Annual Lithuanian Political Science Conference “The Echoes of Polycrisis in Lithuania and the World” (archive)

The war in Ukraine that shaken the European security architecture; violent storms and all-devouring fires as harbingers of an impending climate apocalypse; intractable price leaps and a general post-pandemic economic recession; intensifying global migration flows; aggressive and spreading authoritarian regimes; the development of artificial intelligence and other advanced technologies threatening to transform human, state, and societal relations. These signs testify that we are witnessing a multifaceted (or poly-) crisis.

These and other circumstances not only raise existential challenges to contemporary democracies, and rule-based global order but necessitate Lithuania, like other small states, to closely monitor these changes and seek the best ways to respond to them. It is also valuable to expand the scope of analysis to assess how the same global phenomena are perceived in different regions.

To consider these questions, the Association of Lithuanian Political Scientists and the Institute of International Relations and Political Science at Vilnius University organised the two-day annual Lithuanian Political Science Conference “The Echoes of Polycrisis in Lithuania and the World”, which took place at the Institute of International Relations and Political Science of Vilnius University on November 30 – December 1, 2023.

Maria Mälksoo is a professor of the University of Copenhagen, whose research foci are in Critical Security Studies (ontological security, securitization of historical memory, hybrid warfare); political anthropology (liminality, rituals), and the political practice of deterrence, with a focus on NATO’s eastern flank. Prof. Mälksoo is the Principal Investigator of the European Research Council’s Consolidator Grant RITUAL DETERRENCE (Ritual Action: Making Deterrence Matter in International Security and Memory Politics, 2022-2027). She is also the PI of the University of Copenhagen team in the Volkswagen Foundation-supported MEMOCRACY consortium (The Challenge of Populist Memory Politics of Europe: Towards Effective Responses to Militant Legislation on the Past, 2021-2024). She 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) and an editor of the Handbook on the Politics of Memory (Edward Elgar, 2023).