How much a country is talked about in the media can determine its place in the public debate. In this brief, SITE researchers Maiting Zhuang and Svante Strömberg study the amount of news coverage devoted to European countries in the Swedish press. They document a systematic difference between Western and Eastern Europe and explore underlying factors that could be important in explaining this East-West divide.

At the end of December, a new law banning the punishment of whistleblowers was introduced in Sweden. Several prominent researchers, including House of Innovation's Associate Professor Anna Essén, are figuring out what private and public organizations need to consider when implementing the law.

Policy brief: The recently declassified proceedings of the Swedish Academy shed new light on why it awarded Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn the literature prize in 1970. His novels reflected unique experiences of many prisoners. The Academy characterized his work as a renewal of the great Russian literary tradition. However...

Policy brief: In this brief, we report on the FREE network webinar on the state of vaccinations and the challenges ahead for opening up economies while containing the pandemic, held on June 22, 2021.

New research from the House of Innovation explores how displaced persons living in extreme precarity engage in mundane everyday organizing practices in order to become recognized as subjects who matter.

Working paper: In recent years we have seen a rapid increase in legislation governing, protecting, and rewarding whistleblowers. More recently, EU enacted a directive protecting whistleblowers, the US has gone one step further long ago. In this paper, SITE researchers review the evidence for the effectiveness of US whistleblower reward programs and consider some recent novelties.

How will countries in Eastern Europe, the Baltic Sea region, and the Caucasus region handles the opening of their respective borders and what is the next step in the socioeconomic aspects?

In Ekonomisk Debatt, SITE researcher Anders Olofsgård sheds light into what we can learn about the effectiveness of development aid from literatures at the macro, micro and meso- levels. What are we talking about when we talk about development aid?

Policy brief: The Belarus economy was already struggling to generate growth before both the corona pandemic and the political protests following the August presidential election. The lack of growth was the result of an incomplete transition process to modernize the economy combined with a strong reliance on the Russian economy and its dependence on international commodity prices that have not paid off in recent years. With the added political turmoil and, so far, lack of a new political and economic strategy, the economic outlook for Belarus looks grim. Even if a full-blown crisis may be avoided by restrictive economic policies, stagnation will nevertheless be the most likely outcome without fundamental reforms.

Policy brief: As time passes and archives open, ever more topics in Russian military-economic history can be studied with primary sources. One such theme is the colossal evacuation of industrial enterprises and equipment from July 1941 onwards. Thousands of railway cars and lorries carried equipment, raw materials, as well as personnel from Ukraine, the Baltics, and western regions of the Russian Federation to the Urals and beyond.