contributors

Articles by Valter Bolevics, Jan Sjölin and Tatjana Volkova

1. CBEES Memory Summer School 2024

   The CBEES Summer School 2024 “The Return of History: Memory, War and the End of the "Post” is a specialized course that delves into in-depth studies of central theories of cultural memory.

2. Baltic Worlds Roundtable.

   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).

3. Public Opinion in the Baltic States: Political Culture and Support for Democracy

   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.

4. How to be prepared? Governance for societal resilience in the Baltic Sea Region and Eastern Europe

   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.

5. Right-wing Populism in Germany: An intervention

   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.

6. East or West: Geopolitical Alternatives in Central and Eastern Europe

   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.

7. Rescued from Stalin’s terror The unknown Swedish operation in the 1930s

   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.

8. Higher education and research in times of war and repression

   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.

9. The culture war and the actual war

   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.

10. Lake Ladoga. A transnational history

    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.

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