49 articles tagged with sweden were found.
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.
By
Janine Priebe and Toms Kokins
September 23, 2025
President Trump wants to build 40 new icebreakers to conquer the ice around Greenland, according to the news, May 2025. Interestingly, Finland might play a part in the production of these ships.1 There is a deep historical dimension here and in this essay I return to a time before the icebreaker, that is, before the 1850s, and look into how we related to ice and snow then. It turns out that in the centuries preceding the late 19th century, people in Sweden had an overwhelmingly positive attitude towards ice and snow. In fact, these elements were crucial for the whole Swedish society. Today it is the opposite, as the icebreaker illustrates. I argue that between these two historical temporalities lies the climate shift, which has an ontological dimension to it.
Essay by
Johan Hegardt
September 23, 2025
The revolt that lasted 63 days was a desperate attempt to push back the German enemy before the Red Army crossed the Vistula River. Once it was quashed, the Poles counted their losses in hundreds of thousands: It is estimated that roughly 15 000 Polish soldiers who followed orders from the government-in-exile in London perished, hundreds of whom had already fought during the April 1943 uprising of the Warsaw ghetto. 150 000—170 000 civilians lost their lives, 65 000 of them in organized massacres.
A contemporary Swedish reaction to the Warsaw uprising was published in September 1944 in Warszawa! [Warsaw!]. The editor of the anti-Nazi newspaper Trots allt! [In spite of everything!] and left-wing politician Ture Nerman wrote: "In the history of this time and age, Warsaw stands as one of the most heroic in humanity’s struggle for freedom."
By
Hanna Aspegren
April 16, 2025
This paper focuses on the notions of “time” and “temporality” of nuclear waste, as well as the different time horizons implied by practitioners of nuclear waste storage. In doing so, the paper develops understandings of a key problem defining nuclear waste storage in C21: namely, how to communicate information and memory over the 100,000 years that highly radioactive nuclear matter remains a threat to organic life. This question is notable not least because it involves the proposition of communicating with “deep time” future scenarios in which contemporary representational systems are ineffectual, and even the existence of the “human” is in doubt.
By
Thomas Keating et al
April 7, 2025
International Conference “Exploring the relation between antigender politics and democracy: the Baltic Sea region and beyond” held at Södertörn University on September 26–27, 2024. The conference brought together scholars, activists, and politicians to address the challenges of antigender politics in the Baltic sea region. Funded by the Foundation for Baltic and East European Studies, it was a part of a Horizon Europe project: Co-Creating Inclusive Intersectional Democratic Spaces Across Europe CCINDLE.
By
Elżbieta Korolczuk et al
December 9, 2024
Drawing on in-depth interviews, this essay investigates professional strategies and researcher identity constructions in the precarious postdoctoral phase. The analysis indicates that most of the informants in the present study seem to be somewhere in the middle of the process of establishing a postdoctoral/early-career identity. The essay underlines the need for better preparing PhD students for the postdoctoral phase; and suggests that to most of the informants, the emerging researcher identities are secondary to more pressing issues, relating to survival in academia alltogether.
Essay by
Joakim Ekman
September 18, 2024
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.
By
Torbjörn Nilsson
April 23, 2024
This essay presents the little-known story of the first western package tour to the postwar Soviet Union along with neverbefore-seen photographs from the journey. It also introduces the digitized Oddner archive, which contains an abundance of visual sources on the Soviet Union of 1955.
Essay by
Sune Bechmann Pedersen
December 11, 2023
This article compares Swedish and German social work, including policy documents, and discusses the policies of these two countries regarding the implementation of children’s rights in social work practice. The analysis focuses on two main concepts that are used in social work practice: the concept of a child perspective in Sweden and the concept of participation in Germany. This study aims to investigate the ideas, values and guidelines mediated by political institutions to social workers in the field. The results showed that both the Swedish and German policy documents gave the distinct impression that the concepts had been properly implemented and formed part of child welfare practice. In the Swedish context, the idea of both making children visible and the formal aspects were highlighted, whereas in Germany, participation was related to an educational discourse. However, it is argued here that the discourses suggest that there is unequal relationship between children and adults, and we conclude that social workers must contribute to the child’s status as an active subject.
By
Sylwia Koziel and Ylva Spånberger Weitz
June 20, 2023
The aim of this paper is to analyze the impact of state territorial regulations and restrictions against the spread of Covid-19 on the life of the population of the twin cities of Tornio and Haparanda, on the border between Finland and Sweden. To the inhabitants, the pandemic restrictions meant an oscillating “life world” of opportunities and containments, affecting them differently, often depending on decisions taken by distant authorities and for reasons irrelevant to the local borderland.
Essay by
Thomas Lundén
January 18, 2023
Issue 2025, 2: 
Baltic Worlds covers; the Baltic Sea Region, Eastern Europe, Russia, CentralAsia, Caucasus and the Balkan area.