The full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 has had severe implications for security perceptions, discourses and internal societal dynamics, in particular in countries in the Russian Federation’s immediate vicinity. Viewed in terms of the ‘ontology of security’, the invasion was a paradigmatic rupture for the entire region, which as well as reinforcing longstanding fears, has given rise to new threats and insecurities. Countries in Russia’s neighbourhood have reacted differently to the new security context. However, there are also commonalities that this report seeks to carve out. In some states, societal cohesion and national unity have increased as a result of the war; in others, existing divisions have been aggravated and societies are polarised on the issue of the war itself or Russia more broadly. In its search for new political strategies and a unified reaction to Russian aggression and the destabilisation of the European post-war security order, the prevailing international (Western) discourse has since February 2022 reverted mostly to classical security imaginaries of deterrence and rearmament, essentially a military-centred approach. In a similar vein, contemporary academic and policy-oriented literature is mostly focussed on state-centric policy debates and ‘top-down’ analyses of ‘hard security’ issues. By contrast, the KonKoop topic line ‘In:Security’[1] seeks to shift the focus towards understandings of security ‘from below’, paying particular attention to societal perceptions of insecurity. Since these perceptions of security are collective, constructed by individuals who see themselves as members of a community,[2] the concept of ‘societal security’ will play an important role here. The shared identity of those ‘security communities’ for whom the survival in the face of perceived (‘constructed’) threats is paramount can also transcend international borders. The greater the threat to the identity, the stronger the determination to preserve this identity.[3] At the individual level, a distinction can be made between objective and subjective security. The individual subjective feeling of safety ‘has no necessary connections of actually being safe’.[4] The label ‘subjective’ could even be misleading here, as the ‘security issue is not something individuals decide alone’ (Buzan et al. 1998). Nevertheless, it has repeatedly been stressed that changes to ‘subjective security’ can also determine changes in values within society[5] as well as the understanding of democracy.[6] The growing relevance of ‘ontological security’, seen in a shift from quantitative or physical accounts of ‘being secure’ towards qualitative accounts and societal efforts towards ‘feeling secure’ (Vaughan-Willams 2021), matters in this context. This report is based on a workshop held at ZOiS on 6 June 2023 on the topic of “In: Security in Border Regions”, organised by Nadja Douglas and Sabine von Löwis. It brought together a diverse set of experts on international relations, border studies, and (critical) security studies from various countries in Eastern Europe and the South Caucasus. The workshop was the first in a series of workshops and publications within KonKoop’s topic line on In:Security, all of which will address the various dimensions of security and insecurity in the region. In a nutshell, the aspiration of the workshop and the resulting report is to complement the prevailing ‘top-down’ analyses of state and government security practices with a ‘bottom-up’, actor-oriented and comparative perspective on how these practices are perceived as well as produced and reproduced. Another focus will be on the implications of security practices for ‘societal security’, recognising society as security’s main referent object. Vernacular security theories are a good way to approach these issues, because they treat security as a socially/locally situated and discursively defined practice and thus emphasise the societal dynamics often overlooked by traditional security discourses. Security in the vernacular sense is a ‘political way of dealing with the ontological issue of uncertainty’.[7] It is open to comparison and grounded in specific contexts. The Polish case illustrates clearly how grassroots sentiments and actors, such as paramilitary civil society, have gained in relevance at the latest since 2014, contributing to the remaking of a new ‘security from below’ and the ultimately state-led comprehensive reform of Polish defence. The situatedness of security and the significance of historical memory become apparent when looking at the Finnish population’s altered perception of security since February 2022. Finland’s policy towards Russia has changed from a neutral-pragmatic to an explicitly defensive-pragmatic one, driven by the population’s desire for more security and certainty. The people’s need for assurance about where Finland belongs, bearing in mind its historical experiences with Russia, was an important factor in the country’s decision to join NATO. Security is thus a socially expressed practice, and different societies (or imagined communities) have different ways of socially producing, discursively portraying, and politically managing it.[8] The Ukrainian case certainly stands out here, given that the country is at the centre of the Russian war of aggression. Based on the Ukrainian experience, we show how the Russian logic of ‘a weaponisation of everything’ – an extension of war to non-military resources, such as energy, food and the environment – has not only created unprecedented chains of insecurity, but also led to Ukrainian society becoming more robust and resilient. The neighbouring societies of Moldova and Belarus have also been disproportionately affected by the Russian war, especially in terms of social and economic consequences. While their security situation is not comparable to Ukraine, many security risks are imminent and a constant burden for societies that have already had to shoulder longstanding insecurities emanating from a lack of societal cohesion and unity. Societal divisions have deepened, also with regard to Russia and the Russian war against Ukraine. Such polarisation makes those societies vulnerable to external interference. This is an anxiety shared by Georgian society, which seeks to gain from but at the same time fears the consequences of an influx of Russian migrants. Here, there is the worry not only that Russia will drive a wedge into Georgian society from the outside, but also that Georgia’s democratic governance will be eroded from the inside. In a similar vein, Armenia is struggling with Russian interference and the resulting divisions within society. It has been more affected than other countries by Russia’s loss of regulatory power in the region. The current threat to the country’s democratic consolidation process and the stagnating normalisation process in its relations with Azerbaijan do not contribute to an enhanced perception of security either. Another focus of the report is on borders and bordering as well their different meaning  for security. On the one hand, the political border is a place of securitisation, which the state fortifies and militarises in order to guard against unwanted attacks or mobility across it. But borders are at the same time places of counter-imagination and practices that cut across the state-driven dividing lines, thus contributing to vernacular understandings of security and insecurity. Political borders are very concrete, material structures that demarcate the territorial limits of states or transnational organisations like NATO, the EU, and the Schengen Area. They are governed by a border regime and regulations that define how to cross them (when, for whom, what and how). Yet they are at the same time very symbolic and constructed in the way the territories on either side are characterised, narrated and imagined. Beyond institutional frameworks, the vernacular sense of borders is important, i.e. how borders are practised on the ground by those managing them but also by those crossing and living close to them. In both ways borders may carry meanings of security and insecurity and expectations of more or less of it on the ‘other’ side. Bordering – the understanding of borders as multi-dimensional practices – is also a social and cultural process that is not necessarily bound to territory and the concrete borderline on the ground. With the concept of borderscapes, the border is de-territorialised and brought into the realm of social, economic, cultural and political production and construction of inclusion and exclusion at different levels and places. This process of bordering is fluid and dislocated. It includes the state as well as individuals deconstructing and producing borders between what they perceive to be one’s own and what they perceive to be other. This report aspires to engage with new ontological ideas about what it means to be safe, and covers a wide array of security challenges and risks that societies in the region face. For many of these societies, security has become not an end in itself, but rather a means and an ‘opportunity to choose to live otherwise’.[9] The bordering concept is helpful in approaching the dynamics within and between the states affected by Russia’s war against Ukraine since 2014, especially with regard to processes of belonging, migration and flight, discourses of fear and trust,and infrastructural coupling and decoupling. In this sense, we treat security as a fluid concept that ultimately opens up possibilities for societal emancipation not only from an ‘external threat’ but also in a transbordering sense from state-centred and sanctioned notions of security and insecurity.