Willingness to Defend One’s Country: the Baltic States and Taiwan in the Shadow of Two Hostile Neighbors

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

The issue of willingness to defend one’s country stretches far beyond the military sector. The level of (un)willingness is both a symptom and factor in a range of societal and individual attitudes. The panel aims to present the public opinion research on the issue of willingness to defend in the Baltic states and Taiwan, to compare the results across Latvia, Lithuania and Taiwan, and to extend the current universal toolkits and hypotheses in assessing the phenomenon of willingness to defend beyond the Baltic and Taiwanese cases, contributing to the global research agenda.
The panel is a presentation of the ongoing MUTUAL FUNDS LATVIAN - LITHUANIAN-TAIWANESE COOPERATION PROJECT “Factors and Actors Contributing to the Willingness to Defend One’s Own Country: the Case of Latvia, Lithuania and Taiwan” for the period of 2022-2024. The moderator as well as the panelists are implementing the project in their respective countries.

Short Bio

Chair:
Dr. Una Aleksandra Bērziņa-Čerenkova is Head of the China Studies Centre at Riga Stradins University, Head of the Asia Programme at the Latvian Institute of International Affairs, a member of CHOICE and European Think-tank Network on China (ETNC). She has held fellowships at Fudan University and Stanford University, and is affiliated with King's College London and MERICS. A visiting academic at the University of Oxford China Centre in 2024, she is the author of Perfect Imbalance: China and Russia, published by World Scientific in 2022, and the editor of Discourse, Rhetoric and Shifting Political Behaviour in China (Routledge, 2023).

Panelists:
Dr. Māris Andžāns has both practical and academic knowledge on national security issues and management, among other things having chaired the National Cyber Security Council of Latvia, Dangerous Goods Movement Consultative Council of Latvia, and the Working Party on Telecommunications and Information Society of the Council of the European Union. Upon returning from Fulbright Visiting Scholar Fellowship at the School of Advanced International Studies of the Johns Hopkins University in Washington, DC, the United States, in March 2020, he continues to teach and conduct research at RSU and the Center for Geopolitics Riga.
Dr. Deividas Šlekys is an associate professor at the Institute of International Relations and Political Science, Vilnius University. He holds MLitt. in War Studies, Glasgow University and PhD in Political sciences, Vilnius University. He was a Visiting research fellow at Changing Character of War Centre, Oxford University (2013-2014) and a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at Harvard University Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies (January – June 2020). His main research areas include war studies and civil-military relationships.
Dr. Wei-hao Huang received his PhD from the Division of Global Affairs at Rutgers University, Newark. He is currently an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Political Science at National Sun Yat-sen University, Kaohsiung. His works addressing China’s foreign policy, soft power, as well as Taiwan military expenditure have been published in International Relations of Asia-Pacific, Journal of Chinese Political Science, and Peace Economics, Peace Science and Public Policy.
Dr. Ronan Tse-min Fu is an Assistant Research Fellow in the Institute of Political Science at Academia Sinica (IPSAS). University of Southern California in Political Science and International Relations (2019). His research interests lie in the intersection of international relations theory and comparative politics, with a specific focus on grand strategy, East Asian security, Chinese politics and foreign policy, and historical roots of contemporary relations in East Asia.
Expert discussant from Estonia:
TBC

Sub Unit

• International Relations and Regional Security

Chair

• Una Aleksandra Bērziņa-Čerenkova, Riga Stradiņš University

Discussant

• Māris Andžāns, Riga Stradiņš University, Center for Geopolitical Studies

Individual Presentations

• Fight or Flight: Gauging Taiwanese Citizens' Willingness to Defend through a Conjoint Experiment - Wei-hao Huang, National Sun Yat-sen University

• Conscription as the tool of strengthening will to defend in Lithuania - Deividas Šlekys, Vilnius University

• Not a Monolith: The Diverse Views on Willingness to Fight for One’s Country among Latvian Russian-Speakers after the War in Ukraine - Juris Pupcenoks, Marist College; Māris Andžāns, Riga Stradiņš University, Center for Geopolitical Studies