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Just in

• “Better stories” in higher education Cunning strategies for gender studies: What can you do when nothing can be done? Can the hangman be an ally of gender studies?

  This paper is based on two arguments: First, “grim storytelling” only gives access to part of the story and therefore needs to be supplemented with “better stories” — stories that generate an understanding of human potentiality, creativity, resilience, interconnectedness and shared “vulnerability”. Second, the tendency towards “grim storytelling” in critical social sciences constitutes a major limitation for the possibilities of imagining and enacting the very transformations that Europe most urgently needs in order to enhance the European project.

  By Andrea Petö June 20, 2023

• The fear of the word Samizdat and political language in the real socialist dictatorship

  The article deals with samizdat writing in the GDR, which could not be published legally. Thus, authors published their critical texts on handbills and smaller booklets. The article shows forms of distribution and focuses the analysis on individual examples and actors.

  Essay by Ines Soldwisch June 20, 2023

• MEMORY WARS IN BELARUS 1937–2020

  One out of four, and 1941 are two numbers everyone who went through the Soviet and post-Soviet schools in Belarus is familiar with. The former stands for the statistics of the Belarusians who died in the Great Patriotic War, the latter marks the year this war began. However, when I first came to Europe as a teenager, I was amazed to discover that no one actually knew either of my people’s heroism or our great victory. The war, as I found out then, did not even start in 1941 — nor was it defined as “patriotic”. Rather it was everyone’s — “world war” — with patriotism not attributed to nationalities.

  Essay by Olga Bubich June 20, 2023

• A MEETING POINT FOR OLD AND NEW BERLINERS “ The need for a welcoming and stable anchor after turbulent times will never change”

  2015, amid the summer of migration, the house was founded by writers Sven and Elke Lager who got access to the building from the City Mission. The wish was to contribute with solutions for the topic on everyone’s lips: refugee integration. By then, Give Something Back To Berlin (GSBTB) had already made us a name in migrant support circles. Since 2013 we had built up a big grassroots movement of volunteering and skill-sharing all over Berlin. GSBTB was by no means a refugee project, it was a migrant led-community project that simply reacted to the current needs of the city. One of the most pressing was for modern and human-centered activism supporting newcomers. Also, meet the refugee helpers: Bärbel Heinrich shares her story when she was imprisoned for helping people escape the GDR.

  By Annamaria Olsson June 20, 2023

• LVIV. A CITY OF LIONS IN THE YEAR OF WAR

  The journey to Ukraine is no longer measured in kilometers. After Ukraine closed its airspace, the trip demands new spontaneous, situational solutions to get there. Instead, travel can be measured by time — at least fifteen hours from Copenhagen to the western Ukrainian border, but it may be up to thirty hours or more. However, the most accurate measurement of the distance to Ukraine today is the level of closeness to all those people who are staying in Ukraine, in their own homes, and do not even think about surrender. From this point, Lviv is closer than ever.

  By Svitlana Odynets June 20, 2023

• The use of children in the Russian aggression against Ukraine

  February 2023 will be remembered for a lavish propaganda event of the Russian government in Luzhniki stadium in Moscow dedicated to the anniversary of the second Russian invasion of Ukraine. This year it was combined with a celebration of the most significant regular ideological commemoration — a day of “The Defender of Otechestvo [the Fatherland]. Using the propaganda transfer technique, Russia frames the invasion as a fight against the “Ukrainian Nazis”, providing parallels with winning WWII, thys inheriting Soviet traditions intended to increase feelings of patriotism and national pride. One of the key narratives promoted by Russian propaganda is the “protection of the people of Donbas”, in particular using propaganda materials with children, especially those deported from Ukraine.

  Essay by Alyona Hurkivska June 20, 2023

• The end of Ukrainian radical nationalism is not here – yet THE WAR AND ITS CONSEQUENCES FOR FAR-RIGHT MILITANCY AND VIOLENCE IN UKRAINE

  Is radical Ukrainian nationalism disappearing? However marginal but playing a decisive role in the resistance against Russian aggression, along with the rest of Ukrainian society, this political movement has suffered terrible losses that raise questions about its ability to maintain itself in the post-war political arena. This forward-looking essay examines the multiple challenges posed by this issue, arguing that the Far-right in Ukraine could perhaps find in the war an undeniable opportunity for a renaissance

  Essay by Adrien Nonjon June 20, 2023

• STREET ART AGAINST WAR WITH STENCIL MARKS AND PAINT CANS IN UKRAINE

  Street artists have demonstrated their condemnation of Russia’s invasion of a neighbor with murals, both in Ukraine and abroad. The most famous of these artists is Banksy. On a wall of what was once a kindergarten, he has sprayed the image of a child in a judo match overcoming a seemingly far more powerful opponent (an adult with some resemblance to the Russian leader). Although such works of street artists in Ukraine sometimes also show Putin, children are a common theme – often a girl with two stiff braids. Some of these works are presented in this essay, considering the role of the child in them, seeking to understand the role of art in protest as an appropriation and reconfiguration of public space.

  Essay by Lisa Källström June 20, 2023

• RUSSIAN ANTI-WAR MOVEMENTS. THE HOPE OF EPIPHANY

  The war against Ukraine sank the civil society of Russia into despair. The dreams of turning the country with a centuries long tradition of despotic power and imperialist foreign policy into a peaceful postmodern liberal democracy were brutally crushed. Alongside the tragedy of thousand Ukrainians, this full-scale invasion has meant a defeat of the Russian intellectuals, liberals, and political dissidents who had been trying for many years to persuade themselves and the outside world that the strange reality they inhabited was an inevitable part of being a transitional society. This defeat forced them out of their country. Cursed by their compatriots as “traitors” and by some public abroad1 unwilling to stand up to the criminal regime, the new Russian émigré are now trying to construct a new “Civitas Solis” in exile, a different future for themselves and their country which is supposed to rise in place of the apocalyptic darkness of the present.

  Essay by Alexander Generalov June 20, 2023

• Protests, anti-war grassroots initiatives and resistance in Russia

  Since the beginning of Russia‘s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the repression of civil society has gradually intensified in Russia. During recent years political activism has been under threat and pressure, and in the last year activism has largely gone underground due to the escalating level of repression; therefore one sees few mass protests. The Russian authorities have consistently taken restrictive measures against any street protest, and the last permissible form (a single-person action) in the end also turns out to be almost impossible.

  Essay by Inga Koroleva (pseudonym) June 20, 2023

• Baltic Worlds covers; the Baltic Sea Region, Eastern Europe, Russia, CentralAsia, Caucasus and the Balkan area.
  Articles listed by country you find here.>>
• Scholars in Ukraine write about the war.
  Read voices from Ukraine!>>
• New Series: Doctoral Theses Reviews.
  Read the reviews here!>>

• reviews

  1. The Chernobyl Children. A generation growing up with radiological contaminations

     Chernobyl Children: A Transnational History of a Nuclear Disaster Melanie Arndt, transl. Alastair Matthews (Cambridge University Press, 2025), 368 pages.

  2. Expelled from Communist Poland. Polish Jews in Sweden since the 1960s

     Vi, de fördrivna. Historiska erfarenheter hos polska judar som kom till Sverige 1967–1972 [We, the exiled. Historical experiences of Polish Jews who came to Sweden 1967–1972] Martin Englund, Södertörn doctoral dissertations, Stockholm, Södertörns högskola, (2025), 322 pages.

  3. Ecocide in Ukraine. An epistemological dimension of loss

     Ecocide in Ukraine: The Environmental Cost of Russia’s War Darya Tsymbalyuk, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2025) 208 pages.

  4. Tracing developments in 14 East European states since 1989 until today.

     East Central Europe since 1989. Politics, Culture and Society, Sabrina P. Ramet and Lavinia Stan, (Routledge: London and New York, 2025), 388 pages.

  5. Åland’s autonomy. A particular case

     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.

  6. All reviews