Maria Mälksoo gave the inaugural European Foreign Affairs Review lecture entitled ‘The EU in the Academy of War’ at the European Union in International Affairs (EUIA) 2023 Conference in the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Sciences and the Arts in Brussels, Belgium, on 4 May 2023.
Maria Mälksoo gave a keynote ‘NATO’s New Front: Allied Deterrence Goes East’ at the workshop ‘Critical Perspectives on NATO’ at Newcastle University, UK on 25-26 May 2023. The workshop was sponsored by the Gendering IR Working Group and the Military War and Security Research Group, Newcastle University.
Maria Mälksoo gave a talk about her experience of applying for the ERC Consolidator Grant at the University of Copenhagen Faculty of Social Sciences Grant Day 2023.
‘NATO and deterrence’
Maria Mälksoo presented a paper ‘Writing Deterrence Differently’ as part of the panel ‘The Ritual Moment in International Relations’ at the 2023 annual convention of the International Studies Association in Montréal, Quebec, Canada, 15-18 March 2023. She also spoke at two roundtables (on writing and publishing practices and at the Historical International Relations section’s Distinguished Scholar Panel Honouring Beate Jahn) and served as a discussant for the panel ‘Defending Memory: Exploring the Relationship between Mnemonical In/security and Crises in Global Politics’.
This invited lecture at the University of Tromsø investigates how memory laws that regulate the legitimate frames of remembering the past of righteous and perpetrators function as devices of deterrence in states’ (inter)national memory politics. I conceptualize mnemopolitical deterrence and assess the aims and sought effects of various memory laws in the Central and East European space.
Engaging deterrence scholarship in International Security Studies and legal studies, the lecture unfolds and contextualizes the international aims, the projected and (thus far) observable effects of the memory laws that criminalize, discipline and punish the accounts of the past deemed undesirable to a particular state identity in Russia, Poland and Ukraine. I argue that besides defining acceptable and (un)desirable boundaries of political subjectivities, punitive memory laws do performative work by signalling political intent to defend a particular “state’s story” of the past in the international sphere.
In their distinct ways, the memory laws of Russia, Poland and Ukraine have emerged as international, not just domestic memory-political dissuasion devices in the manifold contestations over the legitimate remembrance and “right” narratives of their respective nation’s role in the Second World War and/or the Holocaust. Mnemopolitical deterrence is illustrative of the ritual logic of action underpinning deterrence practices in state ontological security-seeking.
The Looking Glass War: Memory and Identity Politics in Russia’s War on Ukraine
