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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 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.

How have people in the three Baltic states changed after the fall of the Soviet Union? Do they trust the new political institutions? How do they look upon gender equality, homosexuality or abortion? What differences are there between the three countries, and how can they be explained? These are some of the questions addressed in this report. The analyses are based on data from a series of surveys carried out as part of the research project "Democracy and Social Transition in the Baltic Sea Region" at Södertörns högskola (University College)