The book addresses languages, conflict, and war in the post-Soviet states of Ukraine, Georgia, the Baltics, and Russia’s North Caucasus, emphasizing the pivotal role of language in forming national identity in multilingual states in the context of imperialism and warfare. Bifurcating allegiance to the national language group and minority language groups is found to be a challenging endeavor, and these efforts have served to deepen conflicts and marginalization. The study highlights how language attitudes and language policies have been used to articulate dominance and justify aggression in wars, the Russo-Ukrainian conflict being a stark case. Languages under occupation and in forced displacement are found to be subjected to pressures of assimilation and erasure. Language communities, on the other hand, react with diverse strategies of resilience and alternative paths to revitalization. Exposing war-torn settings, the authors enhance the prowess of decolonial and participatory research approaches and promoting more research on language and diasporas, language transmission, and processes of sociolinguistic migration and conflict. The book underlines the imperativeness of reflexive and ethically sound research that places voices and experiences of affected groups at the center of understanding the complex intersectionalities of language, power, resistance, and conflict.

This article provides a comparative analysis of laws on youth policy and patriotic education in Belarus, Kazakhstan, Russia and Ukraine (as a control case), as well as model laws developed by the Commonwealth of Independent States. These laws are aimed at educating young people and transferring values of loyalty and obedience to authoritarian rule, as well as love and patriotic devotion to the Motherland, as means to legitimise and sustain authoritarian regimes. The article identifies similarities, differences and cases of ‘authoritarian legal harmonization’ in these laws. To compare the similarities and differences in the laws, we use plagiarism software. The software detects words and phrases which are the same or similar, in order to establish the extent to which the texts of laws are harmonised. Our research indicates that levels of legal harmonisation have fallen as new amendments and laws have been introduced, signalling a weakening of Russia’s influence.

The concept of this book emerged following February 2022 as Russia initiated its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The book discusses language conflicts in the post-Soviet world: Ukraine, Georgia, the Baltics, and the Russian North Caucasus. Recent horrific events have confirmed the worth of studying the entwinement of language, conflict, and war in the post-Soviet world. The aim of the volume is to study language conflict in the context of heightened tension, massive internal displacement, and migration that have a determinative effect on ethnolinguistic status all over the region. The volume reflects both the timing and the challenges of following this line of research under shifting political conditions.

This book explores language conflicts in Soviet successor states: Ukraine, the Russian North Caucasus, Georgia, and the Baltics. Current violent developments in these multiethnic countries with their shared legacies of Russian domination highlight the intertwining of language with conflict and war, reflecting confrontation and challenges to peace. It is shown how core values attached to language in identity formation and feelings of belonging or marginalization, along with attitudes to language use by the in-group in contrast to others, are easily subject to politicization. Forced migration, language erasure and shift, central in today’s post-Soviet conflicts, are also experienced by minorities in the Russian North Caucasus—such as the Circassians—based on their history of Russian colonization. The book will be of interest to readers in a wide range of fields, including sociolinguistics, language policy, and language contact, as well as identity politics, migration linguistics, state and nation building, area studies, post-Soviet and European studies, political science, international relations, and peace and conflict studies. 

After the adoption of the constitutional changes in Russia in 2020 the issue concerning who would be Vladimir Putin’s successor was seemingly disarmed as he could now legally stay on in office until 2036. However, the full-scale invasion launched against Ukraine in February 2022 has increased the need for studying the issue, as the war has come to be so closely associated with Putin personally. This article discusses how official Russian discourse, as mirrored through the presidential website kremlin.ru, has dealt with the issue of presidential succession during Putin’s fourth term in office (2018–24), and how the subject has been taken off the public agenda during this time. The argument is that the silence on the matter is indicative and intentional. The regime acts as if Putin’s continued incumbency is taken for granted and accepted as legitimate by default by the public. In Weberian terms, the regime has shifted from relying on charismatic and legal-rational legitimation to claim instead what can be described as neo-traditional legitimacy.

A competitive marketplace of election monitors has emerged, allowing autocrats to cherrypick which observers to rely on in their bid to legitimize elections. We argue that Commonwealth of Independent States Interparliamentary Assembly observers perform two functions: (1) they directly legitimize authoritarian governments and (2) they engage in norm contestation, discrediting the work of the OSCE and other international organizations. CIS observers imitate the language of OSCE observers but come to very different conclusions. We use plagiarism software to uncover the extent to which members are harmonizing legislation and election observers are copying conclusions verbatim from other countries.

This volume examines the strategic transformation of NATO’s borderland regions from perceived vulnerabilities to recognised strategic assets within the Alliance’s collective defence architecture. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the European security landscape has undergone profound changes, exposing limitations of traditional deterrence models and necessitating NATO’s recalibration toward greater emphasis on civil preparedness and resilience alongside conventional military strength. Rather than viewing borderlands as vulnerable peripheries requiring protection, this work demonstrates how regions sharing direct frontiers with Russia have emerged as critical centres of security innovation whose proximity to threat vectors grants them unique experiential knowledge and adaptive capabilities essential for broader Alliance security. Borderland communities have developed sophisticated approaches to managing hybrid threats through whole-of-society defence models that integrate civilian and military efforts while maintaining democratic governance under pressure. Their lived experience with Russian aggression has produced practical knowledge about deterrence implementation, early warning systems, and cross-domain threat management that complements theoretical strategic planning with operational reality. The volume argues that resilience should be conceptualised not merely as recovery from disruption but as transformative capacity enabling systems to reorganise, innovate, and evolve in response to changing threat environments, positioning these borderlands as force multipliers within NATO’s deterrence framework.

This volume examines the strategic transformation of NATO’s borderland regions from perceived vulnerabilities to recognised strategic assets within the Alliance’s collective defence architecture. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the European security landscape has undergone profound changes, exposing limitations of traditional deterrence models and necessitating NATO’s recalibration toward greater emphasis on civil preparedness and resilience alongside conventional military strength. Rather than viewing borderlands as vulnerable peripheries requiring protection, this work demonstrates how regions sharing direct frontiers with Russia have emerged as critical centres of security innovation whose proximity to threat vectors grants them unique experiential knowledge and adaptive capabilities essential for broader Alliance security. Borderland communities have developed sophisticated approaches to managing hybrid threats through whole-of-society defence models that integrate civilian and military efforts while maintaining democratic governance under pressure. Their lived experience with Russian aggression has produced practical knowledge about deterrence implementation, early warning systems, and cross-domain threat management that complements theoretical strategic planning with operational reality. The volume argues that resilience should be conceptualised not merely as recovery from disruption but as transformative capacity enabling systems to reorganise, innovate, and evolve in response to changing threat environments, positioning these borderlands as force multipliers within NATO’s deterrence framework.