This book explores the evolving landscape of peacemaking, highlighting the rise of private organizations that challenge traditional mediation practices. It emphasizes a shift from resolution to transforming violence into a peace system, integrating civic society actors into peace diplomacy, and introducing a new approach termed dialogic mediation.
The end of the Cold War brought the Baltic Sea area into the limelight of political and cultural cooperation. Since then, the Baltic Sea area has gained a powerful position as a dynamic European sub-region. Still, like other similar kinds of areas defined by a sea or a river - the Mediterranean world, the Black Sea, or the Danube - the Baltic Sea area is hard to define and it has as many definitions as there are map-makers. The sea itself plays a central role but its influence is vague and always contingent. This book has sought to introduce multiple insights for focusing on the Baltic. All the contributions examine the question of the essence of the Baltic and the source of its unity and, in particular, concentrate on multi-culturality and multi-nationality in the Baltic context. Some of the contributions survey the whole Baltic Sea area, while others concentrate on the Baltic countries and some of them have found the Baltic in the limited environment of parish and town. The Baltic is comprehended as a label that opens stimulating possibilities for replacing nation-centrism with narratives of another kind extending beyond the current nation-states. This understanding provides opportunities for defining a multi-ethnic, multi-lingual and multi-cultural region and the diversity of identities that has existed.
The emergence of the idea of Baltic Sea unity and of Baltic cooperation seem to be the issues which unify the two big epoch-making periods, the end of the First World War and the end of the Cold War. In both periods, the Baltic Sea connection has been seen to offer a coordinate for remapping the location of the eastern Baltic nations, the Estonians and Latvians, in particular. Why has the Baltic Sea area played so important a role as a construct of the new Europe? This is the question examined in this study, which focuses on the period after the First World War when the disintegration of European multinational empires meant a shift in the international system from the hegemony of a few great powers to the heterogeneity of small states. As a part of this process, the concepts of sovereignty and national self-determination were redefined by the small states themselves so that they would manage to find their place in the world of the great powers. One expression of this transition period was a lively Baltic cooperation, which attained an exceptional pitch of intensity in the Europe of its time.