Category: Lunch Seminar

Paradiplomacy has become a strategy for autonomous regions to get their voices heard in international contexts. Paradiplomacy means that the autonomous regions have their own representatives abroad and conduct their own foreign policy although they are subordinated to the countries they belong to. Occasionally some regions like the Faroe Islands and Greenland can have the right to participate as independent members in international organizations that do not only have states as their members. In the seminar the strategies within paradiplomacy of the Faroe Islands and Greenland are compared. Maria Ackrén is a Doctor of Political Science from Åbo Akademi University and she works as a lecturer in Political Science at Ilisimatusarfik/University of Greenland. The seminar is based on recently implemented research in the field of paradiplomacy.

Lunch seminar 11.12.2018: Who will save the Baltic Sea? The role of law in environmental governance. Tuesday, 11.12.2018 at 11.30-12.30 in hotel Arkipelag’s restaurant. Professor Henrik Ringbom is a specialist in maritime law and the law of the sea. At this seminar he presents research recently conducted within the framework of the BALEX network, in particular regarding multi-level governance and environmental regulation. The Baltic Sea is affected by up to six different levels of legislation at the same time, thus probably the world’s most regulated and managed sea area. What happens when so many different levels of legislation regulate the same thing? What happens when there are no rules? And what kind of legislation works? The seminar is held in Swedish. Lunch can be bought in the restaurant and taken to the seminar held in the southern part of the restaurant. The seminar will start at 11.30 and will last an hour.

Date: 10.4.2018 Time: 11:30 am – 12.30 pm Place: the restaurant at Hotell Arkipelag How does islanders perceive their identity and their history in relation to the national state and to the surrounding world? Historian Janne Holmén has researched on the one hand on islands, identity and historical writing, and on the other hand, on historical consciousness and mental maps. At the seminar Holmén will discuss how regional history-writing has contributed to the formation of regional identities on the islands of Åland, Gotland, Dagö, Ösel and Bornholm. While regional history writing, in most cases, aims to integrate the island into the national state, it has been used in Åland during the second half of the 20th century to depict its inhabitants as a separate nation. Janne Holmén who holds a PhD in History, is a researcher at Uppsala University, Södertörn University, and at the Åbo Akademi University. The lunch seminar is based on Holmén’s research presented in the publication “Islands of Identity: History-writing and identity formation in five island regions in the Baltic Sea”, which can be found here and his arcticle “Mapping Historical Consciousness: Mental Maps of Time and Space among Secondary School Students from Ten Locations around the Baltic and Mediterranean Seas” published

The next lunch seminar will be held on April 19, from 11.30 am to 12.30 pm, at Hotell Arkipelag. The speaker is Lia Markelin from the think tank Magma, and her topic is “What’s happening to the Swedish language in Finland?” The seminar is held in Swedish. A lot is happening in the world and in Finland which affects the position of the Swedish language in Finland. During the past eight years, the think tank Magma has been following the development and has brought important topics for the Swedish speaking Finland up to discussion. What does the digitalization, the social welfare and health care reforms and the new core curriculum for the basic education bring about for the Swedish-speaking population in Finland?  Which are the threats and the opportunities for the Swedish-speaking in Finland? Magma’s research coordinator Lia Markelin discusses these questions in relation to the work of the think tank. She has been employed at Magma for six years, and before that she worked with the co-ordination of Swedish university collaboration in the capital region of Finland. Markelin also works part time as an assistant professor at the Sámi University College in Norway. She is a board member of

The second lunch seminar of the year will be held on March 2, from 11.30 am to 12.30 pm, at Hotell Arkipelag. The speaker is Mikael Wigell, and his topic is “A New Cold War? Power Politics in the 21st Century”. The seminar is held in Swedish. The liberal world order seems to be under threat from the new power politics. There is often talk of the return of geopolitics, or perhaps a new cold war. Russia seemingly wants to overthrow the international legal order. It is also uncertain to what extent the USA, with president Trump in the lead, is prepared to defend the international legal order. What does this mean for Europe? And how should Europe deal with the situation? Mikael Wigell lectures on the new power politics. He describes its changing characteristics, its consequences for international law and order, and Europe’s strategic alternatives in the new political world. Mikael Wigell is a Senior Research Fellow at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs and a board member of the scientific board of the Åland Islands Peace Insitute. He took his PhD in developing countries from the London School of Economics. Wigell has also worked as a teaching assistant

The first seminar of the year will be held at Hotell Arkipelag in Mariehamn on 31 January at 11.30 am. It will be held in Swedish by associate professor and antiquarian Kenneth Gustavsson. The topic of the seminar is ”The Åland Islands 1944-46 – reunification with the Motherland?”. In the shadow of the Finnish-Soviet armistice in 1944, the leadership of the Åland Islands pursued a reunification with Sweden. The other alternative they had in mind, was some kind of independence of the Åland Islands. The leadership of the Åland Islands was therefore secretly in touch with representatives of Sweden. The outcome, however, was a disappointment. Both Sweden and Finland dismissed any ideas of the kind. In addition, the Soviet Union unequivocally declared that the Åland Islands should be subordinated to Finnish authority. Gustavsson lectures on this extraordinary history based on new material discovered in archives in Helsinki, Stockholm and Mariehamn. Kenneth Gustavsson. Antiquarian, PhD in archeology and associate professor of history. He has been working for many years at the Åland Museum, previously primarily with archaeological questions surrounding the medieval and late time, but currently mainly with recent history. His focus is the strategical and political importance of Åland in

On 20 September the Åland Islands Peace Institute will hold a lunch seminar on the theme of mediation and restorative justice. Lecturers Malin Söderberg and Justina Donielaite will talk about experiences of mediation within the local Åland Mediation Office, which started ten years ago. They will be joined by volontary mediators, active in providing mediation services on Åland. The lecture will cover theory an practise of restorative justice and lessons learned from 10 years of mediation activities on Åland. The seminar will be held in Swedish at the Hotell Arkipelag Restaurant at 11.30.

On 16 June, the ÅIPI will arrange a lunch seminar on the national peace process in Burma Myanmar with Professor Kjell-Åke Nordquist. The seminar will be held in Swedish at Hotell Arkipelag in Mariehamn at 11.30. Lunch can be purchased in the restaurant and taken to the workshop to be held at the secluded southern end of the restaurant. The seminar starts at 11.30 and lasts one hour. Kjell-Åke Nordquist is the Director of the Åland Islands Peace Institute, and has been working in the fields of autonomy and conflict resolution both as a researcher and a practitioner, and has been a member of the Board as well as the Research Council of the Åland Islands Peace Institute since its start. As a practitioner he has been working with peace processes mainly in Colombia, the Middle East, and South East Asia (Timor-Leste, Burma). In Burma/Myanmar, various parts of the phased negotiation process that will lead to a national peace accord, is currently under planning. Since autumn 2015 there is a ceasefire, signed by several armed ethnic armies and the government. The forms of political and broad completion of the different civil wars, that have occurred in the country since the

On 17 May, the ÅIPI will arrange a lunch seminar the EU security politics with  PhD Gunilla Herolf. The seminar will be held in Swedish at Hotell Arkipelag in Mariehamn at 11.30. Gunilla Herolf  is Chair of the Research Council of the Åland Islands Peace Institute. She has been a researcher at the Swedish Institute of International Affairs and at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). Her main fields of interest are European integration and security cooperation.

On 29 February 2016 the Åland Islands Peace Institute hosted a lunch seminar in Mariehamn on the topic of “Demilitarisation in an increasingly militarised world”. The seminar was held in Swedish. At the event Associate Professor Sia Spiliopoulou Åkermark spoke about the proliferation of various forms of civil-military cooperation in the Baltic Sea region, and researcher Saila Heinikoski talked about how the European Union’s foreign and security policy has affected the demilitarisation of the Åland Islands and about the position of the demilitarisation in Finnish politics. Sia Spiliopoulou Åkermark is the research leader and Saila Heinikoski is one of the researchers in a three year research project named “Demilitarisation in an increasingly militarised world”, that is funded by the KONE Foundation and Ålands Culture Foundation (Ålands kulturstiftelse). More information about the project can be found here.