Valter Bolevics, Jan Sjölin and Tatjana Volkova
Valters Bolevis is PhD Oec. Can. in business administration, Riga International School of Economics and Business Administration. Project manager. MS with distinction cum laude in the field of transport and maritime management from Institute of Transport and Maritime Management (ITMMA), Belgium, 2007.
Jan Sjölin is associate professor at the Baltic International Academy (BIA in Riga) and emeritus at the Technical University of IASI (CETEX). Served within the inner circle of CEEMAN (the Central and Eastern European Management Development Association) dealing with transition and evaluation of academic institutions.
Tatjana Volkova is professor in strategic management and innovation management and former rector of BA School of Business and Finance, Latvia. Her special research interests are design-driven innovations and creative industries. She is among other things a former President of Rector’s Conference of Latvia (2004—2011) and a former member of the European University Association Council.
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Articles by Valter Bolevics, Jan Sjölin and Tatjana Volkova
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How is war legitimated and delegitimated in music videos? We seek to answer this question using the example of depictions of Russia as a homeland in contemporary music videos. Advancing a multimodal, sound-oriented method to analyze music videos, we engage with the interplay of sound, moving images, and lyrics. How is homeland performed in music videos? Analyzing music videos and performances by Sobor (Ukrainian pro-separatist), Shaman (Russian), and Zemfira (in exile), we find that violence remains hidden in pro-war performances, while emphasizing a Russian-Soviet way of life. Depictions of traditional food and binary gender roles play a central role in pro-war, imperialnationalist renderings of homeland while performances mixing Russian food with hand grenades and questioning traditional femininity subvert such romanticization.
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This article, based on the analysis of media, video production and songs, as well as semi-structured interviews, pursues three objectives. First, it analyses Belarusian rock musicians’ modes of protest engagement in the context of the 2020 Belarusian post-electoral protests and the 2022 Russian war of aggression against Ukraine. Second, it situates their engagement within the Belarusian underground rock artistic tradition that took root in the 1980s, but which was updated in waves as new impulses were given to protest. Finally, it provides an overview of four types of social logics that have historically contributed to the protest politicization of Belarusian rock music.
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Being once a central component of Soviet popular culture, the Vokal’no-Instrumental’nyi Ansambls [Vocal-Instrumental Ensemble] (VIA) repertoire has become a shared heritage across today’s former Soviet republics. While portrayed in the media as a depoliticized historical phenomenon, some music groups still active today like the Soviet Belarusian VIAs Pesniary, Siabry, Verasy and Charaunitsy have in part also become entwined with domestic politics.
Focusing on Belarus, this article explores through virtual ethnography and a multimodal critical discourse analysis the intersection between popular music and politics. It especially focuses on how Belarusian president Aliaksandr Lukashenka, drawing on populist strategies, champions artists like the mentioned VIAs that support his ideology. Over his 30-year rule Lukashenka has promoted a national identity based in part on Soviet nostalgia. The mentioned VIAs are not only important drivers of contemporary Belarusian national identity, but they also provide a bridge to the Soviet past. Not only are they (in) directly supported by Lukashenka and the Belarusian state, they in different ways also support Lukashenka and were thus notably absent in the protests following the contested presidential elections in 2020.
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Alesia Rudnik is a political scientist based in Sweden, originally from Belarus. Her research has been published in journals such as Europe-Asia Studies, Communist and Post-Communist Studies, Media, War & Conflict and Internet Policy Review. She is also a regular contributor to Baltic Worlds (see for example the co-authored article with Malin Rönnblom in BW, vol. 17, no. 4, 2024). She currently serves as the Director of the Center for New Ideas, an independent Belarusian think tank operating in exile. She previously led a Belarusian diaspora organization in Sweden and was awarded “European of the Year 2022” in Sweden for her civic engagement.
Rudnik’s academic work focuses on the relationship between people and technology in the context of political protests under authoritarian regimes. On September 12, 2025, she defended her doctoral dissertation in political science at Karlstad University, titled Machinery of Dissent: People and Technology in Political Protests in Autocracies. In conversation with Baltic Worlds, Dr. Rudnik reflects on research in Sweden concerning Belarus, the 2020 Belarusian protests, and the role of digital platforms in mobilizing protest movements within authoritarian contexts.
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Network of Concerned Historians Annual Report 2025, contains news about the domain where history and human rights intersect, in particular about the censorship of history and the persecution of historians.
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East Central Europe since 1989. Politics, Culture and Society, Sabrina P. Ramet and Lavinia Stan, (Routledge: London and New York, 2025), 388 pages.
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Reflexioner från landet som icke är – Sju essäer om oss människor och vårt samhälle [Thoughts from the land that is not – Seven essays about us human beings and our society] Bjarne Lindström, Hangö, Libraria, 2024, 172 pages.
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arrating the Child and the Baltic Sea, the 2nd International Conference of The Graphic World of Children
Date and location: May 19–21, 2025, Södertörn Univeristy, Stockholm, Sweden.
Organizer: Lisa Källström (Södertörn University).
Advisory board: Maheen Ahmed (Ghent University), Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer (University of Tübingen), Birgitte Beck Pristed (Aarhus University)/ The Graphic World of Children).
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The interdisciplinary research centre Places, Identities and Memories’ (PIMs) Annual Conference “Spaces of Victimhood in Eastern Europe”
Date and location: June 18–19, 2025, the University College London (UCL).
Organizer: Jessie Barton Hronešov. and Paweł Bukowski, School of Slavonic & East European Studies (SSEES) UCL.
Memory Studies Association’s (MSA)Annual Conference “Beyond Crises:Resilience and (In)Stability”
Date: July 14–18, 2025.
Organizers: Charles University and the Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague.
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The article explores how Sweden’s engagement with the forests of the Baltics and Russia in the early 1990s was shaped by a discourse that cast these regions as peripheral. This discourse, we argue, revived historical narratives tied to 19th-century of Swedish forestry expansion toward the north, similarly, positioning the eastern forests a century later as underutilized spaces that could benefit from Swedish forestry expertise and modernization. We connect to historical phenomena and conceptualizations of center-periphery dynamics as a framework for our analysis. To identify narratives revolving around the forests in the Baltics and Russia under the center-periphery discourse, we conducted a qualitative thematic analysis of media sources from the Swedish forestry organization Skogen [The Forest] and Swedish regional and national newspapers from 1991 to 1994. In this article, we outline two key narratives that surfaced from our empirical findings. One narrative focuses on the notion that forest resources in the Baltics and Russia were finite and increasingly contested due to growing demand and restricted availability. The second narrative presents optimized forest management and professional forestry knowledge as solutions to these constraints, framing the eastern forests as potentially limitless if managed with the right expertise. We conclude our analysis of the historical narratives with a brief outlook on the recent developments of Swedish forestry portrayals of forests in the Baltics and Russia.
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Issue 2026, 1: