Building on insights developed through the Mind the Gap project, Assistant Professor Anne Ingemann Johansen convened the international workshop Resisting Bufferhood: Security Transformation and Small-State Agency in the Nordic-Baltic Region, generously funded by the Carlsberg Foundation and co-hosted by the Centre for War Studies and the Danish Institute for Advanced Study (DIAS) at the University of Southern Denmark. The workshop was organised in close collaboration with the Centre for Geopolitics at the University of Cambridge.

While Mind the Gap examined how Danish and Norwegian policymakers navigate an increasingly unstable European security environment and engage with external expertise, the workshop explored how these broader geopolitical changes are reshaping the Nordic-Baltic region. Bringing together leading scholars from across Europe, discussions focused on the region's changing strategic role, the emergence of collective Nordic-Baltic agency through formats such as the NB8, and the opportunities and challenges associated with new forms of regional security cooperation.

The workshop marked the beginning of a new international research collaboration extending the intellectual trajectory of the Mind the Gap project. Since the workshop, participants have jointly developed a proposal for a special issue on Contested Bufferhood, which examines how the Nordic-Baltic states are responding collectively to a changing European security order and what this tells us about the evolving role of small states in regional security politics. The special issue proposal is edited by Anne Ingemann Johansen, Donatas Kupčiūnas, and Trevelyan Wing and brings together contributions from many of the workshop participants.