Why do citizens in democratic states allow governments to monitor them? Studies note that consent to surveillance to a large extent depends on trust in public institutions. But how is surveillance legitimised in states where this kind of trust is low, as in most of the European postcommunist countries? Using data from three former communist states, this study investigates the role of trust in close social networks. The results show that so-called 'particular social trust' may work as a substitute for trust in institutions. Particular social trust may produce legitimacy for policy measures, in this case, surveillance.

How can we understand the relationship between trust and surveillance? This chapter reconsiders empirical findings that indicate a positive correlation between trust in public institutions and acceptance of surveillance, contrasting these findings to studies that claim that surveillance is destructive of trust. To resolve these contradictory views, this chapter discusses institutional and sociocultural theories of trust to shed light on the trust-surveillance nexus and argues that a sociocultural perspective opens space for considering how social changes may affect the trust-surveillance relationship. 

This article seeks to explain public attitudes to secret surveillance. Secret surveillance, for example wiretapping by intelligence agencies, is a controversial activity that affects fundamental civil liberties in any democratic system. Several large research projects have recently attempted to explain how people form opinions about surveillance in general. Thereby privacy concerns and institutional trust are often highlighted. In this article, we argue that earlier research uses a too narrow definition of attitudes to surveillance and that secret surveillance is particularly sensitive due to its opaque character. We introduce a two-dimensional concept that focuses on rationalistic and emotional responses to surveillance. Drawing on new data from three post-communist societies – Estonia, Poland, and Serbia – we show how institutional trust is mainly responsible for explaining acceptance of secret surveillance, but not how one feels about it. Instead, it is the level of ontological insecurity and privacy concerns that explains this second dimension. The results are theorised and implications for future research are discussed.

This special issue is the result of a research initiative that began in 2013, just before the annexation of Crimea by Russia. We, the guest editors, together with Pawel Waszkiewicz at the University in Warsaw, wanted to fill a gap in research on surveillance, which had at that time not yet addressed post-communist societies to any great extent. Today the situation is slightly different, but the need for further research is still pressing. It is therefore with great pleasure that we present a collection of five research articles by both senior and early-stage researchers, as well as a postscript by Professor Emeritus Maria Los, who is one of the few researchers who has written extensively on surveillance-related issues from a post-communist perspective. Below we introduce the special issue with a conceptual overview of post-communist research and its connections to surveillance studies.

The present article concerns Estonian e-government, that is, the digitalization of government and public administration, and the way e-government produces a moral citizen. Although several case studies on e-government exist, they have seldom been sensitive to the local conditions shaping the functions and social meaning of digitalization. E-government involves producing knowledge, and the present article draws on a theoretical perspective that stresses the tight relationship between knowledge and power. In Estonia, the power–knowledge regime is characterized by centralization. Centralization is the condition for a firm national e-government policy, and within this policy, an image of the unique Estonian citizenry is produced. The Estonian moral citizen who emerges out of e-government is de-politicized and detached from a social context, on the one hand, and strongly politicized and attached to a specific ethno-national community, on the other.

This edited collection reports the results of a comparative study of video surveillance/CCTV in Germany, Poland, and Sweden. It investigates how video surveillance as technologically mediated social control is affected by national characteristics, with a specific concern for recent political history. The book is motivated by asking what makes video surveillance "tick" in three very different cultural settings, two of which (Poland and Sweden) are virtually unexplored in the literature on surveillance. The selection of countries is motivated by an interest in societies with recent experiences of authoritarianism, and how they respond to the global trend towards intensified technical means of control. With thorough empirical studies, the book constitutes an important contribution to security studies, surveillance studies, and post-communist area studies.