A scholarly journal from the Centre for Baltic and East European Studies (CBEES) Södertörn University, Stockholm.
Issue 2026, 1: Download.
Author, selected as one of the British Council’s 20 best young British novelists in 2004. Has published the novels The Last Girl (2003), Amber (2014) and The Song of the Stork (2016)
On the 6th of May this year, Baltic Worlds arranged a seminar at CBEES on the topic of the shrinking space for academic freedom. Updated reports from Poland and Hungary was followed by a presentation of the autocratic learning process in Eurasia. Finally there were suggestions on how protect academic freedom and work for international scholarly solidarity.
In my contribution I would like to provide an assessment of what has happened over the past two years in Hungary, how academics have been reacting, and finish with a few thoughts regarding academia in that country and beyond. My focus should and will be on the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.
Rather than moving towards arguments or ideological standpoints, the politics in Ukraine has moved farther towards selling emotions, stories and images. This time it was the politics of mediatised emotion on steroids. Is this simply a new politics that can be used in a populist and non-populist ways, or for progressive as much as reactionary causes? It may look like it is a neutral tool but I would still argue that this kind of politics substitutes political mobilisation with political immersion by submerging the audience into a story, an emotional environment, an experience.
On March 30, Zuzana Čaputová defeated Maroš Šefčovič in the second round of the Slovak presidential election. It looks like an important victory for those who want a “European” and socially liberal Slovakia - regardless of the fact that the country is a parliamentary republic with limited powers for the president. But the presidential race has also revealed more troubling aspects of Slovak politics, and exposed deep divisions within the Slovak society.
Gendering postsocialism: old legacies and new hierarchies, Yulia Gradskova and Ildikó Asztalos Morell, Eds.. 2018. London ; New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.
Die Ostsee. Berichte und Geschichten aus 2000 Jahren. Klaus-Jürgen Liedtke (ed.) Berlin: Galiani Verlag 2018, 650 pages.
Ukraina och informationskriget – journalistik mellan ideal och självcensur [Ukraine and the information war – journalism between ideal and self-censorship] Gunnar Nygren and Jöran Hök (ed.), Myndigheten för samhällsskydd och beredskap. (2016), 279 pages.
Belarus in Maps, Edited by Dávid Karácsonyi, Károly Kocsis, and Zsolt Bottlik. Budapest: Geographical Institute, 2017, 194 pages.
The distinguishing feature of the Kaliningrad region is the fact that it is an exclave, part of but separated from Russia by two countries, Poland/Belarus or Lithuania/Latvia, though with access across the Baltic Sea (thus strictly speaking a semi-exclave). It is Russia’s only exclave and is the biggest in Europe. Seen from inside it is an enclave (or a semi-enclave).
Immediate reactions to the election results focused largely on the triumph of EKRE which nearly tripled its number of mandates. EKRE holding nearly a fifth of the Riigikogu seats ushers in a new era in Estonian politics where the populist far-right is a force to be reckoned with.