CBEES Advanced Seminar with Olena Podolian, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, CBEES, Södertörn University.

Speaker: Olena Podolian, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, CBEES, Södertörn University.

Discussant: Karina Shyrokykh, Associate Professor in International Relations, Stockholm University.

Chair: Oleg Antonov, Visiting Researcher at the School of Social Sciences, Södertörn University.

Abstract: The chapter Democracy in the Baltic Sea Region is part of the educational monograph Re-thinking the Baltic Sea Region: Trends and challenges (editors Tomasz Branka and Victor Shadurski, The Baltic University Programme, Uppsala University, 2023). It is a collection of chapters which aim to introduce the concepts and general scientific knowledge about the region to both students and general public. The focus of the volume is the Baltic sea region in transition.
The chapter, co-authored by Anna Moraczewska and Olena Podolian, deals with the state of democracy in the BSR. Aided by various indices measuring the state of democracy, they conclude that the Baltic Sea Region is mostly made up of democratic states, but at different stages of development. There are also two authoritarian regimes in the region, Belarus, and Russia. Therefore, the authors propose a division into two dominant trends in the region: stable liberal democracies in the northern part of the region (the Nordic and Baltic countries) plus Poland, and growing autocracies in the east and south. They enrich this general division with more nuanced characterisations of individual countries.

Olena Podolian is a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Baltic and East European Studies (CBEES) at Södertörn University, Stockholm. She holds a PhD in Political Science from Södertörn University, an MA in Political Science from the Central European University in Budapest, and an MSc in Russian, Central and East European Studies from the University of Glasgow. Her research interests are comparative European politics with a focus on post-communist regime change, state-building and national identity.