What factors influence the formation of threat perception among the masses? Can the public perceive that external threats exist yet also feel safe? This article investigates both how threat perceptions form, as well as what factors influence security perceptions, in ethnically diverse countries and societies. While drawing on data from two nationally representative surveys, this article inquires to what extent the views of the government and society align regarding whether Russia represents a security threat to Latvia. We find that the determinants of threat and security perceptions differ. Above all else, the views of our respondents are shaped by their ethnic identities and regional effects. Consumption of different forms of media also influence threat perception. Perceived asymmetry of power is an additional important variable shaping security perception. Importantly, there is a correlation between seeing Russia as a security threat and Russophobia or fear of Russians living in Latvia. Overall, this article demonstrates that threat perceptions differ between Russian-speakers and Latvians, shows that it is important to differentiate between perceptions of threat and security, and identifies key explanatory variables influencing development of these perceptions in ethnically diverse societies.

The 1925 Estonian cultural autonomy law is a rare example of the idea of nonterritorial national minority rights officially adopted in the interwar period. Scholarly interest in this legislation, however, has so far overwhelmingly concentrated on the case of the Baltic Germans. This article is intended to make a contribution toward a broader understanding of the 1925 law and the “cultural autonomy” discourse in Estonia altogether by examining the Estonian Swedish minority’s political leadership’s understanding of cultural autonomy: how it changed and developed up to 1925, and what the subsequent Swedish attitudes toward the 1925 Estonian cultural autonomy law were. I demonstrate that although the Swedish leaders had been closely involved in the long process leading up to the law’s passing in 1925, it ended up seen as being of little substantive relevance from the Swedish perspective. Furthermore, by being strongly associated with the term “cultural autonomy,” the law also deprived the Estonian Swedish national movement of an important slogan that had long functioned as the overarching goal of Estonian Swedish nationalism.