First Impressions of Riga
About the author: Bryan Metzger ’20 is a Global Policy Intern at the NATO Strategic Communications Center of Excellence in Riga, Latvia. Bryan is currently a Stanford undergraduate majoring in international relations.
It’s been a strange, yet exciting first week in Latvia. Having never visited this country before, I had little idea what to expect as I rode into the city with my internship supervisor, Linda, after she picked me up from the airport. The sky was cloudy, creating a somber mood as we drove past rows of aging houses and apartment blocks. One of my first experiences here was shopping at the local supermarket, a popular Latvian chain called “Rimi.” Having travelled a bit in Western Europe previously, I expected that most products would have ingredients listed in English, perhaps second to Latvian. I turned out to be dead wrong. While some products had up to five languages on the packaging — Latvian, Estonian, Lithuanian, Russian, and Swedish — I quickly realized that almost nothing in the supermarket was written in English. While I was certainly disoriented by this, I couldn’t help but feel enthralled by the whole episode. This summer was clearly going to be a challenge, but there’s a ton of excitement in that.
I’ve taken some solace, though, in the fact that the NATO Strategic Communications Center of Excellence — also known as StratCom, or the CoE — is based entirely in English. The staff at StratCom are an amalgam of different nationalities, from Latvian, to Canadian, to Czech, to American, to Lithuanian. This makes for an environment of constant learning, and it’s clear that the center takes its mission very seriously. Whether it’s about understanding Russian disinformation campaigns, combatting the messages of terrorist groups, or assessing the legitimacy of NATO in the 21st century, the work of the center is both current and vital, and that’s what makes working there such a tremendous opportunity. My internship has been largely administrative in nature, including work towards the development of a conference report from the most recent StratCom Dialogue as well as looking at ways to improve the conference for next year. At the same time, my responsibilities will also include working with the Digital Forensic Research Lab, a team of forensic analysts focused on building cyber resilience and combatting disinformation and fake news. It seems that I’ll have my hands full, and I’ll be making an impact on the workings of the center as well!
All in all, I’m very glad to be here, and I am excited for the rest of the summer. This internship thus far has exposed me to a unique, policy-relevant environment in the international security sphere while simultaneously immersing me in a culture so much different from my own. Just last weekend, I attended Riga’s celebration of the summer solstice, a holiday known as Jani that’s on par with Christmas in terms of its cultural significance. This dual learning experience has already been incredibly enriching, and I can’t think of a better way to spend my summer. I am so grateful to the Freeman Spogli Institute for making this opportunity possible.
