render-project.eu

Throughout this weekend we are live tweeting from the ‘Europe: Crisis and Renewal’ Congress at Cambridge University organised by the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies and The International Council for Central and East European Studies. The highlights this far included a public conversation between the doyen of East European Studies, Prof Stephen White and the author of ‘Mafia State’ and Guardian correspondent, Luke Harding, fascinating expert panels on energy politics, migration policy, and Baltic history, as well as a session entitled ‘Shitting on Stalin’.

The fast approaching 70th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was marked by an opinion poll conducted by the Homo Homini Institute, surveying the attitudes towards ‘Jewishness’ of a representative sample of 1250 Warsaw high school students. The results have been reported by some of the mainstream media, including Israeli news portals or the British Daily Mail, as proof of deeply rooted anti-Semitic attitudes amongst Polish youth.

Anna-Cara Keim looks at the state of air travel in Northern Europe

In February we published the first part of this 2-part on the rise of the far right and populist parties in Finland. In the first part of the series our author Kristofer Jäntti focused on the rise of the Lapua movement. Now he examines the rise of the populist Finns party.
History

Our editor-in-chief Anna-Cara Keim plans to write about the Eurovision Song Contest and finds herself travelling to Riga instead.
The original topic of this article was this year’s Eurovision song contest. And the plan was to write about the performance of the Baltic Sea Region countries – why Poland and Latvia have not made it to the finals in some years, why Finland’s catchy DingDong tune did not succeed, despite Alexander Stubbs’ energetic tweets, and how regional voting patterns, especially in ex-communist Europe, persist until the present day.