltic Worlds) and Joakim Ekman (CBEES, Södertörn University).
This is a presentation of three original public opinion surveys covering the Baltic states, that were recently released in the public domain. All three surveys have been designed specifically to tap the political culture of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, including the Russian-speaking poulation groups and other domestic ethnic minorities.
With the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, hybrid and conventional security threats to the Baltic Sea region and Eastern Europe became ever more imminent. The case of Ukraine shows that societal resilience and resistance can be crucial for ensuring national defence in an asymmetric war, in addition to savvy military operations. Yet, how can we understand and measure societal resilience in relation to national security and what governance modes in the Baltic Sea region and Eastern Europe can support it? These were the questions that scholars and practitioners discussed at the conference “How to be prepared? Governance for societal resilience in the Baltic Sea Region and Eastern Europe”, which took place on 12-13 October 2023 at Södertörn University Center for Baltic and East European Studies.
In this paper, the AfD is examined in an attempt to understand the success of the populist party in the recent referendum on the European Union. It is a rhetorical analysis in that the election results are interpreted embedded in its rhetorical situation. Given this result, the success in the eastern parts of Germany has been attributed to the socialization of the GDR-era and the dashed hopes after reunification. It is a lack of confidence in this aspect of democracy that provides a breeding ground for parties like the AfD, which they know how to exploit through the use of alternative fora such as TikTok and Twitter on which they promote their ideas on new boundaries and alternative governance.
On May 16 2024, a workshop was organised at the Centre for Baltic and East European Studies (CBEES), Södertörn University, that included presentations on geopolitical orientations in the Baltic states, Central and Eastern Europe, and the Caucasus.
The author analyses the operation by Swedish diplomats in the Soviet Union during the peak of the Stalinist Terror. Although Swedish communists living in the USSR have been in the spotlight of some journalists and historians, the extent of the different Swedish groups and the complicated diplomatic actions to help them are nearly unknown. Who could be saved? Who disappeared in the Gulag? The context is the Soviet actions against all foreigners in the Great Terror from 1937, forcing them to either become Soviet citizens or immediately leave the country. Comparisons are made with Finnish people in the Soviet Union, a group much harder hit by the terror than the small groups of Swedes.
The roundtable “Universities at War”, held in Vienna on September 27, 2023, provided a panorama of case studies analyzing how universities have been implicated and affected by wars and conflicts. The speakers reflected on the way academic communities have been affected and the role of European academic institutions as sites, agents, collaborators, resisters, and victims of military conflicts from the Second World War to Russia’s war against Ukraine.
At a time where many public debates are informed by the ongoing full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, we thought it would be important to further explore the relation between controversies of gender, sexuality, reproduction – what can be labelled the “culture war” – and the actual military war. Four scholars on feminist and anti-gender politics were invited to discuss this topic from various angles on the roundtable “Exploring the links between the culture war and the actual war” at CBEES Annual Conference 2023 on the war and its effects.
Lake Ladoga: The Coastal History of the Greatest Lake in Europe. Maria Lähteenmäki and Isaac Land, eds.,(Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society, 2023). Studia Fennica Historica vol. 27, 233 pages.
Marija Gimbutas: Transnational Biography, Feminist Reception, and the Controversy of Goddess Archaeology, Rasa Navickaitė (Routledge: London, 2022) 244 pages