This article explores individual resistance related to a military organization’s gender equality work as expressed in online contexts. Resistance is explained as expressions of wider social conflicts, grounded in experiences of threats towards military masculinities, challenged by societal and political transformation processes perceived as feminine. The data consists of defence-related blogs and comments. A thematic analysis finds that individual resistance can be understood as blaming and shaming strategies. Five sub-themes are identified: blaming the “feminised” organization, blaming and shaming women’s abilities to serve, individualisation of structural problems, verbal violence and violations, and objectification of men working with and supporting gender equality initiatives. The analysis exemplifies how social conflict is transferred to organizations through individual resistance. As gender equality policies are questioned, organizations need to confront resistance also within the online context.
Systemic violence against women in the military has existed for decades, but they have mostly refrained from public resistance. However, in the context of the #Metoo‐movement in Sweden, 1768 women published a call for an end to violence and sexual harassment in the military. We analyze this call as a public resistance effort against the military and find that #Metoo is: 1) challenging the norms of the hyper‐masculine military organization, making resistance towards it visible, and 2) resisting the practices of sexual harassment and lack of responsibility in the military organization. The military organization is questioned when it comes to norms and practices, but there are variations in whether the social order of the military is truly challenged. Still, the call highlights the fragmentation of this “last bastion of masculinity”. More research is needed on the erosion of the militarized norms and practices and the effects of the call.
Artikeln problematiserar läraryrkets koppling till säkerhets- och krishanteringsfältet samt hur denna kan förväntas inverka på lärarnas arbetsmiljö. Baserad på litteraturstudier med fokus på yrkesgruppen lärares närmande till fältet säkerhet och krishantering, mynnar analysen ut i två potentiella utmaningar a) arbetsmiljöproblem relaterade till den nya lärarrollen och b) genusaspekter som uppstår vid kopplingen till säkerhets- och krishanteringsfältet. Lärarnas arbetsmiljö utmanas med anledning av nya krav att hantera kriser och agera som säkerhetsaktörer. Yrkesgruppen kan ställas inför nya uppgifter som traditionellt sett har hanterats av räddningstjänst och polis. I denna kontext aktualiseras föreställningar om genus kopplade till dessa tidigare separata yrkesgrupper. Kvinnodominerade yrkesgrupper riskerar här att underordnas. Kommunal resursallokering har hittills exkluderat lärare som kris- och säkerhetsaktörer vilket riskerar förstärka arbetsmiljöproblemen.
Armed forces in many Western countries have been facing societal change processes for more than twenty years; including value changes, government savings and, more recently, by the unstable security environment. The starting point here is that there is a relationship between processes of societal change and organizational challenges. The purpose of this study is to examine how military leaders manage and respond to different kinds of organizational challenges, focusing on resistance. The empirical material was collected using a grounded theory approach. Informants possessing wide experience of leadership participated in this study. The qualitative analysis describes the coping strategies, acceptance and resistance found among military leaders when dealing with organizational demands. Challenges caused by societal changes are experienced as negative aspects of organizational structure. This may be an explanation for why military leaders cope with them applying both resistance and acceptance. However, our main conclusion is that resistance to change stays within a culture of obedience.
Nowadays, it is already a truism to state that digital media are effective tools used by citizens, civil society organizations (CSOs) and social movementsto protest, to demand, to push and (sometimes) achieve social and political change. No question, they are. This has been observed and registered time and again in a luminous series of academic contributions (some notable examples include Castells 2012; Cottle 2011; De Luca. Lawson and Sun 2012; Howard and Muzammil 2011; Tremayne 2014; Tufekci 2017). Exactly how these media have been taken up by civic actors in specific contexts has been studied and discussed in fascinating detail (Cammaerts, 2018; Gerbaudo 2012; Treré 2019). This book goes one step further to ask a broader question: Has the use of digital media by civic actors improved (or depleted) the quality of democratic life understood as broad and effective citizen participation in public affairs and decision-making?
This article contributes to the debate on long-term trends in Transatlantic relations. It does so by examining some of the ways in which the central ideational foundation of the Transatlantic area, namely “the West”, has become increasingly contested in a highly polarized US domestic discourse. By drawing on, and contributing to, the constructivist scholarship on Transatlantic relations, which argues for the importance of collective identities for long-term foreign policy orientation, the article examines how the notion of “the West” became increasingly politicized under Trump’s presidency. The article then examines the Democrats’ understanding of the US place in the world and shows that the US commitment to Europe is premised and contingent upon a joint commitment to democracy, rather than an imagined ethnonationalist bounded community. As an identity-conferring concept between the US and Europe the paper shows, “the West” no longer fulfils a unifying function in US mainstream public discourse.
Projection of strategic narratives to gain competitive advantages is a central feature in the global competition for status and power. This article presents a comparative narrative analysis of how the Russian state sponsored news platform Sputnik narrates Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden 2014–2019. The objectives are to uncover what negative work strategic narratives can perform and to decipher how adverse narratives are constructed. The findings suggest that Sputnik uses a mix of standard strategies and tailor-made narratives, working to destruct, direct and suppress the Nordics. The analysis exposed distinct differences as Sputnik narrated Sweden and Denmark more negatively than Norway and Finland. The narratives can serve to divide and weaken the Nordics and the EU, and undermine international reputations of each state. The strategy of division through narratives is particularly problematic as polarization challenges Western democracies and the EU. The article furthers narrative research by testing a recently crafted analytical framework and by presenting findings that indicate a need for a broadened research agenda. Whereas previous research has primarily centred on how malign information influence can harm democracy, our results indicate that narratives can cause a broader variety of harms.
Using primary sources from four Nordic countries, (Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden), this volume explores how small states have adjusted their military strategies in response to external shocks of the 21st century. The 9/11 terrorist attacks, the Russian interventions in Georgia and Ukraine, and the rise of the Islamic State have all forced the Nordic states to adopt new strategies. While the responses have not been uniform, their differing relations to the EU and NATO have not prevented these countries from behaving similarly in military affairs. Limitations in military capacity has led all four countries to pursue strategies that include cooperation with more resourceful partners. It is necessary for them to cooperate with others to protect and promote their national interests. Moreover, the Nordic cosmopolitan outlook expresses milieu-shaping ambitions that we generally would not expect small states to pursue against a potential great power aggressor.
This book will be of much interest to students of military strategy, defense studies, security studies, and international relations.
This article shows that all four Nordic countries, i.e., Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden, have adjusted their alignment strategies when responding to the changes in their external environment during the twenty-first century. Furthermore, our findings indicate a great diversity among the four states in their responses. All too often, security policy analyses cluster small states into allies and non-allies, respectively. However, this article suggests that alliance affiliation in isolation is not sufficient for explaining small states’ behavior and adjustments of their strategies. Occasionally, previous experiences of armed conflicts as well as perceptions of strategic exposure provide stronger explanatory power.
This book explores the military strategies of the five system-determining great powers during the twenty-first century.
The book’s point of departure is that analyses of countries’ defence strategies should acknowledge that states come in various shapes and sizes and that their strategic choices are affected by their perceptions of their position in the international system and by power asymmetries between more and less resourceful states. This creates diversity in strategies that is often overlooked in theoretically oriented analyses. The book examines how five major powers – the United States, China, the United Kingdom, France and Russia – have adjusted their strategies to improve or maintain their relative position and to manage power asymmetries during the twenty-first century. It also develops and applies an analytical framework for exploring and categorising the strategies pursued by the five major powers which combine elements of structural realism with research on power transition theory and status competition. The concluding chapter addresses questions related to stability and change in the present international system.
Do middle powers develop similar defense strategies? Is middle powers a useful category for exploring the diversity of strategies among different categories of states? This article presents a great variation of strategies among the selected cases. Concurrently, similarities between middle powers belonging to similar regional security complexes (RSC) are revealed. The higher degree of great power penetration into a RSC, the lesser options for middle powers to develop individual strategies and vice versa. Furthermore, by comparing our findings with the strategies of more and less resourceful states, common elements among middle powers in terms of ends, means and ways, appear.
This article outlines a general history of the intellectual origins and development of geopolitical thought. It provides categories for assessing contemporary expressions of this phenomenon, and then discusses the applicability of these tools to the Baltic Sea region. The article focuses on eliciting and juxtaposing contrasts between the three classical bodies of literature that evolved largely in parallel, and ends up briefly commenting on a fourth, partly “critical” approach. The main takeaway is that considering all four geopolitical approaches before applying any of them to the Baltic Sea realm encourages analysts to embrace a more holistic and dynamic viewpoint than each of the alternatives individually can offer. Such a conceptualization promises to forge analytical linkages between a series of relevant, geographically contingent circumstances including resources, arenas and communities that represent prerequisites and opportunities incrisis, conflict, or war.
This book explores the multilayer nexus among inter-related international and regional security parameters that critically define the EU's rapidly changing security environment. In terms of intensity, complexity and urgency these changes constitute challenges that threaten the very core of European security - both internal and external. In a fluid and transitional international environment of diversified needs and polymorphic threats the space dimension acquires a novel unified meaning. The book closely examines the EU's current strategic, organisational and defence capabilities regarding global, regional and domestic challenges such as terrorism, systemic instability, global order and a number of crucial hindrances to transatlantic cooperation. The chapters offer not only valuable theoretical insights, but also unique perspectives on operational and organisational elements of EU applied policies based on the testimonies of field experts. The combination of theory-based approaches and the demonstration of the EU's operational capabilities and weaknesses as externalized through its global strategy choices provide an overall evaluation of adopted policies and their effects. This is crucial in a global transition period that will define the EU's role and its potential to produce desired outcomes through synergies with its strategic allies.
The first part of this report provides an overview of the history of nuclear weapons doctrine, as it evolved in parallel to the practice of warfare and war planning in the mid-1940s and subsequently as an integral element of the cold war. A distinction is made between the early development of nuclear weapons doctrine, when United States held a dominant position in the field, and the near-parity situation that ensued in the late 1960s and onwards. The second part of the report consists of an analysis of American, British, French and Russian nuclear weapons doctrine between 1991 and 2018, illustrating how a period of low tension was gradually replaced with a reinvigoration of mutual suspicion after the year 2000. A third part briefly examines recent contributions to the American scholarly debate about the utility of nuclear weapons for strategic thought in a world moving toward polycentrism, as it revisits earlier theoretical insights and challenges conventional wisdoms. The fourth and final part elicits lessons for Sweden in particular.
Overall, the report demonstrates that nuclear weapons consistently have represented an integral element of managing security risks in the Western hemisphere but that domestic political and defense industry considerations play in as well. It also suggests that doctrinal adjustments mirror the major concerns of policymakers in this regard and that nuclear powers are well aware of special obligations and privileges ascribed to them by countries that lack this category of weapons. A world in which the United States wields the greatest share of this power (unipolarity) will nonetheless be quite different from one in which two countries possess roughly the same capacity (bipolarity), and yet fundamentally different from one in which three or more countries compete to gain, or sustain, an edge toward others (multipolarity).
To the extent that the world is moving toward greater security competition including the dimension of nuclear power, it will inevitably be more difficult for individual states to remain on the sidelines, unless they are ready to compromise their political autonomy. In terms of options for aligning Sweden with a broader security arrangement in the near future, there are only three feasible alternatives that may offset the risk of nuclear coercion: responding within the framework of the EU, forge closer ties to NATO, or build a bilateral relationship to the United States. Each such option comes with its own set of assets and liabilities, as does remaining a passive bystander.
This article provides an overview and concise analysis of the often underappreciated bilateral security and defense agreements that the United States entertains with a significant number of countries around the world. It sets out by emphasizing the role of the United States in sustaining the world order at a systemic level and notes that Washington’s bilateral relations, albeit forming a significant part of the overall security and defense arrangements, receive much less attention than multilateral alliances and systemically conditioned alignments. After briefly reviewing recent literature on this subject, the article examines the process by which the United States enters into agreements of varying legal and political status, and then discusses the ramifications and limitations of the respective types of arrangements. In turn, the article examines formal bilateral treaties (mainly with East Asian states), politically motivated security and defense agreements (mainly in the wider Middle East), and, lastly, executive agreements initiated by the presidential administration, the Defense Department or the State Department. The article ends by suggesting that the administration of Donald J. Trump—given campaign statements and the first six months in office—is less likely than many of its predecessors to enter into new agreements and formalize existing alignments, and that the viability of existing ones may become increasingly dependent on America’s counterparts demonstrably living up to their end of the bargain.
Thirty years after Bulgaria’s democratic breakthrough, this book provides a “balance sheet” of the country’s democratic institutions through a number of interdisciplinary contributions. The volume is organized around three themes—democratic institutions, civil society, and European Union (EU) processes—and examines such topics such as voting, political parties, populism, media, civil society organizations, identity, and the rule of law. While the contributors argue that Bulgaria’s democracy is successful in terms of the procedural norms of democracy, civic participation, and compliance with EU rules, they also identify serious problem areas. Bulgaria’s democratic institutions struggle with obstacles such as populist Euroscepticism, political elitism, corruption, and a lack of political accountability, though this volume fully acknowledges the historical development of Bulgarian democracy, including its achievements and continuing setbacks.
While the coloniality of power underpins the continuity of colonial situations in postcolonial Africa, (neo)liberal thinking attempts to dismiss its place in Africa's contemporary challenges, blaming instead anti-colonial struggles and the quest for complete decolonisation as the cause of these challenges. A focus on this neoliberal cum pro-colonial perspectives, at the expense of a corpus of post-, anti- and de-colonial writings that expose and challenge coloniality, however, inhibits our understanding of the consolidation, problematic place and impact of the coloniality of power in postcolonial Africa. Analysing the presence of colonial situations in policy choices and governance patterns, which link Africa's postcolonial present to their colonial past, this paper claims that the coloniality of power retains its salience in postcolonial Africa. Illustrating with experiences from Nigeria, I show how this continues to structure the state of affairs in Africa even after formal colonialism has ended. This article contributes to the discourse on the legacies of colonialism in Africa.
One of the key challenges graduate students face is how to come up with a good rationale for their theses. Unfortunately, the methods literature in and beyond political science does not provide much advice on this important issue. While focusing on how to conduct research, this literature has largely neglected the question of why a study should be undertaken. The limited discussions that can be found suggest that new research is justified if it (1) fills a ‘gap’; (2) addresses an important real-world problem; and/or (3) is methodologically rigorous. This article discusses the limitations of these rationales. Then, it proposes that research puzzles are more useful for clarifying the nature and importance of a contribution to existing research, and hence a better way of justifying new research. The article also explores and clarifies what research puzzles are, and begins to devise a method for constructing them out of the vague ideas and questions that often trigger a research process.
In this autobiographical essay, I narrate my experience of being positioned in public as naive in my profession and a traitor to my country after publishing an op-ed in Sweden’s largest daily newspaper, in which I argued that Sweden should not join NATO — the transatlantic military alliance. Some of the negative reactions came from within my own workplace. I had just been promoted to Professor at the Swedish Defence University and colleagues thought I had also betrayed them and the university by publishing the piece. In this essay, I disclose some of the reactions I encountered but, more importantly, I try to understand the effect they had on me, recounting my own inner dialogue of shame and resistance. At times I worried that I lacked expertise or even secretly harboured an affinity with the country that is now seen to motivate a Swedish NATO membership — i.e. Russia. At other times, I tried to turn the tables on the stigmatisers, claiming that it was they who had to change. While I work in a highly militarised environment, I think the fear of social death and professional shame I explore in this essay has broader resonance.
This article draws on identity construction, emotions and a notion of productive power to address the question of why Swedish policymakers and public opinion are becoming increasingly supportive of NATO membership. It contributes theoretically by arguing that such textual phenomena intertwine with ‘disciplinary power’, which operates on the bodies of the subjects of power, exposing them to verbal and physical sanctions, a host of complex feelings and enhanced levels of self-disciplining. The article analyses 354 editorials and op-eds related to Sweden and NATO, published in the four biggest Swedish newspapers in 2014–2018; 1408 tweets, with a focus on 14 selected NATO campaigners and their advocacy; and semi-structured interviews with 12 such influencers. It concludes that Swedish NATO campaigners produce and negotiate emotional discourses in a way that targets other influencers and potential influencers by exposing them to ridicule and allegations of treason. While tendencies are similar on both sides of the debate, the article demonstrates that productive power currently intertwines with disciplinary power in a way that makes anti-NATO advocacy seem more fraught with personal risk than pro-NATO campaigning, and joining NATO appear to be the most normal, realistic and responsible policy option.
Why do self-representations of weakness pervade public discourse in self-identified great powers? Moreover, why do they intersect with self-representations of greatness? Do such narrative instability, inconsistency, and incoherence simply indicate that great powers are ontologically insecure? This article advances a theoretical explanation that is both embedded in and contributes to scholarship that theorizes ontological (in)security from a Lacanian perspective. The gist, ironically, is that great powers’ quest for greatness is co-constituted with the narrative construction of weakness. The article then challenges the assumption in existing ontological security scholarship that states are generally self-reflexive and experience pride when ontologically secure but shame when ontologically insecure. Since great power narratives reflect persistent, exaggerated, and simultaneous feelings of shame and pride, it argues that narcissism helps better account for great power self-identification and ontological security-seeking. Drawing on psychological research on narcissism, the article develops four narrative forms—shame, pride, denial, and insult—through which self-representations of weakness and greatness, and feelings of shame and pride, can be mediated. Finally, using empirical illustrations from the United States and China, the article analyzes how and with what implications political leaders have narrated about each respective great power's weakness and greatness, with a focus on the period 2006–2020.
We are living at a time when people appear to have become more aware of the power of narratives in international politics. Understanding how narratives exercise power is therefore more pertinent than ever. This special issue develops the concept of narrative power for international relations research by focusing on East Asia—the region that has been at the centre of debates about international power shifts since the 1990s. This introduction seeks to elucidate and define four key binary distinctions: (a) narrative power as understood from the perspective of an individualist versus a narrative ontology; (b) narrative power as explanandum versus explanans; (c) narrative power as more prone to continuity or change; and (d) the scholar as a detached observer of narrative power versus the scholar as a narrative entrepreneur and a potential wielder of power. Informed by the individual contributions, the introduction demonstrates how and with what implications research on narrative power can negotiate and traverse these binary distinctions.
Recent research has explored how the Sino-American narrative struggle around COVID-19 might affect power shift dynamics and world order. An underlying assumption is that states craft strategic narratives in attempts to gain international support for their understandings of reality. This article evaluates such claims taking a mixed-methods approach. It analyzes American and Chinese strategic narratives about the pandemic, and their global diffusion and resonance in regional states that are important to the U.S.-led world order: Australia, India, South Korea, Turkey, and the United Kingdom. While the article confirms that strategic narratives remain a highly popular policy instrument, it argues that their efficacy appears limited. Overall, the five states in question either ignored the Sino-American narrative power battle by disseminating their own strategic narratives, or they engaged in “narrative hedging.” Moreover, even China’s narrative entrepreneurship was enabled and constrained by pre-existing master narratives integral to the current U.S.-led world order.
Japan can now do more or less everything that other, more ‘normal’ countries do in the security field.
The existing research on Japanese security focuses mainly on the nation state and conceives of male elites as the key bearers of relevant knowledge about the phenomenon. This article problematizes these biases by zeroing in on women’s everyday-oriented perspectives, which fall outside the scope of security politics as traditionally conceived. More specifically, it analyzes the rich material provided by a survey of the members of three major Japanese women’s organizations, using a mixed-method approach premised on statistical methods and qualitative content analysis. The results show that the Japanese women in our sample accommodate and reproduce content from dominant elite views about security and insecurity. However, they also challenge and at times ignore these perspectives by identifying a host of other insecurities as more pressing in their daily lives, notably those related to environmental degradation and Japan’s political development.
This article examines Japanese processes of self-formation as reflected in junior high school civics textbooks, comparing books published in 1990 and 2012. It demonstrates surprising continuity in how books from the two years construct a pacifist self in sharp contrast to Japan's prewar and wartime belligerence. We argue that this kind of antagonistic temporal othering has continued to socialize Japanese students into a "peace identity" and helps to explain the strong grassroots opposition to the Japanese government's 2015 announcement of laws to back up its position that Japan can exercise collective self-defense.
Periods of mutual enmity in US-North Korean relations are typically interrupted by more conciliatory gestures. How can the many twists and turns in this relationship be explained and hopefully overcome so that more long-lasting détente is accomplished? Drawing eclectically on realism and constructivism, we conclude that a nuclear deal should address not only North Korea’s interests in security and regime survival, but also its status concerns. Applying the same theories to the other part of the dyad – the US – we conclude that it may now have material interests in ameliorating the relationship, but that such a development requires US foreign policy discourse to cease depicting North Korea as “irrational” and “evil”.
This article engages with China's “politics of harmony” to investigate the dangers and possibilities of soft power as a concept and practice. Chinese sources claim that China will be able to exercise soft power due to its tradition of thinking about harmony. Indeed, the concept of harmony looms large in Chinese soft power campaigns, which differentiate China's own harmonious soft power from the allegedly disharmonious hard power of other great powers—in particular Western powers and Japan. Yet, similarly dichotomizing harmony discourses have been employed precisely in the West and Japan. In all three cases, such harmony discourses set a rhetorical trap, forcing audiences to empathize and identify with the “harmonious” self or risk being violently “harmonized.” There is no doubt that the soft power of harmony is coercive. More importantly, the present article argues that it has legitimized and enabled oppressive, homogenizing, and bellicose expansionism and rule in the West and Japan. A similarly structured exercise of soft power may enable violence in and beyond China, too. Ultimately, however, we argue that China's own tradition of thinking about harmony may help us to theorize how soft power might be exercised in less antagonistic and violent ways.
Soft power and hard power are conceptualised in International Relations as empirically and normatively dichotomous, and practically opposite – one intangible, attractive, and legitimate, the other tangible, coercive, and less legitimate. This article critiques this binary conceptualisation, arguing that it is discursively constructed with and for the construction of Self and Other. It further demonstrates that practices commonly labelled and understood as soft power and hard power are closely interconnected. Best understood as ‘representational force’ and ‘physical force’ respectively, soft and hard power intertwine through the operation of productive and disciplinary forms of power. We illustrate this argument by analysing the Sino-Japanese dispute over the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands. Both governments exercise representational force in constructing their respective versions of events and Self/Other. The soft/hard power binary itself plays a performative role as the Self is typically associated with soft power and the Other with hard power. The operation of productive power, moreover, privileges the attractiveness of the former and the repellence of the latter, and disciplinary power physically enforces these distinctions on subjects in both states. Finally, reinforced Self/Other distinctions legitimise preparations for violence against the Other on both sides, thus exposing how fundamentally entangled soft and hard power are in practice.
Michael Oakeshott’s distinction between ‘civil association’ and ‘enterprise association’ has inspired international society theorists to conceive of international society as not just a ‘purposive association’ constructed by states to satisfy their interests but also as a ‘practical association’ providing formal and pragmatic rules that are not instrumental to particular goals of state policy. While this article is supportive of the Oakeshottian turn in international society theory, it suggests that somewhat different conclusions can be drawn from it. The article sketches out an alternative conception of international ‘civil association’, one that transcends the boundaries of communities. It is argued that such a notion of civil association is both possible and at the same time anchored in the experiences of the modern state. It is suggested that this notion of international civil association, when sustained by an adequate legal conception, promotes the enforcement of moral and political responsibility across borders. Finally, it is argued that European governments post-Brexit should strive to retain, as much as possible, the element of civil association present in European relations in order to preserve the civil condition, the rule of law, and in order to enhance political responsibility across borders.
This chapter argues that realism in International Relations embraces a romantic account of politics in sharp contrast to its scientific pretentions. Central to the romance of realism is the tragic and pessimistic outlook which reveals the connection between Romanticism and realism, shaping a mythical account of power politics. It is argued that the recurring tragic narrative is more than a way to moderate liberal hubris. It makes it possible to convey to the public a political pessimism building on established narratives reserving the finer moral and political understanding of realism for political theorists and diplomats. Looking backwards for patterns of ‘recurrence and repetition’ and the tragic narrative make realism vulnerable to nostalgia, forming ‘retrotopic’ visions of the future or seeking to restore ‘arcadian’ images of past glory.
Den här artikeln identifierar och analyserar tre olika reaktioner, i artikeln benämnda »strategisk respons», på amerikansk strategisk återhållsamhet sedan 2017 och mot bakgrund av Brexit: »Liberal övervintring», »Ett starkare Europa» och »En bredare koalition». Analysen kopplar strategisk respons, strategiskt aktörskap och strategisk autonomi och leder till två slutsatser: För det första att Brexit snararare har gynnat än hindrat det europeiska säkerhets- och försvarssamarbetet, såväl inom ramen för EU som mellan EU och stater som står utanför EU, däribland Storbritannien. För det andra att den framväxande säkerhetsordningen innebär nya och annorlunda förutsättningar för det säkerhets- och försvarspolitiska samarbetet i Europa, inte minst i Norden.
National security discourses have entered teacher’s classrooms. A strand of largely critical literature in education studies have noted that new security tasks clash with the roles of teachers. However, few studies have yet approached this audience about their views on security. This article analyses how Swedish teachers conceive of security in relation to the school system. Data consists of semi-structured interviews with teachers and principals, conducted in medium-sized municipalities in Sweden. The analysis finds that teachers maintain a conceptualisation of security that focuses on the individual. Simultaneously, teachers rarely adopt national security discourses (except regarding school violence) and several argue against emphasising the concept of security in relation to schools. The results offer an opportunity to analyse the views of teachers as audiences in relation to the extension of the security field into the educational domain.
This is a commentary to the article "The framing of environmental citizenship and youth participation in the Fridays for Future Movement in Finland" by Janette Huttunen and Eerika Albrecht. In the piece I reflect on the analysis and results of this interesting research, focusing in particular on adult's depoliticization of children's protest and the potential collective social and political impact of the Fridays for Future movement for youth.
This article proposes that children constitute a new climate precariat. This conceptualization contributes to a more comprehensive theoretical understanding of the vulnerability of children in relation to the climate crisis. Previous literature tends to treat climate change in an abstract fashion that renders today’s children invisible. Climate precarity consists of three main elements of vulnerability: temporality problems, insecurity and an identity vacuum. In relation to temporality and security, children are suffering from the potential loss of a sustainable future, which spurs the need for urgent action and constant consciousness – in the present. World leaders’ inaction creates an uncertainty regarding whom should be held responsible for taking action in guaranteeing children the future which climate change is at risk of depriving them. The concept of climate precarity could be used to explain children’s collective action in relation to the climate crisis. Children’s concerns in relation to the climate crisis suggest that agency and empowerment are spurred through their resistance towards these vulnerabilities.
This article explores children’s resistance in relation to the climate emergency through a thematic analysis of climate activist Greta Thunberg’s speeches. Two themes, new to the literature, are identified: (1) need for political and social change focusing on the climate emergency, resistance towards laissez-faire behaviour and exhortations, and (2) resistance targets including the political leaders, capitalist ideologies and older generations. This illustrates the power of children in expressing abstract progressive resistance.
This article elaborates on how structural, normative and functional pressures for change may challenge military organizational characteristics. We problematize theoretically and exemplify empirically what consequences these pressures can have on military organizational characteristics, arguing that they constitute major challenges for managing in particular normative pressures for change. The empirical examples suggest that bureaucratic, hierarchical, narcissistic and greedy traits of the organization are challenged by normative pressures such as value changes and normalization. Another source of challenge is professionalization processes. Structural challenges, on the other hand, are managed by the organization and do not seem to inhibit the workings of organizational characteristics. The plausibility probe conducted questions the sustainability of military organizational characteristics in their traditional disguise, in particular due to legitimacy concerns. It is suggested that future research should be directed towards analyzing how military organizations manage pressure for change and whether their characteristics are questioned.
This article analyses the gendered nature of teachers’ views on schools and security.Current research on security emphasizes masculinity and the absence of femininity inrelation to the security field – traditionally dominated by the military and emergencyrescue services. However, there is a lack of knowledge on the areas of society that arenew to the security field. Schools, pupils and teachers are gendered in many ways. Whathappens when security is added to this nexus? Existing, limited research suggests thatthis relationship may be both complicated and gendered. A qualitative content analysisis conducted based on interviews with teachers and principals from two municipalitiesin Sweden. It shows that teachers hold gendered views of their roles as security actors;of pupils in relation to security, as subjects of risks and sources of threats; and ofexternal security threats. Men are embodied as positive or negative actors, whereaswomen are embodied mostly as powerless actors. Teachers give voice to a discoursefocused on everyday insecurities. This is important, as the role of teachers (in particularwomen) as promoters of democratic citizens risks becoming undermined, and individualperspectives of security risk becoming replaced by national perspectives.
Drawing on a wide range of material, from memoirs of former spy masters to the highly acclaimed TV series Le Bureau des Légendes, this article shows how documentary as well as fictional accounts of double agents cast light on a “dark underside” of the international system. This dark underside is made up of exceptional spaces of secrecy in which intelligence organizations and spies operate. The article's main point of entry when analyzing these spaces is the intimate connection between secrecy and subjectivity. While secrecy as a social practice has received increased attention in sociological accounts of secret intelligence, the constitutive role of secrecy in relation to subjectivity is a much less explored theme. This theme, it is argued, becomes especially valuable for thinking about the conflicting lines that constitute the life and becoming of the double agent. In particular, it can be drawn on to show how this subject both is captured by the transparent norms and limits of the international state system and effectively transgresses those limits. In this way, rather than upholding a dichotomy of secrecy and transparency as two separable sides of the international system, the double agent emerges as a disruptive figure calling for its deconstruction.
The Baltic Sea and the Arctic have once again become scenes for geostrategic great power competition, influencing regional economic, military and environmental security. Here, international relationships span a spectrum from friendship to fear. We observe that a host of different units of analysis currently compete for our attention in this part of Europe. But while “Scandinavia”, “the Nordic area”, “the Baltic Sea region”, “the High North” and “the Arctic” help focus strategic analysis on important and sometimes overlapping components of this area, security complex theory prescribes that we must adopt a broader, multi-layered view in order to understand how great and small power interests play out in this part of the world today. Such analysis must consider China’s global role, NATO’s increasingly elaborate military planning and the Russian Federation’s perception of vulnerabilities and opportunities, in an area that stretches from the Suwalki gap in East-Central Europe to the Barents Sea. In addition, security complex analysis benefits from including the perspectives of small states that control key territories – such as resource-rich continental shelves and exclusive economic zones – and from taking relevant international bodies into account as enabling and constraining factors. As part of a larger project, this paper reviews several sets of open source documents indicative of the incentive structure of such key players, published over the past five years. We delve into the political, economic and military dimensions of aims and actions by three categories of actors, namely: i) China, Russia, the United States; ii) Denmark, Norway; Sweden, Finland, Iceland, Canada; and iii) the EU, NATO and the Arctic Council. We conclude that, while smaller units of analysis still make sense for limited research purposes, the concept of a Baltic-Arctic security complex is necessary for meaningful strategic analysis.
Sweden and Denmark have presented contrasting relationships between centre-right and populist radical right (PRR) parties. In Sweden, the centre-right has refused cooperation with the Sweden Democrats (Sverigedemokraterna) (SD), even when this cost the centre-right office. However, in Denmark, coalitions led by centre-right parties have cooperated with the Danish People’s Party (Dansk Folkeparti) (DF) on multiple occasions. Through a controlled comparison, we examine what explains these different outcomes. Using Chapel Hill Expert Surveys and public opinion data, we firstly look at the policy congruence between parties and the social acceptability of cooperation. We then examine interview material with representatives from centre-right and PRR parties in Sweden and Denmark to see their explanations of cooperation and non-cooperation. We conclude that, while the office goals of Danish centre-right parties, along with the policy focus and uncontroversial past of DF, explain that case, the reputation and past of SD has precluded a similar outcome.