How much should a society change to prevent the disaster it fears? Connecting cases in Estonia, Finland, Latvia and Lithuania, this book describes how ordinary life is reorganized around crisis-talk and futures that may never arrive. Francisco Martínez travels across Europe’s Baltic edge to investigate the social and political consequences of security. In Lithuania, balloons close an international airport and stray drones sent the President to a shelter; at an Orthodox convent, the Estonian government wants to know where prayer ends and Moscow influence begins; beneath Finland, engineers build a tomb intended to outlast the civilization that produced its contents; on a boat drifting towards Russia, an engine breaks. When states derive authority from disruptions they claim to have prevented, readiness hardens into militarization and ambiguity begins to look dangerous.

Introduction: Living on the Edge

Interlude I: Helsinki, the Capital that Practices Its Own Disappearance

1. Paldiski, or How to Unmake an Empire

2. How Final Is Final? Enacting Safety at Onkalo

Interlude II: Suwałki, Geography in the Conditional

3. Rail Baltica, Where Europe Changes Trains

Interlude III: Nord Stream, the Pipeline that Pacified Nothing

4. The Governed Cut: Disconnective Synchronization from Russia

5. The Cable Is the Border: Statecraft on the Baltic Seabed

Interlude IV: Insurance Companies and The Price of Uncertainty

6. The Nervous Sky: Drones, Balloons, and Hybrid Warfare

7. Pühtitsa. God, the Kremlin, and Convent Cows

Conclusion. Peace with the Engines Running