Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Baltic states have intensified their efforts to counter Russian foreign interference. Within these security strategies, Russian-speaking communities have come to occupy a central yet ambivalent position. They are frequently framed both as especially vulnerable targets of foreign interference and as potential sources of insecurity. This dual framing has contributed to the further securitization of Russian-speaking populations and legitimized a wide range of countermeasures. These include bans on Russian state media and the introduction of resilience-oriented initiatives such as media literacy programmes. Measures have expanded into other areas, including tighter conditions for participation in municipal elections, the gradual marginalization of the Russian language in education, restrictions on cross-border mobility, and the removal of Russian and Soviet symbols from public space. While these measures are commonly justified through the language of societal resilience, they also risk reinforcing mistrust and deepening existing social and political divides. Despite the prominence of Russian-speaking communities in policy debates, relatively little is known about how people living in these contexts themselves understand the threat of foreign interference, interpret state responses, and experience their everyday effects. Much of the existing policy and academic literature portrays local populations primarily as passive recipients of disinformation or as objects of security governance. This paper adopts a vernacular security perspective in order to shift attention away from elite-driven threat narratives and towards everyday understandings of security, insecurity, and resilience as articulated by local residents. Empirically, we focus primarily on Narva, Estonia, a predominantly Russian-speaking border city that features prominently in national and international security imaginaries. Narva serves as the main case through which the paper explores how foreign interference and counter-interference policies are made sense of in everyday life. The analysis is complemented by a comparative perspective from Daugavpils, Latvia, which allows us to identify both shared patterns and important contextual differences across the Baltic states. The paper addresses the following questions: How do residents of Daugavpils and Narva perceive and experience foreign interference campaigns? How do they interpret and respond to state policies aimed at countering them? Do these measures foster a sense of resilience and security, or generate new insecurities? To answer these questions, the paper draws on qualitative data from interviews conducted during fieldwork in Narva and Daugavpils in November and December 2025, complemented by a second round of field research scheduled to take place in Estonia and Latvia in April and May 2026.

Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Baltic states have intensified their efforts to counter Russian foreign interference. Within these security strategies, Russian-speaking communities have come to occupy a central yet ambivalent position. They are frequently framed both as especially vulnerable targets of foreign interference and as potential sources of insecurity. This dual framing has contributed to the further securitization of Russian-speaking populations and legitimized a wide range of countermeasures. These include bans on Russian state media and the introduction of resilience-oriented initiatives such as media literacy programmes. Measures have expanded into other areas, including tighter conditions for participation in municipal elections, the gradual marginalization of the Russian language in education, restrictions on cross-border mobility, and the removal of Russian and Soviet symbols from public space. While these measures are commonly justified through the language of societal resilience, they also risk reinforcing mistrust and deepening existing social and political divides. Despite the prominence of Russian-speaking communities in policy debates, relatively little is known about how people living in these contexts themselves understand the threat of foreign interference, interpret state responses, and experience their everyday effects. Much of the existing policy and academic literature portrays local populations primarily as passive recipients of disinformation or as objects of security governance. This paper adopts a vernacular security perspective in order to shift attention away from elite-driven threat narratives and towards everyday understandings of security, insecurity, and resilience as articulated by local residents. Empirically, we focus primarily on Narva, Estonia, a predominantly Russian-speaking border city that features prominently in national and international security imaginaries. Narva serves as the main case through which the paper explores how foreign interference and counter-interference policies are made sense of in everyday life. The analysis is complemented by a comparative perspective from Daugavpils, Latvia, which allows us to identify both shared patterns and important contextual differences across the Baltic states. The paper addresses the following questions: How do residents of Daugavpils and Narva perceive and experience foreign interference campaigns? How do they interpret and respond to state policies aimed at countering them? Do these measures foster a sense of resilience and security, or generate new insecurities? To answer these questions, the paper draws on qualitative data from interviews conducted during fieldwork in Narva and Daugavpils in November and December 2025, complemented by a second round of field research scheduled to take place in Estonia and Latvia in April and May 2026.

The concept of resilience has become central to contemporary debates on security, governance, and regime durability. In parallel, recent scholarship on authoritarian resilience has challenged earlier assumptions about the inherent fragility of non-democratic regimes, highlighting the surprising durability of many authoritarian systems under conditions of sustained crisis. Yet, despite the growing theoretical sophistication of authoritarian resilience research, its implications for Human Rights remain insufficiently theorized. This paper addresses this gap by examining how resilience functions as a mode of authoritarian governance and how it reshapes the conditions under which Human Rights are constrained, instrumentalized, or selectively upheld. Building on authoritarian resilience theory, the paper conceptualizes resilience not merely as institutional survival, but as a political strategy that stabilizes regimes by narrowing the space for contestation and rendering political alternatives increasingly redundant. Rather than mobilizing participation or deliberation, resilient authoritarian systems rely on centralized decision-making, elite cohesion, patronage networks, and adaptive governance mechanisms to manage crises and neutralize dissent. In this framework, Human Rights restrictions are not temporary emergency measures but structural components of resilient authoritarian rule. The paper develops this argument through a comparative analysis of Russia and NATO. While NATO presents resilience as grounded in democratic values and Human Rights, the paper argues that resilience in liberal contexts can nonetheless generate tensions with Human Rights, particularly in prolonged security crises where exceptional measures, reduced transparency, and military prioritization become normalized. These tensions highlight that resilience, even in democratic settings, can produce rights-restrictive outcomes if not accompanied by robust accountability and legal safeguards. The Russian case illustrates authoritarian resilience in its most explicit form. The paper shows how resilience discourse in Russia legitimizes the systematic subordination of Human Rights to state sovereignty, stability, and national security. Here, resilience operates as a justificatory framework for legal exceptionalism, the marginalization of international Human Rights law, and the suppression of political opposition. This analysis demonstrates how authoritarian resilience is sustained not despite Human Rights violations, but through them. By integrating authoritarian resilience theory with Human Rights analysis, this paper reconceptualizes resilience as a normatively ambivalent concept. It argues that resilience should be assessed not only in terms of regime survival or security effectiveness, but also by its long-term consequences for Human Rights and political agency, highlighting the often-overlooked rights costs of resilient authoritarian governance.

This paper examines the top-down process of governmental management of societal emotions. Existing research shows that emotions shape political behaviour. However, top-down and institutionalised processes through which governments regulate societal emotional states over time remain under-theorised. The paper introduces the concept of a governmental emotional management cycle. This cycle describes emotional management as both cyclical and adaptive. The model traces how and why specific emotional energy strategies are selected, institutionalised, and translated into dominant background emotions, which mainly condition political agency and engagement. The article identifies two distinct emotional management strategies: emotional governance and emotional manipulation. These two approaches represent alternative logics of emotional regulation, each with distinct implications for political order. Empirically, the framework is illustrated through an analysis of wartime Russia. During the war in Ukraine, the Russian government has employed both emotional governance and emotional manipulation strategies. The strategies were selected based on feedback from previous cycles of governmental emotional management. This pressure of a feedback compels the state not only to react to changes in dominant emotional stances but also to develop and recalibrate corresponding strategies of emotional governance or emotional manipulation. The Russian case vividly illustrates this logic. Beginning with a politics of fear targeted primarily at the politically engaged segments of society (Years 1–3 of the war) and a politics of pacification aimed at the previously depoliticised majority of the population (Years 1–2), the Kremlin’s emotional management strategies later shifted toward the manipulation of hope (Years 3–4) and the reinforcement of a politics of fear applied to society at large (Year 4). Through the case study, the article demonstrates the existence of a top-down process of societal emotion management, its cyclical rather than linear nature, and that a shift from emotional governance to emotional manipulation can be considered one of the signals of regime change. This article draws on an analysis of 4,900 relevant media publications to examine how the Kremlin has employed emotional governance and emotional manipulation strategies toward Russian society during the war. The empirical corpus consisted of articles from the main federal television channel, major state-affiliated news agencies, and leading newspapers, as well as official documents and public speeches by government representatives. Relevant materials were extracted using the SCAN Interfax Monitoring System based on predefined keywords. The dataset covers the period from 1 August 2022 to 1 October 2025. A combination of content analysis and discourse analysis was employed to identify textual, discursive, and social-practice dimensions of governmental communication and decision-making.