A scholarly journal from the Centre for Baltic and East European Studies (CBEES) Södertörn University, Stockholm.
Issue 2026, 1: Download.
These three authors held a seminar on Pussy Riot in November 2012. Afterwards they jointly wrote down their contributions and thoughts – and also commented each other texts.
In order to silence dissident voices within Belarusian higher education, students with uncomfortable political views are often expelled. International critique has resulted in a decrease in the number of expulsions, but the repression continues. The university administration merely has changed methods and nowadays focuses on the students with a capacity to lead others.
This essay describes the widening common space of neo-authoritarianism in Eurasia. Preliminary results of ongoing research show how Russia and the Central Asian republics of Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan synchronically introduced similar anti-democratic measures to restrict freedom of academia, civil society, and political participation in response to major social and political events such as popular uprisings, financial crises, and successful successions of state power. The goal of this essay is to introduce a theoretical framework for the comparative analysis of various types of hybrid non-democratic regimes not only in post-Soviet Eurasia, but also in other regions that experience democratic backsliding.
The emergency rule of the last two years has created useful cases to understand what the authoritarian government in Turkey are trying to do in terms of women’s mobilization and gender studies at the universities. Celebrations of March 8 have been turned into a battleground to intimidate women’s mobilization through violent police interventions. In addition, it has become increasingly difficult to engage in women’s, gender, and LGBTI studies due to the changing nature of universities and related departments. However, these attempts have not been without resistance.
Academic independence and freedom in Turkey have long been influenced by the neoliberalization of universities and state control of the agenda in science and education. However, since the “We will be not be a party to this crime” petition released on January 11, 2016, calling for an end to curfews in Kurdish towns and a renewed commitment to the reconciliation process with Kurdish parties, the current Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) government has increased its reaction to academics and academia in general by firing, jailing, and starting legal proceedings against academics.
The Swedish National Commission for UNESCO and the Young Academy of Sweden arranged a symposium “The Shrinking Academic Freedom in Europe” November 9, 2018 in Stockholm. This symposium was one of many that have been organized lately on the topic threats to academic freedom, which can be seen as a sign and an acknowledgement that there is cause for worry.
Scholars at Risk (SAR) is an international network of institutions and individuals whose mission it is to protect scholars and promote academic freedom. We ask five questions to Lauren Crain, Director of Research and Learning at Scholars at Risk.
Gleb Yarovoy is a professor of political science and is currently based at the University of Eastern Finland in Joensuu. His dealings over the years with his former main employer, Petrozavodsk State University, says something about the situation for Russian academics of today.
Independent scientific and professional organizations began to suffer especially after the introduction of the so-called law on “foreign agents”. Ideological control over science, together with espionage, begins to directly influence the state of academic rights and freedoms. The topic of human rights has almost disappeared from teaching, and research in the field of queer sociology is in fact banned. However, the most vulnerable are those who either teach or demand respect for human rights at the university, and then the loss of employment is the result of a direct ideological confrontation with the rector, such as for the author of this text.
The elections in Lučani took place in the time of an increasingly intense atmosphere in society. The debate between opposition parties and the regime does not exist, yet there is an aggressive exchange in the media. The violence took to the streets when an opposition leader was brutally beaten just before the opposition rally.
December 9, 2018 marked a historic day in Armenia’s modern era as people went to the voting stations for a snap parliamentary election. The result rendered a landslide victory (70.4%) to acting Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s My Step (Imkayl) coalition. The election was a consequence of the power shift which occurred nine months earlier in April 2018, during a popular uprising dubbed as the “Velvet Revolution”.