Cold East

Twenty-something author and minor media influencer Stasys Šaltoka – or Stanley Colder to his adoring IG followers – has hit an existential wall. Abandoning his clichéd and stifling New York city life, he buys a one-way ticket to Southeast Asia in search of life-changing experiences. A chance meeting with an enigmatic Russian leads Stasys to a documentary project – the murder of a mysterious Mongolian model that implicates a prime minister and his jewel-hoarding wife. Unravelling the truth takes Stasys deeper through the murky swamp of extreme corruption, death, Islamophobia and media manipulation. Will he ever figure out the meaning of life or find a decent espresso?

'The chapters dealing with the countries' security situation are informative...an informative work.' - Pal Dunay, Deputy Director, Hungarian Institute of International Affairs, Budapest The book is a detailed examination of the evolution of the national security policies of the countries of East-Central Europe - Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary - since the East European revolutions of 1989. It also analyses the Visegrad group regional cooperation process between the East-Central European states, their relations with the main European security institutions (the European Union, NATO and the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe) and their position in the European security order of the 1990s.

During the Cold War, stories of espionage became popular on both sides of the Iron Curtain, capturing the imagination of readers and filmgoers alike as secret police quietly engaged in surveillance under the shroud of impenetrable secrecy. And curiously, in the post-Cold War period there are no signs of this enthusiasm diminishing. The opening of secret police archives in many Eastern European countries has provided the opportunity to excavate and narrate for the first time forgotten spy stories. Cold War Spy Stories from Eastern Europe brings together a wide range of accounts compiled from the East German Stasi, the Romanian Securitate, and the Ukrainian KGB files. The stories are a complex amalgam of fact and fiction, history and imagination, past and present. These stories of collusion and complicity, betrayal and treason, right and wrong, and good and evil cast surprising new light on the question of Cold War certainties and divides.

The Arctic's profile as a region for engagement and opportunity is rising among both circumpolar and non-circumpolar states.