Maria Mälksoo

• PhD (International Studies), University of Cambridge, 2008; M.Phil. (International Relations), University of Cambridge, 2003; BA (Sociology, cum laude), University of Tartu, 2002
• Professor of International Relations at University of Copenhagen

How can a signal of extended deterrence, such as prepositioning of foreign military forces, signify status for the beneficiaries of the allied deterrence/reassurance chain? This article explores how the manifestation and communication of allied deterrence can concurrently constitute an affectively charged status symbol for the protégé states of thi...

Traditionally used within the context of hard military power in interstate relations, the concept of deterrence has been progressively extended to non-state actors and new issue areas. While scholarship on the social aspects of deterrence has expanded our understanding of this core international security practice, the focus of existing research has...

Why has NATO taken so long in adapting its deterrence strategy to Russian revisionism and extending its military presence to the eastern allies? The setting up of NATO's Enhanced Forward Presence (eFP) in Poland and the Baltic states offers a critical case for examining the changing understandings of allied deterrence in the post-post-Cold War era....

This handbook is currently in development, with individual articles publishing online in advance of print publication. At this time, we cannot add information about unpublished articles in this handbook, however the table of contents will continue to grow as additional articles pass through the review process and are added to the site. Please note...

This article unpacks the ways Eastern Europe (broadly conceived) has featured as a space, trope, and scholarly origin in major International Security Studies (ISS) and International Relations (IR) journals over the past three decades. A framing and authorship analysis in 18 disciplinary journals between 1991 and 2019 demonstrates how the region has...

This article theorises the nexus between mnemonical status anxiety and militant memory laws. Extending the understanding of status-seeking in international relations to the realm of historical memory, I argue that the quest for mnemonical recognition is a status struggle in an international social hierarchy of remembering constitutive events of the...

How can ritual help to understand the practice of deterrence? Traditional deterrence scholarship tends to overlook the active role of deterring actors in creating and redefining the circumstances to which they are allegedly only reacting. In order to address the weight of deterrence as a symbol, collective representation and strategic repertoire, t...

Rituals are customarily muted into predictable routines aimed to stabilise social orders and limit conflict. As a result, their magic lure recedes into the background, and the unexpected and disruptive elements are downplayed. Our collaborative contribution counters this move by foregrounding rituals of world politics as social practices with notab...

A combination of undemocratic developments in Hungary and Poland as well as Eastern Europe’s reluctance to engage in solidary burden-sharing at the height of the refugee crisis in Europe has brought back familiar allusions of Eastern Europeans as troublemakers for European unity and peace. This article offers a discursive dissection of ‘Eastern Eur...

This article examines the Latvian documentary The Soviet Story (by Edvīns Šnore, 2008) as a militant Baltic memory project which seeks to establish the parity of East and West European experiences with totalitarian crimes in the pan-European memory narrative of twentieth-century wars and genocide. The film offers a useful vantage point for investig...

What are the ethical pitfalls of countering hybrid warfare? This article proposes an ontological security-inspired reading of the EU and NATO’s engagement with hybrid threats. It illustrates how hybrid threat management collapses their daily security struggles into ontological security management exercise. This has major consequences for defining t...

How does an approach towards transitional justice produce preconditions for a country's international action, enabling certain policies and practices in the immediate neighborhood and international society at large? This article unpacks ontological security-seeking as a generic social mechanism in international politics, which makes it possible to...

Security strategies are important sites for narrating the EU into existence as a security actor. The unveiling of a new global strategy on foreign and security policy for the EU immediately post-Brexit could be conceived as a pledge to remain together as a Union for the purposes of contributing to global security in a particular way. This paper off...

This article supplements and extends the ontological security theory in International Relations (IR) by conceptualizing the notion of mnemonical security. It engages critically the securitization of memory as a means of making certain historical remembrances secure by delegitimizing or outright criminalizing others. The securitization of historical...

The Eastern enlargement of the European Union has intensified calls for the reconstruction of a common European remembrance of the continent's multiple totalitarian legacies. Various political initiatives to condemn, along with counter-attempts to re-legitimize, the legacy of communism have emerged at the pan-European level. Each aspires to leave a...

This article examines the self-positioning of the three Baltic states in international politics in relation to the major structural pressures challenging the status quo of the transatlantic security configuration. The constitutive role of the Russia-Georgia war of 2008, the global economic recession, the debt crisis in the eurozone, and the shiftin...

The concept of liminality favours a broad interpretation, lending itself easily to disciplinary contexts outside of the original framework of cultural anthropology. Developed by Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner by exploring the rites of passage, liminality points to in-between situations and conditions where established structures are dislocated...

The situation in collective memory studies that share a nexus with the discipline of International Relations (IR) is currently reflective of the traditionally West-centric writing of European history. This order of things has become increasingly challenged after the eastern enlargement of the European Union (EU). This article examines Poland’s and...

This book weaves together perspectives drawn from critical international relations, anthropology and social theory in order to understand the Polish and Baltic post-Cold War politics of becoming European. Approaching the study of Europe's eastern enlargement through a post-colonial critique, author Maria Mälksoo makes a convincing case for a rethin...

In the last decade, critical approaches have substantially reshaped the theoretical landscape of security studies in Europe. Yet, despite an impressive body of literature, there remains fundamental disagreement as to what counts as critical in this context. Scholars are still arguing in terms of ‘schools’, while there has been an increasing and sus...

This article presents a critical discourse analysis of the Baltic states’ self-positioning within European foreign policy. It argues that, despite certain relief in their immediate security concerns after the dual enlargement of the EU and NATO, the shift from existential politics to normal politics by the Baltic states is far from being accomplish...

In a recent critique of the Eurocentric character of security studies, Tarak Barkawi and Mark Laffey perceptively observe that "security relations today are about the contradictions between old security logics and new security problematics". 1 Eastern European newcomers in the European Union (EU) are generally designated as a prime embodiment of th...