The project consists of 5 pillars:
In September 2025, the ECMI co-organized an international roundtable in Vilnius on „Ethnic relations in the Baltic Sea region“. Together with the Centre for Geopolitics at Cambridge University, the University of Vilnius and the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, the event brought together more than a dozen scholars and government officials to talk about both the historical background and contemporary challenges facing ethnic politics in the region.
For the ECMI, this represented a continued focus on the strains ethnic relations have been subjected to as a result of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine. In particular, of course, the region’s Russian-speaking populations have come under increased scrutiny – not only in Estonia and Latvia, but also Finland and Lithuania.
The complete conference report can be downloaded here.
Why are some citizens more willing to fight for their country than others? Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 has renewed attention to national defence and societal resilience. Existing research often overlooks internal diversity and the perspectives of ethnic minorities. A study by ECMI Senior Researcher Felix Schulte, co-authored with Juris Pupcenoks and Māris Andžāns, examines how cultural identity and historical memory shape defence-related attitudes.
Focusing on Russian speakers in Latvia, the study draws on three waves of original survey data collected between 2022 and 2024. The findings show that Russian speakers are less willing to fight for Latvia than ethnic Latvians. This disparity is substantially driven by divergent historical memories: Russian speakers display greater Soviet nostalgia and are less likely to perceive Russia as responsible for the war against Ukraine. These views, in turn, reduce their willingness to fight. The results highlight a critical “minority effect” with important implications for defence planning in multiethnic states.
The study, published in the European Journal of International Security, can be found here.
This research examines how ethnic identity and cultural memory shape attitudes toward democracy in Latvia, with a particular focus on the country’s Russian-speaking minority. Drawing on nationally representative survey data, the study analyses how members of this minority perceive democratic institutions and political life today.
In particular, it examines whether Russian speakers exhibit lower levels of trust in political institutions than the ethnic Latvian majority and seeks to explain the drivers of any such differences. The research also investigates how divergent interpretations of the Soviet past influence political trust and satisfaction with democracy in contemporary Latvia.
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has prompted a number of changes in ethnic policy in the Baltic states. Russian-language schools in Estonia and Latvia are in the process of being transferred to only national -language instruction. Russian Federation citizens in Latvia have been required to pass new language exams in order to retain their residency rights in the country. And in Estonia Russian Federation citizens lost their right to vote in local elections in 2025 with stateless persons set to lose this right also by 2029.
These changes have been profiled in articles published by the ECMI:
Vello Pettai, “Educational Reform in Estonia and Latvia: An End to Russian-Language Schools?”
Vello Pettai, “Russian Federation Citizens in Latvia: A Real or Exaggerated Security Threat?”
Following is a more complete bibliographic listing of sources consulted as part of the publication “Scholarly research on ethnic relations in Estonia and Latvia: a retrospective overview” published in Bradley Woodworth, Darius Staliunas and Violeta Davoliute, eds., Ethnic Relations in the Baltic States Revisited (CEU Press, 2025).
Needless to say, this list does not cover everything that has been published in English (or Estonian or Latvian) on these topics. Nor is the listing of one or another work an absolute guarantee of its quality or long-lasting relevance. But the bibliography should provide researchers starting out within this field an initial overview of essential works.
Note that the main focus of the list is on analytical scholarship that looks at trends since re-independence in the 1990s. It does not cover historical aspects of ethnic relations, including the interwar or Soviet periods.
