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.
Essay by
Julija Kekstaite and Aimee Herring
November 6, 2026
The article explores how Sweden’s engagement with the forests of the Baltics and Russia in the early 1990s was shaped by a discourse that cast these regions as peripheral. This discourse, we argue, revived historical narratives tied to 19th-century of Swedish forestry expansion toward the north, similarly, positioning the eastern forests a century later as underutilized spaces that could benefit from Swedish forestry expertise and modernization. We connect to historical phenomena and conceptualizations of center-periphery dynamics as a framework for our analysis. To identify narratives revolving around the forests in the Baltics and Russia under the center-periphery discourse, we conducted a qualitative thematic analysis of media sources from the Swedish forestry organization Skogen [The Forest] and Swedish regional and national newspapers from 1991 to 1994. In this article, we outline two key narratives that surfaced from our empirical findings. One narrative focuses on the notion that forest resources in the Baltics and Russia were finite and increasingly contested due to growing demand and restricted availability. The second narrative presents optimized forest management and professional forestry knowledge as solutions to these constraints, framing the eastern forests as potentially limitless if managed with the right expertise. We conclude our analysis of the historical narratives with a brief outlook on the recent developments of Swedish forestry portrayals of forests in the Baltics and Russia.
By
Janine Priebe and Toms Kokins
September 23, 2025
Issue 2026, 3-4: 
Baltic Worlds covers; the Baltic Sea Region, Eastern Europe, Russia, CentralAsia, Caucasus and the Balkan area.