FACULTY OF CULTURE AND SOCIETY | Seminar
Maria Mälksoo: Deterrence by Other Means

Deterrence by Other Means: The International Politics of Memory Laws

Professor Maria Mälksoo from University of Copenhagen will hold a seminar at the institution for Global Political Studies (GPS) on the 2 of April.

Speaker:

Maria Mälksoo is Professor of International Relations at the Department of Political Science, University of Copenhagen and an Associate Editor of the Review of International Studies. She is currently leading the European Research Council’s Consolidator Grant project RITUAL DETERRENCE and has recently concluded the Volkswagen Foundation-supported MEMOCRACY consortium project.

Prof. Mälksoo is the author of The Politics of Becoming European: A Study of Polish and Baltic Post-Cold War Security Imaginaries (Routledge, 2010), a co-author of Remembering Katyn (Polity, 2012), an editor of the JIRD Special Issue “Uses of ‘the East’ in International Studies: provincializing IR from Central and Eastern Europe” (2022) and the Handbook on the Politics of Memory (Edward Elgar, 2023).

Abstract:

In international security politics, deterrence refers to the ability of an actor to persuade another not to take a specific action because its prospective costs would outweigh the anticipated benefits. Memory-political deterrence signifies the ways in which states seek to dissuade other political actors from taking actions that threaten the collective memory narratives underpinning the ontological security of the deterring actor.

Memory laws

Memory laws that regulate the legitimate frames of remembering the past righteous and perpetrators function as devices of deterrence in states’ (inter)national memory politics. In their distinct ways, the memory laws of Russia, Poland and Ukraine have emerged as international, not just domestic memory-political dissuasion devices in their contestations over the legitimate remembrance and “right” narratives of their respective nation’s role in World War II. In the broader politics of defending a state’s story of the past, memory laws work as explicitly securitizing moves, serving as “warning shot”-deterrence.

Can be used to justify

They can thereby be part and parcel of hybrid engagement strategies of one’s domestic and foreign opponents, just as “memory wars” can demarcate the antecedent phase of a kinetic conflict, as Russia’s current war in Ukraine amply exemplifies. Together with wider memory-political rhetoric and state’s legislative action at courts, memory laws as devices of deterrence can be used to justify, burden, or prevent political moves, serving various instrumental goals in political mobilization. Memory-political deterrence by legal means is illustrative of the ritual logic of action underpinning deterrence practices in state ontological security-seeking.