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)
Alyaksandr Lukashenka arrested all his opponents during the Election Day. Four months after the presidential elections in December 19th last year, one of the mayor oppositional candidates, Andrey Sannikau, has been sentenced to five years in a maximum security prison camp by the court in Minsk.
Is Russia part of Europe? Russians answer this question in different ways. For many of them, Russia is not Europe but Eurasia, which is an alternate unit of civilization. I do not share this opinion, writes Adam Michnik here.
Drakulić claims that top-down governance, which - she argues - started the war, is also the path to reconciliation in the region: Without the whipping up of nationalist emotions, purposefully and with the political will to do so, it would not be possible to start wars. It is only logical, then, that addressing people’s emotions is equally important as a way out of nationalism.
A number of representatives of the opposition in Belarus participated in a seminar “The Way Forward for Belarus”. The seminar addressed such issues as the difficulties experienced by the opposition in working for democracy and human rights in Belarus and what the outside world can do to support their work.
The Finnish Parliamentary elections of, which were held on April 17, resulted in a dramatic victory for a populist party, the True Finns, which increased its representation from 4 to 39 seats, and a big defeat for the Center Party of Prime Minister Mari Kiviniemi. The leader of the National Coalition Party, which despite losing six seats, Finance Minister Jyrki Katainen is expected to form the new government.
Ragnvald Blix was both a cartoonist and author. Blix declared his manifesto: “To be a good cartoonist, you have to be cold as ice in the face of all ideas and all persons. Sympathies and antipathies do not exist. First and foremost, you must have no respect for authority, tradition, or anything else in Heaven or on Earth, or even for anything in Hell.” Blix continued ridiculing fascism, Nazism, and communism in his satirical cartoons.
Balkan experts attending the symposium “Memory and Manipulation: Religion as Politics in the Balkans", agree that the war was directed from the top, and that “top-down” is the key to understanding how the war began in the region.
Elske Rosenfeld was 15 when the Berlin Wall came down. She realized that this was the end of the critical discourse that the citizens’ movements had brought to life in the GDR. When the 1990 election results were announced in the media, she cried. Today the topic of 1989 is her professional project as an artist.
Kurapaty and Khatyn: two places along the same road, the number three highway from Minsk to Vitebsk. Two places that are about history. But also about how history is used.
Russian financial markets have been a completely new element in the Russian post-Soviet economy. The level of development and the character of the financial market institutions in this country can tell us much about whether Russia will succeed or fail in evolving towards a well-functioning market economy. Professor Alexandr Abramov from the Higher School of Economics in Moscow is one of Russia’s leading experts on Russian financial markets. Ilja Viktorov from CBEES met him in Moscow to pose some questions concerning developments in the field.