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Sweden has a long tradition of participation in different kinds of peacekeeping missions. During the Cold War, Sweden’s troop contributions were exclusively focused on UN operations, but in the early 1990s Sweden’s official troop contribution policy changed from an “only under the UN flag” position to one of “only under UN Security Council mandate”. It is fair to say that Sweden’s foreign policy has undergone fundamental changes and the country has been contributing military forces to both EU and NATO missions for quite some time. Swedish foreign policy debate has largely been characterized by a sense of political unity or consensus. Despite this, there have been occasions when the political parties have been in disagreement. There are studies that confirm that the level of conflict in the foreign policy debate has increased over time. Political and ideological disagreements do exist and the political landscape has changed during the last 10 years. These changes should also have an impact on foreign policy decisions.

The aim of this study is to investigate the political decision making process regarding Swedish military international missions. It will examine the political unity in the decisions concerning eight different cases; Kosovo (1999-2010), Congo (2003) , Liberia (2003-2006), Afghanistan (2004-2014), Chad (2007), Somalia (2009-2017), Libya (2011) and Mali (2015 à).  The focus for the study will be the political unity regarding the decision process within Parliament and, more specifically, the work of the combined Foreign affairs and Defence committee, and the debates in Parliament.

The empirical analysis reveals that the rate of political controversy has increased. However, there is still a great sense of unity and broad agreement among the political parties on the main question regarding troop contributions.  In many cases any conflict and debate concern side issues such as timings, personnel and finance. The two main parties, the Social Democrats and the Moderate Party, are generally in agreement. They also conduct negotiations before a proposition becomes official, which leads to less conflict in the subsequent debate. The study also reveals a higher level of opposition from the Left party and from the Sweden Democrats. Some of their opposition can have ideological explanations. The Left party is mainly critical about participation in NATO missions.