During April, the Research Director of the Åland Islands Peace Institute, Associate Professor of International Law, Sia Spiliopoulou Åkermark is on a research stay at the Uppsala Centre for Russian and Eurasian Studies and the Faculty of Law. During her stay she is giving two guest lectures, and has also taken part in one seminar.On 18 April, Spiliopoulou Åkermark held a guest lecture on “New forms of civil-military cooperation in the Baltic Sea”, organized by Uppsala Forum on Democracy, Peace and Justice and the Swedish Institute of International Law. Using the demilitarization of Åland as a case study, Spiliopoulou Åkermark argued that enhanced military-civilian cooperation in the Baltic Sea may contribute to the increased blurring between peace and war and modify our understandings of core concepts of international law, such as ideas of territorial sovereignty.
On 26 April she held the lecture: ”Education rights of minorities – how are they implemented today around Europe and in Sweden?”, where she discussed how the understanding of minority education has evolved in these past twenty years, and what the situation looks like ‘on the ground’, starting off from research results from the project European Language Diversity for All (ELDIA, 2010-2013), presented in the new book “Towards Openly Multilingual Policies and Practices – Assessing Language Minority Maintenance Across Europe” (Multilingual Matters, March 2016).