A scholarly journal from the Centre for Baltic and East European Studies (CBEES) Södertörn University, Stockholm.
Issue 2026, 1: Download.
Pēteris F Timofejevs
Senior Lecturer at the Department of Political Science, Umeå University. He has written on Europeanization of foreign aid policy in Central and Eastern Europe and European NGOs working with development cooperation.
Currently, his research is focused on radical right parties in the Baltic Sea area, their positions in foreign and environmental policies and their youth organizations.
Louis John Wierenga
Lecturer in International Relations at the Baltic Defence College, PhD fellow at the Johan Skytte Institute of Political Studies, University of Tartu and Research fellow at the Latvian Institute of International Affairs (LIIA). His research interests include populist radical right parties – specifically leadership and party structure, social media and discursive opportunity structures, youth organizations and transnational networks. Currently, Wirenga is part of a project entitled, “Making Tomorrow’s Leaders” which is a Swedish Research Council project analyzing youth organizations of far-right parties.
Trying to understand where post-Soviet Russia is going seems to be a matter of understanding how the society is redefining itself: contradictory pictures are circulating of what precisely Russia and “Russianness” are. The official picture of a united and multicultural Russia is being challenged from several directions.
On June 15–17, 2011, the Advanced Cultural Studies Institute of Sweden (ACSIS) organized its biennial conference, this year dedicated to “Current Issues in European Cultural Studies”. This report highlights some of the issues that were discussed at the panel session “East European Cultural Studies: The ‘New’ Europe”, chaired by Professor Irina Sandomirskaya of CBEES.
Adopting and Remembering Soviet Reality: Life Stories of Lithuanian Women 1945—1970, Edited and adapted by Dalia Leinarte, Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi 2010, 234 pages
Privatizations in states with no actual market economy obviously become legislative matters. For instance, matters related to property rights may need to be re-regulated. The role of EU law in privatization was brought up at the conference. The law does not regulate privatizations, but contains a great deal on liberalization, which in turn affects privatization. Matters related to the alignment of legislation have made law more interesting for all of us who usually categorize legislation among the restrictions.
During two scorching hot days in the middle of June, a diverse assembly of scholars from Russia and beyond converged in Moscow in search of answers to two questions: What is Varlam Shalamov? And why do we need him?
Scientists have not always agreed on either the causes or the possibility of restoring the cloudy, fish-poor, partially oxygen-deficient, algae-blooming, oil-slicked Baltic Sea. Wherein lies the disagreement? There seem to be two main controversies: 1. The Baltic Sea is eutrophic. Or is the Baltic Sea not eutrophic? 2. Algae blooms are controlled by the nutrient phosphorus. Or is the bloom controlled by both phosphorus and nitrogen?
Even though, with the dissolution of Austria-Hungary, Galicia ceased to exist, the idea of Galicia has a kind of ghostly presence in contemporary politics. The area was incorporated in 1919—1923 in the resurrected Polish state, only to be divided twenty years later between Germany and the Soviet Union as a result of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. This cleaving in two endured through the “shift” of Poland westwards after the Second World War. East Galicia became part of Soviet Ukraine and thereafter of independent Ukraine.
“Why is there no happiness in the East?” was the, according to many, provocative title of a conference put on by CBEES and Södertörn University September 8–10 of this year. The organizers of the conference, Teresa Kulawik, Renata Ingbrant and Youlia Gradskova, wanted to bring together feminist scholars for a discussion about conditions facing feminism in the East and in the West after the Berlin Wall, as well as the role of the EU and politics in the development of feminism.
The author argues that, despite the disastrous effects of the enormous brain drain for Russia’s development, the emergence of Russian communities abroad can also be seen as an indicator of a normalization resulting from the opening up of the country after a long period of isolation. For Berlin, it is the regeneration of the mixed and more cosmopolitan society of the pre-Nazi and prewar epoch.
When the preliminary electoral results came in the evening of 17 September, two things were rather clear. First, the Harmony Centre (Saskaņas centrs, SC) seems to be the winner of the extraordinary parliamentary elections in Latvia. Second, the so-called oligarch parties have suffered a humiliating defeat.