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The outbreak of COVID-19 has significantly reshaped debates on the global order, democratic politics and the liberal mode of governing societies. Some have compared the virus to the “ultimate empty signifier”, which allowed difficult ideological groups to fill it with their own securitizations, creating in an instant a plethora of political otherings. For IR realists, the sudden collapse of cross-border movement and other privileges of the globalized liberal elite came as a vindication of their long-cherished argument: the nation state remains the key actor in international politics, and the post-national world had largely been a utopian liberal illusion. Right-wing nationalist populists have been saying the same thing but in a different language and were apt to make COVID-19 instrumental to their purposes. Thus, Viktor Orbán quickly linked it to the agenda of migration and used the state of exception as a pretext to further limit the democratic process in Hungary. However, as students of populism have also stressed, the populist response to the pandemic has been far from uniform. In a yet broader perspective, while some democratic governments enacted draconian measures in response to the pandemic, suspending basic individual freedoms, some dictatorships like Belarus experienced a sudden “flow of liberalism“, refusing to cut down on both economic activity and cross-border movement. This special issue focuses on comparing the liberal and illiberal reactions (both domestic and international) to the pandemic, looking into how it has affected the democratic and non-democratic forms of governance; examining where the responses have been similar or overlapping, i.e. where COVID-19 has practically blurred or erased the border between liberal and illiberal politics; looking into how different types of regimes and political groupings have borrowed new elements and styles of politics, e.g. in which circumstances populist or autocratic politicians suddenly seemed more liberal than their liberal and democratic counterparts; and investigating the ramifications of these changes for the liberal components of the globalized international order.

In this article, we discuss the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic as a biopolitical challenge that – along the lines of the contemporary academic debate on biopower – may be approached through the concepts of sovereignty and governmentality. Within this general framework, the authors look at the challenges Russia faces due to the corona crisis from the viewpoint of domestic transformations within the ruling regime, mainly focusing on centre-periphery relations as a core element of the power structure in Russia that demands a stronger emphasis on governmentality. We outline several forms of regions’ distancing from the federal centre: digital empowerment, the resistance of the North, and the demand for “people’s governors”. Our main conclusion is that the relative administrative autonomy obtained by the regions reflects the ongoing process of decentralization of the Russian political system, which will affect the structural characteristics of Russian federalism in the future.

The article discusses how material legacies of the past are conceptualized as cultural and artistic objects, and in this capacity inscribed into the contemporary Estonian political debates on security, identity, and borders. One section focuses on the city of Narva where the compound of the Kreenholm factory is located. Another part looks at industrial objects in smaller towns where the Soviet material heritage is intermingled with the EU-promoted environmental agenda, including the Green Deal project and the idea of just transition. research based on the methodology of visual analysis includes two specific groups of visual artefacts that are illustrative of linkages between locations, cultural meanings and their political reverberations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The object of this study is a new Russian migrant community in Estonia, a relatively small group of Russian citizens who escaped their home country after the resumption of the mass-scale attack against Ukraine. The author seeks to identify major narratives produced the anti-Putin Russian migrants settled in Estonia and unveil their political meanings. The article discusses how these narratives are communicated, what audiences they appeal to, and how the agency of the new Russian community in this Baltic state is discursively constructed. The author explains how Russia-centric narratives of emigrants are transformed and adjusted to Estonian and - in a broader sense - European political agenda. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This short piece introduces three articles that form a special section discussing how critical security studies might be helpful for conceptualizing new insecurities in the region of Central Europe and the Baltic states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses how geopolitical discourses and related performative practices of bordersensitive groups in countries neighbouring Russia are transformed by the war in Ukraine. Based mainly on the mixture of ethnographic methods (semi-structured interviews and unprovoked talk), the article is built around the study of vernacular geopolitics of Russian speakers living in the city of Narva, Estonia, and Finland. It suggests that the geopolitical narrative of these ethnolinguistic groups is changing from subaltern, neither dominant nor resistant geopolitical imagination, to oppositional geopolitics. This transformation takes place through public expression in the form of creative performances (Estonia) or online and offline protests (Finland). In this way, Russian speakers seek to acquire a political agency, local (in the case of Estonia) or national (in the case of Finland). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special issue explores the multifaceted impacts of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on the Europe-Russia borderlands, from Norway to Lithuania. It investigates its transformation from a peaceful zone of cooperation to one of confrontation, analysing the implications for cross-border interactions, regional security, and normative frameworks. The contributors pay special attention to the level of border (and border-sensitive) communities and examine grassroots responses to the re-bordering process, as well as evolving geopolitical narratives within border communities. Through diverse methodological approaches, including ethnographic studies, qualitative and quantitative data analysis, and geopolitical discourse analysis, the special issue suggests a comprehensive reevaluation of border studies in the context of heightened security concerns and shifting geopolitical realities. The findings highlight the need for a revised understanding of the EU-Russian border and borderlands, emphasizing their protective and exclusionary functions in the face of ongoing conflict and instability. This collection of studies offers critical insights into the new dynamics of border regions, contributing to broader discussions on European foreign and security policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This contribution to the Forum intends to shed light on the most recent changes in Estonia's policies towards Russia, Belarus and Ukraine after February 24, 2022. I intend to show how the Russian–Ukrainian war transformed Estonia's relations with its eastern neighbors. I start the analysis with a general account of spatiality and bordering in Estonia's foreign policy thinking, with the ensuing distinction between its geopolitical and biopolitical aspects particularly boosted by Russia's military interference in Ukraine. I discuss both the hegemonic and the counter-hegemonic discourses on re-bordering with Russia and de-bordering with Ukraine, and finalize the essay with research-based conclusions largely pertaining to the deconstruction of Eastern Europe in Estonian regionalist imagery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]