This edited volume, featuring accomplished scholars, is about the information wars in the Baltic states, a battle that pits Russia against the West with Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania as sites of contention for great power politics. Chapters address responses from titular populations, local Russian speakers, national governments, activists, journalists, and NATO, as well as the impact of Russian foreign policy on media.
Immediately following the end of World War I, amid the collapse of the German, Austro-Hungarian and Russian Empires, bitter fighting broke out in the Baltic region as Poland, Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania struggled for their independence, and Red and White Russian armies began their civil war. There were also German forces still active in what had been the northern end of Germany's Eastern Front. This book offers a concise but detailed introduction to this whole theatre of war, focusing on the Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian and relevant German and Russian forces, plus Finnish, Danish and Swedish contingents. For each region there is a detailed map as well as meticulous orders-of-battle and insignia charts. Detailed for the first time in the English language, this fascinating book concisely tells the story of the birth of these Baltic nation states.
A military historian and naval warfare expert delivers a revealing history of the Baltic Sea Campaigns and their significance throughout WWII. From the Battle of Westerplatte on the Polish coast in 1939 to the thousands of German refugees lost at sea in 1945, the Baltic witnessed continuous fighting throughout the Second World War. This chronicle of naval warfare in the region merges such major events as the Siege of Leningrad, the Soviet campaign against Sweden, the three wars in Finland, the Soviet liberation of the Baltic states, the German evacuation of two million people from the East, and the Soviet race westwards in 1945. Naval historian Poul Grooss explains the political and military backgrounds of the war in this theatre while also detailing the ships, radar, artillery, mines and aircraft employed there. He also offers fascinating insights into Swedish cooperation with Nazi Germany, the Germans’ use of the Baltic as a training ground for the Battle of the Atlantic, the secret weapons trials in the remote area of Peenemunde, and the Royal Air Force mining campaign that reduced the threat of German submarine technology. A major contribution to the naval history of this era, Naval War in the Baltic demonstrates the extent to which the Baltic Sea Campaigns shaped the Second World War
The Baltic Security Strategy Report provides an indepth security review of the Baltic countries of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. As highlighted in this important work, the Baltic States' various national and collective strategies to address recurring regional threats since achieving statehood over a hundred years ago present notable case studies useful to contemporary policymakers and defense planners. Scholars Olevs Nikers and Otto Tabuns based this report on a series of discussions and workshops involving key European and American experts and stakeholders engaged in Baltic regional security matters. The participating experts assessed current challenges pertaining to defense and deterrence, societal security, economic security and cyber security. In addition to exploring the security considerations of each of the three Baltic States, the workshop discussions and resulting papers collected in this report specifically examine avenues of subregional cooperation that may prove more potent than individual national effort in certain fields. Consequently, the authors provide a detailed list of recommendations on how to proceed with a more coherent, goaloriented, and efficient regional cooperation strategy that serves to buttress the security of each of the Baltic States and the Transatlantic community more broadly. The report is a rich guide to issues and opportunities of Baltic intraregional security, and a valuable resource for policymakers, advisors, scholars and defensesector professionals on both sides of the Atlantic.
Impending technological advances will widen an adversary’s attack plane over the next decade. Visualizing what the future will hold, and what new threat vectors could emerge, is a task that traditional planning mechanisms struggle to accomplish given the wide range of potential issues. Understanding and preparing for the future operating environment is the basis of an analytical method known as Threatcasting. It is a method that gives researchers a structured way to envision and plan for risks ten years in the future. Threatcasting uses input from social science, technical research, cultural history, economics, trends, expert interviews, and even a little science fiction to recognize future threats and design potential futures. During this human-centric process, participants brainstorm what actions can be taken to identify, track, disrupt, mitigate, and recover from the possible threats. Specifically, groups explore how to transform the future they desire into reality while avoiding an undesired future. The Threatcasting method also exposes what events could happen that indicate the progression toward an increasingly possible threat landscape. This book begins with an overview of the Threatcasting method with examples and case studies to enhance the academic foundation. Along with end-of-chapter exercises to enhance the reader’s understanding of the concepts, there is also a full project where the reader can conduct a mock Threatcasting on the topic of “the next biological public health crisis.” The second half of the book is designed as a practitioner’s handbook. It has three separate chapters (based on the general size of the Threatcasting group) that walk the reader through how to apply the knowledge from Part I to conduct an actual Threatcasting activity. This book will be useful for a wide audience (from student to practitioner) and will hopefully promote new dialogues across communities and novel developments in the area.
A “well-told” insider account of the State Department’s twenty-first-century struggle to defend America against malicious propaganda and disinformation (The Washington Post). Disinformation is nothing new. When Satan told Eve nothing would happen if she bit the apple, that was disinformation. But today, social media has made disinformation even more pervasive and pernicious. In a disturbing turn of events, authoritarian governments are increasingly using it to create their own false narratives, and democracies are proving not to be very good at fighting it. During the final three years of the Obama administration, Richard Stengel, former editor of Time, was an Under Secretary of State on the front lines of this new global information war—tasked with unpacking, disproving, and combating both ISIS’s messaging and Russian disinformation. Then, during the 2016 election, Stengel watched as Donald Trump used disinformation himself. In fact, Stengel quickly came to see how all three had used the same playbook: ISIS sought to make Islam great again; Putin tried to make Russia great again; and we know the rest. In Information Wars, Stengel moves through Russia and Ukraine, Saudi Arabia and Iraq, and introduces characters from Putin to Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, and Mohamed bin Salman, to show how disinformation is impacting our global society. He illustrates how ISIS terrorized the world using social media, and how the Russians launched a tsunami of disinformation around the annexation of Crimea—a scheme that would became a model for future endeavors. An urgent book for our times, now with a new preface from the author, Information Wars challenges us to combat this ever-growing threat to democracy. “[A] refreshingly frank account . . . revealing.” —Kirkus Reviews “This sobering book is indeed needed to help individuals better understand how information can be massaged to produce any sort of message desired.” —Library Journal
Since the end of the Cold War there has been an increased interest in the Baltics. The Baltic States brings together three titles, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, to provide a comprehensive and analytical guide integrating history, political science, economic development and contemporary events into one account. Since gaining their independence, each country has developed at its own pace with its own agenda and facing its own obstacles. The authors examine the tensions accompanying a post-communist return to Europe after the long years of separation and how each country has responded to the demands of becoming a modern European state. Estonia was the first of the former Soviet republics to enter membership negotiations with the European Union in 1988 and is a potential candidate for the next round of EU expansion in 2004. Lithuania and Latvia have also expressed their desire for future membership of NATO and the EU.
Tracing the origins, evolution, and goals of Polish and Estonian émigré politics in Cold War Sweden and its linkages with both the host and homeland societies, this book investigates the transnational dimension of resistance and opposition to the communist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe. The analysis of the constantly shifting, at times conspiratorial, and even subversive networks that transcended the Iron Curtain draws a line from World War II to the collapse of the Soviet Union, framing half a century of transnationally concerted political activism in a geographical context that has not received much scholarly attention. Challenging the image of the Baltic Sea Region as a periphery of the European Cold War theater, the topography of the multilayered and complex linkages between neutral Sweden and her opposite coasts suggests that the small inland sea was a particularly vibrant setting for processes that efficiently defied the rigid border regimes of the Cold War era. This book relates both to ongoing historiographical debates about the scope and extent of East-West contacts that developed underneath the radar of international diplomacy and to the question of the role, significance, and impact of émigré politics during the Cold War. Embedding the dynamics of transnationally framed opposition in the wider context of political, economic, and cultural relations at the northeastern peripheries of divided Europe, the study not only sheds new light on so far still unexplored facets of interaction and cooperation between societies in East and West, but also offers a first comprehensive synthesis of the Baltic Sea Region’s post-war history.
From an expert on the Eastern Front of World War II, this book chronicles the cataclysmic experience of the region that includes modern-day Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia. The Baltic States suffered more than almost any other territory during World War II, caught on the front-line of some of the war's most vicious battles and squeezed between the vast military might of the German Wehrmacht and the Soviet Red Army. Combining new archival research and numerous first-hand accounts, this is a magisterial description of conquest and exploitation, of death and deportation and the fight for survival both by countries and individuals.
