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Paper short abstract

This paper shows how war anxiety, as part of a broader affective governance that includes the deployment of notions of duty, loyalty, and “comfort refugees,” shapes East–West mobility imaginaries and decisions among Estonians at home and abroad.

Paper long abstract

This paper explores how long-standing anticipatory fears related to Russia shape East–West mobility imaginaries and moral evaluations among Estonians both at home and abroad. Drawing on interviews and audiovisual extracts from an ongoing documentary research with Estonian migrants conducted primarily before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the paper argues that war anxiety should be understood not as a sudden reaction to geopolitical rupture but as a historically sedimented affective condition that has long structured decisions to leave, stay, or return.

For many interlocutors, migration to Western Europe was framed as a search for “freedom”—not only economic or lifestyle freedom, but also relief from a persistent affective atmosphere of stress, vigilance, and insecurity associated with living in close proximity to Russian state power. Mobility in post-EU-accession Europe has often been romanticised and admired in public discourse. At the same time, it has also been accompanied by more subtle moral evaluations, in which migrants may be labelled as “comfort refugees,” implicitly contrasted with those who remain, or positioned within quiet debates about responsibility, loyalty, and collective endurance.

The paper highlights how these ambivalent judgements operate as a form of affective governance, regulating mobility through emotions such as fear, guilt, and duty rather than formal policy alone. By situating contemporary debates within longer affective histories of post-socialist insecurity, the paper shows how conditional privilege and polarised imaginaries of belonging were already in place before 2022, and how the war has since intensified—rather than fundamentally transformed—these affective and moral regimes of mobility.