Clements Center for National Security

🇺🇸 Happy Fourth of July!

On this day in 1776, the Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence. This year marks its 250th anniversary, and the founders are closer than you think: a letter in George Washington's hand at the Briscoe Center, a 1776 printing of Thomas Paine's "Common Sense" at the Harry Ransom Center, and the first statue of Washington in Texas, at the head of the South Mall since 1955.

UT News catalogued the founders' presence on the Forty Acres. Link in bio.

Summer Beyond Borders, Baltic Perspectives: In Lithuania, students met with Vice Minister Sigitas Mitkus of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for a candid conversation on regional security and the transatlantic partnership.

In Latvia, they explored the cobblestone streets of Riga's Old Town before visiting the Media Hub, where they heard directly from journalists working in exile, learned how the Hub sustains the work of dissident reporters under pressure, and gained insight into Jill Dougherty’s experience of broadcasting in Russia during the 2022 invasion of Ukraine

Summer Beyond Borders, Baltic Perspectives: In Riga, Latvia, our students sat with journalists who can no longer work in their home countries.

At the Media Hub, they heard from reporters operating in exile, professionals who continue their work from the Baltics because returning home would mean imprisonment, or worse. They also heard from Jill Dougherty, former CNN Moscow Bureau Chief and one of the foremost American journalists covering Russia and the post-Soviet region, on the rapidly shifting media environment in Russia and the Baltic States.

After the Media Hub, the students took time to experience Riga the way Latvians do: at the Central Market. Built in 1930, Riga Central Market is one of the largest open-air markets in Europe, housed in five pavilions originally constructed as German Zeppelin hangars. It was added to the UNESCO World Heritage list in 1997 as part of the Riga Historical Centre.

The day ended at the dinner table with Jill Dougherty, where students had the rare opportunity to ask one of America's most seasoned Russia watchers their most pressing questions directly.

Summer Beyond Borders, Baltic Perspectives: The Lithuanian Special Archives are housed at Gedimino Ave. 40 in Vilnius, the former headquarters of the KGB.

Inside, more than 1.35 million files document five decades of Soviet surveillance, repression, and political persecution in Lithuania. KGB source files. Personnel records. Criminal files of those sentenced for their political convictions. The operational machinery of a security state, preserved in full.

Hosted by Dr. Inga Zakšauskienė, our students didn't just read about these records, they handled them. Primary sources that were, not long ago, instruments of control.

Understanding how archives work — what gets preserved, how it gets used, who gets access — is part of understanding how nations reckon with their own history. Lithuania is doing that reckoning in the building where the surveillance happened.

Summer Beyond Borders, Baltic Perspectives: Vilnius, Lithuania. Beneath the streets of the city, more than 300 civil defense shelters were built during the Cold War, stocked with filtered air, food, medical supplies, and whatever else Soviet planners thought residents might need to survive a nuclear strike.

Most have been demolished, sold off, or forgotten. The Automatika bunker in the Naujamiestis neighborhood is one of the few that remains, preserved so visitors can walk into the world ordinary people were told to prepare for.

One day in Lithuania. Two sites. One story about power, occupation, and the limits of both.

Morning: Plokštinė, the Soviet Union's first underground nuclear missile base, buried in a forest in western Lithuania. Four silos. R-12 missiles with warheads capable of reaching every NATO member in Europe. A facility so secret that U.S. reconnaissance didn't confirm its existence until 1978, nearly two decades after construction began.

Afternoon: the Hill of Crosses near Šiauliai. Hundreds of thousands of crosses planted by generations of Lithuanians, bulldozed repeatedly by Soviet authorities, and rebuilt each time. A site the regime could never permanently erase.

The missiles are gone. The crosses remain.
This is what it means to study national security in the field.