Foreign interference has become a central structuring condition for “in‑between” states whose survival strategies are recalibrated amid geopolitical contestation, volatile strategic cultures, and security uncertainty generated by shocks such as Russia’s wars against Georgia and Ukraine. In such environments, interference is not a marginal disorder but an everyday parameter of statecraft, elite calculus, and struggles over regime resilience. Georgia provides a critical case: formally committed to Euro‑Atlantic integration yet increasingly marked by democratic erosion, strategic ambiguity, and securitized narratives of “foreign agents,” it exemplifies how hybrid regimes turn foreign interference into a resource for governing internal order rather than merely an external threat.
The article bridges debates on foreign interference into dialogue with geostrategic in‑betweenness and small‑state statecraft to show how “in‑between” countries like Georgia manage liminal positions and gatekeep external linkages under intense geopolitical competition and insecurity. It addresses two gaps. First, it offers a systematic theorization of interference as a distinct causal process—structured by specific modalities, mechanisms, and elite choices—rather than as diffuse external “influence.” Second, it integrates geostrategic in‑betweenness and elite gatekeeping into interference theory by foregrounding how governing elites in hybrid regimes selectively open and close channels of linkage and leverage to external “black knight” actors.
The article argues that in hybrid regimes foreign interference and counter‑interference practices are central to the reconfiguration of sovereignty, governance, and security nexus. It builds a matrix that crosses key interference modalities (disinformation and socio‑cultural penetration; elite co‑optation via patrimonial networks; economic and energy leverage; cyber and connectivity interventions; exploitation of de facto entities and borderization) with micro, meso, and macro layers of Georgia’s resilience architecture. This framework enables an examination of sovereignty claims and authoritarian legal‑institutional change both as outcomes of specific interference–counter‑interference episodes and as conditions shaping which nodes of resilience are politicized or deliberately weakened by ruling elites. Foreign interference thus appears not only as a phenomenon that happens to hybrid regimes from the outside but also as a structured, interactive process in which external strategies and domestic elite gatekeeping jointly remake the contours of sovereignty as regime control leading to authoritarian consolidation.

In recent years, political participation in Latvia has increasingly developed under conditions of heightened security pressure. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has fundamentally reshaped the regional security environment. Security threats increasingly span multiple domains, including the political environment, which is a critical pillar of a country’s internal and regional security. Such an environment fosters susceptibility to populism, political apathy, and external influence – factors that undermine democratic consolidation. In the context of the upcoming parliamentary elections, these dynamics become particularly significant. The research methodology combines quantitative and qualitative methods for data acquisition, analysis, and interpretation. According to research, in Latvia: 1) voter turnout in Latvia has consistently declined since independence; 2) political party membership remains extremely low (as of early 2025, only one active political party in Latvia exceeded the threshold of 2,000 members, despite there being more than 50 political parties and party associations in the country); 3) public trust in political parties is persistently weak; 4) the party system is characterised by fragmentation and limited sustainability, as parties often emerge around short-term goals, personalities, or electoral cycles rather than stable ideological platforms; 5) leader-centred politics increases societal polarisation; 6) populism is increasingly shaping electoral competition. These dynamics weaken citizen engagement, reduce democratic accountability, and widen the gap between political elites and society. By focusing on Latvia as a case study, this paper contributes to broader discussions on democratic resilience, political participation, and security in the European Union’s eastern member states facing persistent external and hybrid threats. A resilient democracy requires not only effective institutions, but also active citizens who view politics as meaningful and trustworthy.

Across Europe’s extended crises, military conflict in Ukraine, the energy and cost-of-living shock, renewed migration contestation, and escalating “culture-war” politics, far-right actors have increasingly fused security and belonging into a single narrative repertoire. This paper traces how Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) and Die Heimat (ex-NPD) mobilized support in 2022-2024 by co-producing threat and “civilizational” frames under overlapping crises and by tuning their diffusion across platforms with distinct affordances (Facebook and Telegram). We theorize frame co-production as an interaction between party elites, elite-adjacent actors, and engaged publics: security claims (war, migration, “internal order”) are articulated together with symbolic boundary-making (nation, family, “normality”) to yield modular frames that can be re-used across issues and circulate through digitally networked publics. Empirically, we assemble a corpus of party and elite-adjacent posts, high-engagement comments, and party manifestos.

Methods integrate Critical Discourse Analysis with scalable text-as-data: a human-in-the-loop (active learning) annotation pipeline assigns texts to six issue frames, multi-label transformer classification models co-occurring frames via a graph-aware head and interrupted time-series inference estimates structural breaks around salient events (elections, legislative milestones, and crisis peaks). By linking platform dynamics to the politics of meaning-making under insecurity, the paper contributes a mechanism-focused account of how insecurity becomes a vehicle for identity politics and democratic contestation, and a transferable workflow for studying digitally mediated frame diffusion relevant to East and Southeast Europe’s insecure futures in the Ukraine-war period.

Russia has turned information control into a cornerstone of its authoritarian governance, systematically suppressing dissent and shaping information environment. While research on Russia’s foreign information manipulation and interference has largely focused on the reception and effects of disinformation, far less attention has been paid to how audiences perceive and interpret information suppression - deliberate actions to silence information and mute dissenting voices to consolidate power. We address this gap by examining how Russophone audiences living outside Russia perceive Russia’s media bans and broader authoritarian information control, and how these perceptions relate to democratic vulnerabilities in host societies.

Focusing on Russophones in Latvia and Estonia - where Russian-speaking minorities constitute 38% and 29% of the population, respectively - we ask: how do Baltic Russophone audiences interpret Russia’s information suppression, and how do these interpretations shape normative boundaries between authoritarian and democratic information governance? Drawing on securitisation theory and scholarship on strategic communication, we conceptualize audience perceptions as a reception-oriented dimension of security framing. Methodologically, the study adopts a qualitative audience-centred approach. We conducted online focus groups in July 2025 with 55 Russophone participants in Latvia and Estonia, segmented by migration cohort: (1) pre-1991 residents and their descendants; (2) post-1991 immigrants; and (3) arrivals after Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Participants compared freedom of expression and access to information across Russia, host countries, Ukraine, Western democracies, and China, enabling us to trace how perceptions of authoritarian media control emerge in everyday reasoning.

Findings show marked heterogeneity shaped by migration history and national context. A small proportion of participants view Russia’s bans as authoritarian repression, while the majority perceive them as stabilising measures aimed at preserving internal order in Russia. Many respondents blur distinctions between Russia’s suppression of information and the security‑driven restrictions introduced in Ukraine and the Baltic states after 2022. Recent migrants are more critical of Russia, whereas long‑established residents often express scepticism toward host‑state regulations. Latvian participants report higher self-censorship and fear of sanctions, whereas Estonian participants describe a more moderate environment. Our analysis reveals that perceptions of information suppression are relational: audiences do not evaluate Russian practices in isolation but interpret them through cross-context comparisons with information controls and security-driven media restrictions in democratic states.

The paper contributes to debates on European security and democratic resilience by demonstrating how Russia’s information suppression resonates transnationally and how security‑driven measures within democracies may inadvertently erode trust and accountability among minority populations.