Download back issue of Baltic Worlds
Issue 2026, 3-4: Download.
Essays A glitch in the machine Contesting militarized futures through the forest
Russia’s aggression against Ukraine has contributed to a sense of uncertain sovereignty (Klumbytė 2019, 2022) in Eastern Europe, manifesting in accelerated militarization. This essay invites a more nuanced debate around militarization and borderland futures. Following a series of protests against the construction of a military training ground (poligonas) in Kapčiamiestis, Southern Lithuania, we suggest that the forest disrupts the technē (Scott 1998) of militarization by creating glitches in its practice, the abstracted logic of territorial legibility and calculation. The forest has become a site from which unexpected alliances between local residents, environmentalists, and neighboring Polish communities have begun to articulate alternative understandings of life, temporality, and security, resisting the reduction of the forest to strategic military terrain.
Published in the printed edition of Baltic Worlds BW 2026 vol. 19 no. 3-4, pages 93-99
Published on balticworlds.com on November 6, 2026
abstract
Russia’s aggression against Ukraine has contributed to a sense of uncertain sovereignty (Klumbytė 2019, 2022) in Eastern Europe, manifesting in accelerated militarization. This essay invites a more nuanced debate around militarization and borderland futures. Following a series of protests against the construction of a military training ground (poligonas) in Kapčiamiestis, Southern Lithuania, we suggest that the forest disrupts the technē (Scott 1998) of militarization by creating glitches in its practice, the abstracted logic of territorial legibility and calculation. The forest has become a site from which unexpected alliances between local residents, environmentalists, and neighboring Polish communities have begun to articulate alternative understandings of life, temporality, and security, resisting the reduction of the forest to strategic military terrain.
KEYWORDS: poligonas, militarization, forest, Lithuania, borderland.