Category: Publications
NATO Pirates in the Baltic Sea? Lawfare in Russian Deterrence Strategy
The chapter “NATO Pirates in the Baltic Sea? Lawfare in Russian Deterrence Strategy” explores how lawfare has become integral to Russia’s coercive signaling strategies. Mariia examines the escalating piracy rhetoric employed by Russian officials in response to European states’ detention of shadow fleet vessels suspected of damaging undersea infrastructure in the Baltic. This narrative reveals how the Kremlin appropriates the authority of international law to achieve strategic ends. By characterizing European navies as pirates—against whom international law grants any state universal jurisdiction—Moscow effectively threatens European navies with escalation and legitimizes potential use of force.
Please find the full text available in open access on the official page of the Russia Conference at the Baltic Defense College.
Resilience is the New Black: NATO in and Beyond the Grey Zone
The trope of resilience has emerged as a staple in NATO’s grappling with the many hybrid challenges it is currently facing both in the so-called grey zone of coercion, below the threshold of traditionally conceived violent attacks, and beyond. NATO’s coming to terms with the hybrid challenges through the past decade has been persistent, if somewhat piecemeal. There was a notable delay in recognising the nature and scope of the threat posed by Russia up until its brazen full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 on behalf of the North Atlantic allies. NATO’s framing of the Russia-challenge as primarily “hybrid” was paralysing the Alliance’s strategic diagnosis of its historical antagonist’s revisionist ambitions too long, thus delimiting the Alliance’s readiness and response to such a large-scale conventional challenge, at a tragic expense of Ukrainian lives. As the continuum between resilience and traditionally conceived deterrence by denial is shrinking, NATO’s tailorship of effective countermeasures to complex modern threats and challenges in and beyond the grey zone can only benefit from embracing resilience thinking, with an emphasis on anticipation, creative and flexible adaptation and the inclusivity of diverse decision-makers.
Risk, Resilience, and Resistance
This chapter investigates the development of ‘resilience thinking’ in NATO’s post-Cold War discourse and practice and raises questions about the compatibility between the logics of security and resilience. The increasing emphasis on resilience performatively enacts NATO’s self-projection as a comprehensive security organization, much beyond its standard military alliance repertoire. What deterrence and defence are to NATO’s original identity, now resurrected after Russia’s 2022 full-on aggression against Ukraine, resilience has been to the Alliance’s positive post-Cold War sense of self. The chapter offers a conceptualization and empirical documentation of NATO’s take on resilience, identifying four meanings of the term in NATO’s collective use, pertaining to the Alliance’s political unity, democratic essence, reputation/credibility, and institutional endurance.
The Baltic Politics of Post-War Accountability for Russia
