A world turned upside down: Using law to protect our values and defend our borders
This is a time when the European security landscape is being reshaped by war, coercion, hybrid operations, and systemic rivalry. The return of large‑scale conflict to our continent, the weaponisation of interdependence, and the erosion of long‑standing norms have forced governments and societies to rethink the foundations of security.
In this context, law, norms, and governance have become central instruments of response. They shape deterrence, crisis management, resilience, and the legitimacy of state action. Legal frameworks structure how states exercise emergency powers, how they govern borders, how they respond to hybrid influence, and how they balance security imperatives with democratic values.
Yet law is never neutral. It can be a shield, but it can also be a constraint. It can enable resilience, but it can also be invoked to justify exceptional measures.
At the heart of contemporary security governance lies a simple but often overlooked fact: law is the primary medium through which democratic societies authorise power, constrain coercion, and articulate the boundaries of legitimate action. In moments of uncertainty, it is law – not strategy alone – that determines whether states respond in ways that reinforce democratic trust or erode it. Law structures not only what governments may do, but what they must justify, disclose, and remain accountable for. In this sense, law is not peripheral to security; it is the condition of its democratic legitimacy.
Borders today function less as fixed demarcations and more as evolving sites where governance, security, and everyday life intersect. They are sites where Arctic dynamics, migration governance, and hybrid operations converge. They are spaces of resilience and vulnerability, of protection and exposure.
In the Nordic‑Baltic region in particular, borders have become laboratories for innovative responses to cross‑domain pressures. They reveal how security environments change faster than governance systems, and how societies negotiate the balance between openness and protection. Anyone working on border governance or hybrid threats will recognise these dynamics.
Hybrid threats persist because they adapt. They exploit legal grey zones, societal fractures, technological dependencies, and psychological vulnerabilities. Responding to them requires more than military capability or legal reform. It requires whole‑of‑society resilience – institutional, technological, civic, and cognitive. But it also requires something more fundamental: the ability to mobilise law as a strategic capability.
Hybrid actors thrive in ambiguity; democracies must respond through frameworks that are transparent, predictable, and legally grounded. The capacity to deploy legal tools – rapidly, coherently, and proportionately– now shapes attribution, sanctions, cross‑border cooperation, and the credibility of deterrence. Where adversaries weaponise legal grey zones, democracies must strengthen legal clarity.
The Nordic‑Baltic region has long been at the forefront of developing such approaches. But the challenges we face are not regional; they are transnational. They demand coordinated, interoperable, and mutually reinforcing responses across the transatlantic community.
The importance of NATO, EU–US cooperation, and shared democratic commitments has rarely been clearer. Legal interoperability, information sharing, and coordinated deterrence are no longer optional; but essential.
No single discipline can solve the challenges we face. Law cannot operate in isolation from strategy; strategy cannot operate in isolation from society; and none of these can operate without a deep understanding of political, geographical, and technological contexts.
When we speak of “our values” and “defending our borders”, we invoke a possessive that is neither neutral nor uncontested. It is a political construction – one that defines who is included, who is excluded, and who is rendered marginal or invisible. The possessive pronoun does not simply describe a community; it actively shapes it. It draws boundaries of belonging, legitimacy, and vulnerability, and in doing so, it performs political work that often goes unexamined.
It is worth pausing on this deceptively simple word “our”. Who is included in this “we”? Who is not? And crucially, who decides? The possessive “our” functions as a boundary‑making device. In moments of uncertainty, this boundary can harden. It can become a tool for rallying solidarity, but also for narrowing the circle of moral concern.
Anyone working on identity politics or border governance will recognise how powerful this linguistic move can be. In times of insecurity, the language of “our values” can become both a unifying call and a rhetorical weapon. It can clarify what is at stake, but it can also obscure the plural, contested, and evolving nature of the values we claim to defend.
Values are not fixed artefacts; they are negotiated, debated, and sometimes in tension with one another. They are shaped by history, institutions, and political struggle. To speak of them as if they were singular and universally shared risks flattening the complexity of democratic life. This is why reflexivity matters.
The same critical lens must be applied to the idea of “defending our borders”. Borders, in my view, are means to an end, not ends in themselves. Border security must ultimately enhance the safety and well‑being of societies and people – not merely fortify territorial lines. Appeals to “defending our borders” can obscure the fact that borders do not simply protect; they also produce hierarchies of mobility, vulnerability, and legitimacy. They shape who can move, who must stay, and who is exposed to risk. And the threats we face today are not territorially bound. They do not respect “our” borders – nor do they respect “our” values.
The late President of Finland, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Martti Ahtisaari, warned that Europe – and the West more broadly – risks misunderstanding its own value foundations. He reminded us that the principles we often call “our values” were never meant to be cultural property. They were conceived as shared commitments undertaken to secure peace after catastrophe.
Values are not unshakable. They erode – especially when responsibility is avoided rather than shared. In defending our borders, we must ensure that we are also defending our values, rather than allowing ourselves to drift away from them.
Recent years have shown how easily exceptional measures, emergency framings, and securitised narratives can reshape democratic norms. The challenge is to ensure that the defence of borders does not become a justification for the erosion of the very principles we claim to uphold.
We carry a responsibility to interrogate the categories, assumptions, and concepts we use. The task is not to abandon the language of values or borders, but to use it with conceptual precision and awareness of its political effects. Only then can we ensure that the legal and security frameworks we build genuinely protect democratic futures rather than inadvertently narrowing them.
The text is based on speech delivered by Professor Jussi P. Laine at the 2nd Annual Transatlantic Alliance for Law, Outreach, and National Security (TALONS) Conference, held on 27–29 May 2026 in Joensuu.
