Category: News

Prof. Maria Mälksoo spoke at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs (FIIA) panel ‘Taming the Bear: Countering Russia’s Enduring Threat’ at the strategic dialogue hub ‘NATO in the Huis’ organised by  the Munich Security Conference (MSC) and the Netherlands Institute of International Relations Clingendael on the occasion of  the 2025 NATO Summit and NATO Public Forum in the Hague, Netherlands, 24-25 June 2025.

Half of the RITUAL DETERRENCE team presented research at the 50th anniversary conference of the British International Studies Association (BISA) in Belfast, UK. The conference took place on 18-20 June 2025.

Prof. Maria Mälksoo presented a paper ‘Envisioning Future Deterrence: Peace, Accountability and the End Times after the Russo-Ukrainian War’ in the panel investigating temporal security in international relations. She further participated in a roundtable on critical perspectives on NATO and another dedicated to Georg Löfflmann’s book ‘The Politics of Antagonism – Populist Security Narratives and the Remaking of Political Identity’ (Routledge, 2024).

Dr Cameron Hunter presented a paper ‘Ritual Interaction Chains in US-China Lunar Competition’ in the panel on a new space race convened by the BISA Astropolitics Working Group. He further chaired a panel ‘Middle Space Powers and Non-State Actors in Outer Space’ and presented at the ERC Third Nuclear Age Roundtable on understanding and addressing contemporary nuclear challenges.

(Image below courtesy of Lauren Rogers, picturing part of the editorial team of BISA’s flagship journal Review of International Studies meeting in Belfast).

(Image below courtesy of  Bleddyn Bowen, picturing Third Nuclear Age Roundtable participants).

Prof. Maria Mälksoo presented her paper ‘Peacetiming for the Future: Deterrence, Accountability and the ‘End Times’ after the Russo-Ukrainian War’ at the Johns Hopkins University, Department of Political Science in Baltimore, MD, USA on 12 May 2025. She further participated as an external discussant at the Hopkins PhD Prospectus Workshop for the critical IR doctoral students working at the department on the invitation of Prof. Tarak Barkawi (JHU) on 13-15 May 2025.

Prof. Maria Mälksoo presented her research in progress on Russian accountability as the problem for future international order at the workshop “Memory and Speech: From benign neglect to authoritarian prohibition?” at the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights, Oxford University, UK, 30 April-1 May 2025. The workshop was organised by the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights (Oxford) and the Academy for European Human Rights Protection (Cologne).

Prof. Maria Mälksoo participated at the 16th Conference on Baltic Studies in Europe (CBSE) ‘Converging Paths: The Baltic Between East and West’ at the University of Cambridge, UK on 24-26 April 2025. She convened and chaired a panel ‘From the Margins to the Vanguard? The Security Politics of/on the Baltic states from the Early 1990s till Today’, presented a paper ‘The Baltic Politics of Post-War Accountability for Russia’, and shared her experiences as an ERC grant recipient at a panel dedicated to introducing European Research Council funding opportunities. She further participated at the Baltic Geopolitics Network meeting as the representative of the Centre for Military Studies at the University of Copenhagen.

Prof. Maria Mälksoo gave an invited lecture in the framework of the Swiss Chair Seminar Series on ‘Envisioning Future Deterrence: Peace, Accountability and the End Times after the Russo-Ukrainian War’ at the European University Institute (EUI) in Fiesole, Italy, on 10 April 2025.

The talk revisited the political and academic exchanges during 2022-2024 about the envisioned endings, peace settlements, and Ukraine’s security-political future-related scenarios as distinctly charged political designs for the post-war interaction order between the United States, Europe, Russia, and the so-called Global South. The visions of future peace reflect definite temporal sources and reference points of ontological security for Ukraine, its regional neighbours, Europe, the US and the institutional West at large. The nature of the end of this war marks the ‘end times’ to wildly varying degrees for the engaged actors across the globe. Peace agreement as a ritual component of ending a war has become a political battlefield over envisioning future world order, demonstrating the malleability of the notion of deterrence therein.

Prof. Maria Mälksoo presented her research on deterrence by means of memory laws and policies at the Global Politics Seminar, Malmö University on April 2, 2025. The talk focused on Russia’s ontological security-seeking through punitive memory laws.