Finland

William Lyon Mackenzie King once observed about Canada that, "if some countries have too much history, we have too much geography." This is true of Northern Ontario, where the boreal forest covers 40 million hectares and small towns are the norm. However, Northern Ontario's economy has been hard hit over the past several years, resulting in significant job losses in the forest industry and major economic and social shifts. While most studies of globalization focus on industrial cities in densely populated regions like Southern Ontario, this book examines the impact of global forces on the industrial centres of the boreal forest region with a reflection on the new forest industries in the Global South. The friction generated by these shifts is the essence of this study.

In the later part of the Second World War, German troops were responsible for a front of nearly a thousand kilometers in Lapland, Northern Finland. The Germans built close to 100 prisoner of war and labor camps in the area, and imprisoned some 30,000 Russian soldiers there. Since Lapland’s infrastructure was very poor, the prisoners were used as a workforce for tasks such as building and improving roads and bridges. The prison camps and military bases, as well as their archives, were almost completely destroyed during the German retreat from Finland, in 1944–1945, in the Lapland War between the Finns and the Germans. In this chapter we report on preliminary fieldwork at the German base of Peltojoki, and we discuss how archaeology can contribute to the study and understanding of military sites from the recent past.

Regions have been regarded as processes, artefacts and discourses, and recently as ‘brands’ that various stakeholders use in marketing. Discourses on institutional regions are typically promoted by media, governmental bodies and planning organizations that draw on reputed collective regional identities—the expressions of past and current social discourses and cultural practices. However, such institutional regional discourses are often incongruous to spatial imaginaries of everyday life. This article scrutinizes the meanings of spatial attachment to citizens and explores to what extent regional identities are meaningful in everyday life. To avoid biased assumptions, focus-group interviews were carried out within four Finnish provinces among the members of four social movements. The results show that provincial spaces are not actively thought-and-practiced. Spatial identities are rather structured around personal experiences that typically accumulate in several locales, since personal histories are increasingly characterized by mobility. This article also recognizes that the everyday meanings of a socially constructed region are often generationally read and combine different historical narratives.

Within barely a year, two school shootings shook Finland. The school shootings shocked Finnish society, forcing media, academics and experts, police and politicians alike to search for reasons behind the violent incidents. Focusing their analysis on the two main Finnish newspapers, Helsingin Sanomat and Hufvudstadsbladet , authoritative sources of information for Finland’s two language communities, the authors maintain that the Finnish case contributes to research on school shootings by evidencing the intimate linkages between the state, gender and violence. The authors argue that violence is to be understood through different discourses about the Finnish state. In particular, they discern three discourses about the state that produce gendered discourses of violence: the welfare state, the realist state and the neoliberal state. The authors conclude that these discourses produce different notions of rational and irrational violence thereby providing different legitimizations for male-embodied/masculine violence.

Innovation has become a crucial part of the vocabulary of contemporary political governance and its conceptual equipment. As innovation has emerged as an ever-more significant political issue, the discourse on innovation has become intertwined with the notion of network. This paper argues that certain ontological elements inherent in this discourse tend to lose their openness when they are defined as policy-oriented concepts, and uses the innovation system concept as a case study to illuminate this. Insofar as innovation, the production of something novel, is the basis of contemporary economy, then political language has to strive both to attain what is new and, at the same time, to make it governable. It seems, however, that when a concept receives its political formulation, that is, when it becomes a means for governance, then the unifying process attendant to the production of a field of governance will replace the perspective of change. This essential tension is investigated in what follows through innovation policy as articulated mainly in the Finnish policy discourse.

Teollisuusmaiden hiilivelka on samansuuruinen kuin kehitysmaiden lainataakka. Tämä tarjoaa oivan tilaisuuden tilanteen nollaamiseen. Esitän, että kehitysmaat jotka tulevat mukaan kansainväliseen sopimukseen, joka toivottavasti solmitaan Kööpenhaminan ilmastokokouksessa vuoden loppupuolella, saavat velkansa kuitattua. Tämän jälkeen voidaan aloittaa yhteiset ponnistelut kasvihuoneilmiön ja taloustaantuman samanaikaiseen torjumiseen. Velkojen molemminpuolinen anteeksianto auttaisi kansainvälistä pankkijärjestelmää takaisin jaloilleen, ja investoinnit energian säästöön ja vihreään energiaan toisi kaivattuja työpaikkoja.

"Because of both history and geography, the Finnish relationship with Russia is unique in Europe. At the same time the Finnish perception of Russia as a source of security challenges is acute.

Finland has engaged in a debate over whether it would be desirable to seek membership of NATO in order to mitigate these challenges. A full and frank debate has been difficult because it is constrained by a range of political and societal taboos; nevertheless at the time of writing (November 2009) there were indicators that a move toward NATO was not impossible in the foreseeable future.

But if Finland were to opt for joining NATO, this would register in Russian defence and security thinking as a serious concern. Unlike the Baltic accession in 2004, the response from the newly assertive Russia could potentially be swift and damaging. This would also have implications for Russian relations with the EU, of which Finland has been a member since 1995. Many in Finland saw the EU as a security provider, and there was confusion in the national debate between EU or Nordic security policy cooperation and an actual defensive alliance.

Finland’s NATO argument is a complex and multi-faceted one, made even more so by regional and cultural specifics; but it needs to be understood because its result could be significant for Russia’s relationships with both NATO and the EU."

Koulutuksen tuloksellisuudesta ja sen arvioinnista on muodostunut sekä kansainvälisellä, kansallisella että paikallisella tasolla entistä tärkeämpi koulutuksen hallinnoinnin osa-alue. Artikkelissa tarkastellaan suomalaisen koulutuksen tuloksellisuudesta käytyä yhteiskunnallista keskustelua hyödyntäen Jürgen Habermasin filosofisia teemoja. Artikkelin tarkoituksena on osoittaa, että Habermasin tieteenfilosofisia ja modernisaatioteoreettisia ajatuksia voidaan käyttää koulutuspoliittisen keskustelun analyysin taustateoriana. Tämän jälkeen tutkitaan, millaiselta tämä keskustelu näyttää, kun sitä katsotaan Habermasin teoreettisen filosofian lävitse.

"This chapter is based on action research conducted in the city of Kokkola, Finland. The two year action-based study aimed to  explicate the unexplored knowledge of Finnish youth work. As an end result, the project gave an overview of the goals of youth work. This description did not include any strong commitments to promoting entrepreneurial learning. The chapter reflects on these findings and asks why the perspective of entrepreneurial learning is
absent in the self-understanding of youth work."