Research Profile

I am Professor of Global Political Studies at Malmö University since January 1, 2010.

I am currently on leave from my position as Professor of Political Science at Lund University. I have served in thisn position between 2006 and 2009, and I was also Senior Lecturer of Political Science at Lund since 1996. During 2009 I was Director of Graduate Studies at the Department of Political Science, and 2005-2009 I was Deputy Head of the Centre for European Studies at Lund University (CFE).

Since my early academic career, I have dealt extensively with Russia and the former Soviet Union. Even though I for several years thought that I had left this geographical field of analysis more or less for good, I now find myself having come full circle and have started to analyse this object of study again. So far, apart from my doctoral dissertation (The Soviet Union and Peacetime Neutrality in Europe. A Study of Soviet Political Language, Lund Political Studies 1990) I have written three monographs, co-edited two volumes and written numerous chapters and articles on Russia and the former Soviet Union. This includes some writing I have done on Central Asia, especially Tajikistan, and the Caspian region. The current phase of my scholarly development is concerned with reconnecting my theoretical fields of interest in nationalism and identity constructions with my empirical field of interest in Russia. Through my activities within the Centre for European Studies I have also had reason to deal with issues of energy security and there as well Russia of course figures prominently. I have (with the financial assistance of the Centre for European Studies and the Fahlbeck Foundation) recently launched the so-called Ryssvet seminar series, which is an informal rallying point for scholars dealing with political and social developments in Russia and adjacent regions.

In general terms, my primary research interests have for several years been situated within the fields of identity construction, nationalism, stereotypes, scapegoating, xenophopia and local responses to multiculturalism. I am especially intrigued by the interplay between local and national identity discourses and actions. I look into matters of socio-cultural risk and how constructions thereof relate to majority views about immigrants and contending communities of value. I hope to be able to develop these angles further in the years to come.My most recent monograph concerns majority populations in local communities in Sweden and their views and prejudices about immigrant groups, often refugees and asylum-seekers. It deals with perceived challenges to ingrained habits and traditions and defensive mechanisms that may be triggered by them. The book, Stories about Strangers: Swedish Media Constructions of Socio-Cultural Risk (University Press of America, Lanham, 2006), is a collection of stories about ways in which socio-cultural risk is perceived, constructed and narrated in the local media and what consequences this may bring. In the book these risks are all perceived by majority populations as brought about by immigrants. In brief, Stories... is chiefly about the power of stereotypes.

The project which led to the publication of Stories... was funded by the Swedish Emergency Management Agency 2002-2003 and the Jenz and Carl-Olof Hamrin Foundation in 2004. Some early findings had already been reported, i.a. in an article in International Journal of Peace Studies (March, 2003). Related to the theme of Stories... was also the volume Bortom stereotyperna? Invandrare och integration i Danmark och Sverige ("Beyond the stereotypes? Immigrants and integration in Denmark and Sweden") which I edited together with Ulf Hedetoft and Lina Sturfelt. The book, which represented a rather vast spectrum of views in the contemporary debate about integration and immigration, was published in 2006 by Makadam Publishers, Göteborg and the Centre for Danish Studies at Lund University. Similarly, my interest in encounters between majority populations and minority groups is borne out in the edited volume Bo Petersson and Katharine Tyler: Majority Cultures and the Everyday Politics of Ethnic Difference: Whose House Is This?, which was published by Palgrave in 2008.

Besides Stories about Strangers, my most important monograph to date has been National Self-Images and Regional Identities in Russia (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001). The study was the outcome of a three-year research project, supported by the Swedish Research Council. The book builds on 110 in-depth interviews with federal and, above all, regional parliamentarians in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Perm, Volgograd, and Khabarovsk. The main results indicated crucial intra-national tensions and a certain lack of internal cohesion in the Russian Federation, and I would say that they enhance the understanding of the climate that brought Vladimir Putin to presidential power in the year 2000. 

Other books that I have been involved in are e.g. Bo Petersson & Alexa Robertson (red.): Identitetsstudier i praktiken (Malmö: Liber 2003), and Bo Petersson & Eric Clark (eds.): Identity Dynamics and the Construction of Boundaries (Lund: Nordic Academic Press 2003). The former was an outcome of the discussions in a national research network among Swedish political scientists who were united by their interest in methodological aspects of studies of collective identities. The meetings of the group were held under the aegis of the Swedish political science network for European studies. The latter volume was the fruit of a cross-disciplinary Ph D course held at Lund University in 2001-2002, where political scientists and human geographers took part along with linguists and area studies specialists.

Current Projects

Firstly, I am a team member of a three-year project supported by the Swedish Research Council with Associate Professor Kristina Riegert at Södertörn University as the project leader. The project is titled "Media and European Identity: National or Regional Media Perceptions of the USA?". My practical involvement in this project started in the second half of 2009. The title of my own contribution is "Coveted, Detested and Unattainable? Images of the US Superpower Role and the Self-Images of Russia in Russian Print Media Discourse 1984-2009"; and I hope eventually to have it published in a special issue of the Journal of Intercultural Studies in 2010. The article will explore how the image of the United States of America has developed in two major Russian daily newspapers, Izvestiya and Komsomolskaya Pravda, over a period of time from 1984 and 2009.  Empirically, it builds on an analysis of editorials, commentaries and news items focusing on United States foreign policy actions in connection with major international processes and events in 1984, 1994. 2004 and 2009. The analysis of the empirical material is undertaken with the invaluable help of my research assistant Emil Persson.

The time span chosen for analysis was by way of drama almost unprecedented in Russian history: from the position of stagnant superpower under the name of the Soviet Union in the 1980s, via the chaos and the political, economic and social downfall in the aftermath of the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the 1990s, to the partial comeback to the status of great power status in the first decade of the 21^st century. A comparison over time of publicly projected images of the US will therefore be very revealing also about the metamorphosis and trauma characterising the domestic arena in Russia during this time period. The variation in leaders in the Soviet Union/Russia over the time period was telling: the interregnum presided over by the elderly Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko, respectively, in 1984; Boris Yeltsin with his still vigorous but chaotic first presidency in 1994; Vladimir Putin and his reasserted strong hand in 2004; and Dmitry Medvedev’s questioned status as a really acting president in 2009, with Putin still at his side as prime minister and assumed strongman.The chapter will thus trace the development from Soviet-time dictatorship in 1984, to fledgling democracy in a country in turmoil in 1994, to de-democratization and reasserted authoritarian tendencies in 2004 and 2009.

While telling the story about how the image of the United States has evolved in Russian newspapers, the article will also tell the story of the developments in Russian self-images as publicly expressed in the print media. While almost constantly denigrated in the public discussion on the grounds of being morally decrepit, degenerated and power-hungry, in its capacity of an undisputed superpower the US still comprises the scale against which Russian commentators wish to measure their own country. In terms of variations in the projected image of the US, the chapter is likely to find the most benevolent images in the 1990s, whereas the 1980s and the illustrations from the 2000s, especially the first one, will probably display variations of the theme of the prime international adversary being criticized and sometimes scorned. This will probably be indicative of the development of Russia’s own international ambitions during the period; during the 1990s those were highly limited due to the bad state of the Russian economy at the time, whereas a more assertive Russia has emerged from the late 1990s on..

Secondly, I am the main applicant of a project (together with the architects of the study, fellow political scientist Mikael Sundström and psychologist Robert Holmberg, both at Lund University) on "Legitimacy, knowledge creation and practical drift in information security management". The project is designed as a three-year enterprise and is supported by the the Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency (MSB).

Thirdly, have since some time back focused on the potential influence of diaspora groups on political developments in the authoritarian states in Central Asia. Those groups may carry democratising influences inspired by Western political thought, but they may also represent sentiments of e.g. radical Islam. The resulting tug-of-war provides an intriguing subject for analysis. In a current paper project (undertaken together with journalist and writer Elin Jönsson) I am discussing the aftermath of the Andijan massacre in Uzbekistan in 2005, and how those events have come to be used as a symbolic rallying point for oppositionally minded diaspora groups.

Select bibliography

Monographs:

Sovjetunionen och neutraliteten i Europa. Sovjetiska kommentarer om Finlands, Schweiz, Sveriges och Österrikes neutralitetspolitik 1955-1988, Utrikespolitiska Institutet/MH Publishing, Stockholm/Göteborg 1989

The Soviet Union and Peacetime Neutrality in Europe. A Study of Soviet Political Language, MH Publishing, Göteborg, 1990 (PhD diss)

Med Moskvas ögon. Bedömningar av svensk utrikespolitik under Stalin och Chrusjtjov, Arena, Stockholm, 1994

National Self-Images and Regional Identities in Russia; Ashgate, Aldershot 2001

Stories about Strangers: Swedish Media Constructions of Socio-Cultural Risk. University Press of America, Lanham, 2006.

Edited volumes:

(with Ingvar Svanberg, eds.): Det nya Centralasien. Fem forna sovjetrepubliker i omvandling, Studentlitteratur, Lund, 1996

(with Klas-Göran Karlsson and Barbara Törnquist-Plewa eds.): Collective Identities in an Era of Transformations. Analysing Developments in East and Central Europe and the Former Soviet Union, Lund University Press, Lund 1998

(with Alexa Robertson, eds.): Identitetsstudier i praktiken, Liber, Malmö 2003.

(with Eric Clark, eds): Identity Dynamics and the Construction of Boundaries, Nordic Academic Press, Lund 2003.  

(with Ulf Hedetoft och Lina Sturfelt, eds): Bortom stereotyperna? Invandring och integration i Danmark och Sverige, Makadam, Göteborg 2006.

(with Katharine Tyler, eds): Majority Cultures and the Everyday Politics of Ethnic Difference: Whose House is This?  Palgrave, London, 2008

Edited conference volumes:

(with Jussi Laine, Sergei Prozorov & Helena Rytövuori-Apunen, eds): The Bologna Process on the Ground: Experiences of Nordic-Baltic-Russian Cooperation in Higher Education, CFE Conference Papers Series, No. 1, Lund 2007,

(with Barbara Törnquist-Plewa, eds): Energy Security in Europe. Proceedings from a conference in Lund, CFE Conference Papers Series No. 2, Lund 2008.

(with Barbara Törnquist-Plewa, eds): Remembering Europe’s Expelled Peoples of the Twentieth Century, CFE Conference Papers Series, No. 3 (2009).

Selected articles, book chapters etc.  

“Russia, the Near Abroad, and the Reborn Russian Assertiveness: The Case of Tajikistan”, Central Asian and the Caucasus Review No. 5, pp 159-170 (1996)

 ”Ryssland, Centralasien och den problematiska återintegreringen”, Nordisk Æstforum vol. 11, no. 2, pp 47-58 (1997)

 (with Charlotte Wagnsson:) ”A State of War: Russian Leaders and Citizens Interpret the Chechen Conflict”, Statsvetenskaplig Tidskrift, vol. 101, no. 2, pp 167-181 (1998)

 ”National Self-Images among Russian Regional Politicians: Comparing a Pilot Study on Perm and the Case of St. Petersburg”, CFE Working paper series, no. 1, (1998)

 ”Russia and Post-Soviet Central Asia: Re-Integration Ahead?”;  Mirja Juntunen & Birgit N. Schlyter (ed): Return to the Silk Routes: Current Scandinavian Research on Central Asia, pp 135-147, Kegan Paul, London (1999)

 ”Centralasien - fast i återvändsgränden”, Klas-Göran Karlsson (ed): Östeuropa. Länder på skilda vägar, Lund: Fontes,  pp 117-140 (1999)

 ”A Tale of Four Cities: Studying National Self-Images among Russian Regional Politicians in Perm, St. Petersburg, Volgograd, and Khabarovsk”, The Soviet and Post-Soviet Review, 23, 3, pp 251-284 (1999).

 “Utvinningsproblem vid Kaspiska havet”, Farid Abbaszadegan and Frans Wennberg (eds.): Oljan - en förbannelse?, Uppsala: Skrifter utgivna av Sällskapet för asienstudier no. 10 (1999)

 “Identifying the Enemy Within: Internal Enemy Images and Collective Identity in Russia”, P. Månson (ed): East Europe Ten Years After Communism. Transforming Power and Economy, Centre for European Research, GöteborgUniversity, Report no. 9 (2000).

 ”Combating Uncertainty, Combating the Global: Scapegoating, Xenophobia and the National-Local Nexus”, International Journal of Peace Studies, Spring 2003.

 (with Anders Hellström): ”The Return of the Kings: Temporality and the Construction of EU Identity”, European Societies, 2003, vol 5:3, 235-252..

 (with Anders Hellström, ’Stereotyper i vardagen: Bilder av ”de främmande”’, Karin Borevi & Per Strömblad (eds.) Kategorisering och integration. Stockholm: SOU 2004:48

  ”Globalization, Renationalization and Reception of Strangers”, International Conference on Modernization Process in Central Asia: Models of the Future, Conference Proceedings; Kazakh Ablai Khan University of International Relations and World Languages/NATO, Almaty, Kazakhstan (2004), 5-9.

 ‘Strangers in Our Midst: Stereotyping in Local Media’, Hans Brinks, Stella Rock & Edward Timms (eds.) Nationalist Myths and Modern Media: Contested Identities in the Age of Globalization, London: I. B. Tauris, 2006.

 ’Tulpaner och brustna grenar: om ledare, legitimitet och klaner i Centralasien’, Christer Jönsson & Magnus Jerneck (red): I ledande ställning, Studentlitteratur, Lund, 195-207 (2006).

 ’Invandring och integration i Danmark och Sverige: Likt och olikt i debatt och politisk praxis”,  Ulf Hedetoft, Bo Petersson och Lina Sturfelt (red): Bortom stereotyperna? Invandring och integration i Danmark och Sverige, Makadam/Centrum för Danmarksstudier, Göteborg/Lund, 7-25 (2006).

’Sweden’s evergreen political parties divide over EU’s climate strategy’, Europe’s World, Summer 2007.

’The Power of Stereotypes and Enemy Images: The Case of the Chechen Wars’, Bo Petersson & Katharine Tyler (eds): Majority Cultures and the Everyday Politics of Ethnic Difference: Whose House is This?  Palgrave, London, 2008, 155-168

Bo Petersson & Katharine Tyler: ’The Making and Breaking of Difference: Concluding Thoughts’, Majority Cultures and the Everyday Politics of Ethnic Difference: Whose House is This?  Palgrave, London, 2008, 226-237.

‘Putin as Peter: Russia’s Return to Great Power Status’, Karin Aggestam & Magnus Jerneck (eds): Diplomacy in Theory and Practice, Liber  2009, 413-426.

’Hot Conflict and Everyday Banality: Enemy images, scapegoats and stereotypes that are lived by’, Development 52:4, 460-466, 2009

Honours & external administrative qualifications:

2010-

Suggested chair of steering committee of Northern Dimension Institute 

2009-

Member of European Science Foundation Pool of Reviewers

Member of Review Panel for the Social Sciences and the Humanities, the Swedish Foundation for International Cooperation in Research and Higher Education (STINT)

Member of International Review Panel (Chair), Eurocorecode, European Science Foundation;

Member of International Steering Committee, International Institute for Transtextual and Transcultural Studies (IETT), Université Jean Moulin, Lyon III.

2008-

Member of the Research Advisory Board of the Centre for Baltic and East European Studies, SödertörnUniversityCollege, Stockholm;

Project evaluator and expert for Rustaveli Foundation, Georgia

Assignments as faculty opponent at viva

Ann-Marie Ekengren: Av hänsyn till folkrätten? Svensk erkännandepolitik 1945-1995, Göteborg University, Department of Political Science (June 1999).

César Villanueva Rivas: Representing Cultural Diplomacy: Soft Power, Cosmopolitan Constructivism  and Nation Branding in Mexico and Sweden, Växjö University, Department of Social Sciences (Sept 2007)

Anna C. Spånning: Towards Institutional Stabilization and Development? A Study of Inter-Organizational Cooperation in the Tajik Cotton Industry, Karlstad University, Faculty of Social and Life Sciences (Will take place on January 29, 2010).

Membership in evaluation committees at viva

14 times in the period 2000-2009; of these 1 abroad (Université Jean Moulin, Lyon III), 3 at Swedish Universities other than Lund (Linköping, Uppsala, Umeå), 5 in other disciplines than political science (peace and conflict studies, linguistics, history, geography, media and communication studies).

Assignments as external academic expert (‘sakkunnig’)

Recruitment of Chair: 2 (European studies, Aalborg, Denmark; European studies, Copenhagen, Denmark, (ongoing)).

Promotion to Full Professor: 1 (Media studies, U. of Tartu, Estonia).

Recruitments of lecturers/senior lecturers:  5 (Aabenraa, Denmark; 2 x Malmö; Uppsala; Linköping; Stockholm).

Promotion to associate professor (‘docent’): 2 (Södertörn, Uppsala).

Project grant applications: 5 (Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation; Baltic Sea Foundation)

Publication grants: 2 (Swedish Research Council).

Institutional grants/scholarship grants: 4 (STINT; as external reviewer, prior to 2009)

Peer reviewer

Acta Sociologica; Cooperation and Conflict; Geografiska Annaler, serie B.; International Journal of Peace Studies; International Political Science Review; Journal of Contemporary European Research; Journal of International Relations and Development; Norsk tidsskrift for migrasjonsforskning; Sage Publications (book proposal); Scandinavian Political Studies, Sociologisk Forskning, Statsvetenskaplig Tidskrift; Theoria: Journal of Social and Political Theory

Supervised PhD Theses, Lund University: 

Ulrika Jerre: Conflicting Logics? Implementing Capacity and EU Adaptation in a Postcommunist Context (defended 13 May 2005)

Anders Hellström: bringing Europe down to earth (defended 7 June 2006).

Sara Kalm: Governing Global Migration (defended 28 November 2008)

Nesrin Uçarlar: Between Majority Power and Minority Resistance: Kurdish Linguistic Rights in Turkey (defended 30 October 2009)

Ongoing PhD supervision, Lund University:

Lisa Strömbom (since 2002)

Mi Lennhag (co-supervisor, since 2009)

Ongoing external PhD supervision: 

Pascal Yan Sayegh (since 2007), assistant supervisor, Université Jean Moulin, Lyon 3, France.