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While traditional and non-traditional issues of security are at the very top of the policy agenda, security studies has been subject to much criticism. These concerns have often been framed in terms of challenges to the field’s relevance. This paper seeks to further the debate on relevance in security studies. Specifically, the paper examines the field in three major dimensions of relevance: responsiveness, diversity, and intellectual pluralism. Unlike previous disciplinary investigations, which have solely focused on United States (US) security studies, this paper examines trends pertaining to relevance in security studies in the USA as well as in Europe. The paper finds some evidence of responsiveness, a slight trend toward a more equitable share of female authors, and conflicting evidence when it comes to intellectual pluralism. The paper suggests that the field appears more as a ‘broad church’ than ‘irrelevant cult’ when its output in the USA, as well as in Europe, is taken into account.

This article contributes to an understanding of the backlash against liberalism by reconstructing the emergence and development of an increasingly influential strand of Anglo-American thought that challenges liberalism, known as postliberalism. The central diagnostic claim of postliberalism is that the two dominant forms of post-WW2 liberalism, market liberalism and social liberalism, instead of being somehow opposed, have coalesced around an all-encompassing sociopolitical project that above all else seeks to maximize individual autonomy. As a result, postliberals hold, the liberal order has become increasingly unable to cultivate the communal resources on which human sociability depends and erodes the values liberalism purportedly defends. The article argues that a central, albeit not necessarily insurmountable, challenge for postliberalism lies in moving from a critique of liberalism to proposed remedies for its perceived deficiencies, without slipping into a political project with clear illiberal rather than merely non-liberal implications.

Concerns raised over the impact of changing demographics, domestic polarization, and the return of near-peer competition on US military manpower challenges are overstated. Drawing on open-source materials and interviews, this article discusses factors often neglected in conversations on this topic and provides leadership and policymakers with a scholarly overview of an important yet understudied issue facing the US armed forces.

This chapter analyses if the EU is developing a defence union, and what that would imply for the EU. In order to analyse the development of EU defence policy since 2016, this chapter first discusses what measures would need to be in place in order for the EU to have a defence union, given previous literature on defence union. Then it analyses the development from 2016 to 2022. The conclusion is that the EU so far has not developed a defence union, even though the traits of union in EU security and defence policy have increased. In particular, three aspects found are of importance. The first is the European Defence Fund, the second the common capability development, that in combination with islands of specialization increase future possibilities of specialization and burden sharing; and the third some of the PESCO-projects which indicate defence of the member states within their own territory.

Departing from Russia’s full-scale invasion in Ukraine in 2022, this article analyses the OSCE-based security order that prevailed since the Cold War and that later was formalised in the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe. The first conclusion is that the OSCE-based European security order was successively weakened, and at the longest can be said to have functioned until 2014. The second conclusion is that this security order will not reappear even if the OSCE survives the consequences of the war. The article then analyses the partially parallel development of the EU as a security actor in Europe, and the potential of the EU to become a node in a new European security order. The third and fourth conclusions are that the EU has the potential of being a node in a new European security order, but that it will also need to become a node in a larger global order.

Genetic technologies are revolutionizing human health. In parallel, geopolitical instability has prompted renewed discussions on the risks of DNA technology being weaponized in international conflict. With today’s changing security environment, we argue that risk assessments must be broadened from genetically targeted weapons to a series of new domains.

This article seeks to theorize the transformation of the armed forces in Northern Europe by examining its drivers during previous NATO enlargements in the region. The exploration includes the German reunification in 1990, the Polish entry in 1999, and the joining of the three Baltic States, i.e., Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, in 2004. Based on these experiences, the article identifies some theoretical considerations for transformation in conjunction with the current accession process of Finland and Sweden. Based on a realist logic, we conclude that the ongoing transformation should be underpinned by a new operational design, hence considering the need for flexibility and for managing potential new expeditionary shocks. To this end, we argue that the focus must initially be internally within the Alliance, i.e., to proceed with novel operational planning for northern Europe before turning the attention to the transformation of the armed forces of the new members.

Scholars of Strategic Studies have seldom problematized the concept of military strategy beyond identifying the three elements constituting the phenomenon, that is ends, means and ways. Moreover, we see a need for contextualizing the presumably universal conceptualization of military strategy. This article contributes to previous research by operationalize each of the three elements one-step further, thereby introducing an analytical framework for systematic comparisons of states’ different priorities regarding military strategy. Additionally, in order to explain these different priorities, the proposed analytical framework introduces tools related to both relative power and position in the international system, and to regional systems and unit-level characteristics. The usefulness of the analytical framework is illustrated by a summary of some of our findings from a research project on comparative strategy including more than 30 states.

This book analyses how and to what extent ex-communist states have adjusted their defence strategies since joining the EU and NATO, and how differences and similarities between their strategies can be explained.

Between 1999 and 2013, four phases of enlargement took place when the European Union (EU) and NATO allowed 11 new former communist states to enter both organisations. These states share some common attributes and experiences related to strategic culture and common experiences during the Cold War era that can potentially explain similarities in behaviour and preferences among them. However, the strategic adjustments among these states are far from uniform. In an effort to explain these differences, the book introduces three intervening variables: (1) differences in relative power and position in the international system, (2) national geographical characteristics; and (3) historical experiences related to formative periods of state-building processes as well as wars and armed conflicts. Empirically, the book strives to present and analyse the defence strategies of each of the new allies by conducting a structured focused comparison of official strategic documents from the twenty-first century for each of the 11 cases. Theoretically and methodologically, it introduces an analytical framework enabling us to explain both similarities and differences in the formulation of the strategies of the 11 states, and to shed light on their external and internal efforts to promote their strategic interest by operationalising the dependent variable - defence strategy. The analytical framework combines elements of structural realism with classical realism, and constructivist research on unit-level characteristics related to relative power and perceptions of strategic exposure.

This book will be of much interest to students of strategic studies, European Union policy, NATO and International Relations in general.

The war in Ukraine unleashed in early 2022 may temporarily obscure the long-term trend that the United States is shrinking its military footprint in and around Europe, as the defence posture of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) in Central Europe suddenly was bolstered by tens ofthousands of additional US troops. For as long as the war drags on, certainly, these reinforcements will stay in place. But if, and when, the war ends or shifts to attrition warfare stretching out for years, aswas the case after the 2014 annexation of the Crimea, one can easily envisage changes in how European governments manage security and defence issues among themselves and in relation to their North American counterparts. While the debate on transatlantic security so far has played out in two distinct modes, either focusing on the economic side of burdensharing or projecting a vision of European strategic autonomy, there is a need for a more sober understanding of the future division of labour, one that would be grounded in the right blend of economics and deterrence. The main suggestion of this article is that stakeholders on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean ‘split the difference’ and strike a new grand bargain on the basis of their respective strengths. Once key issues of financial equity and militarydeterrence have been adequately addressed, European governments will still have their work cut out forthemselves. They must elaborate solutions to specific challenges at the sub-strategic theatre level and atthe same time navigate the complexities of optimizing defence reforms, aligning regional force designs and rendering foreign policy compatible with the strategic priorities of the European Union (EU) and Europe at large.

This article examines Sweden’s successful 2016 bid to serve at the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) and shows that the subsequent 2017–18 tenure relied on a formula with three key elements. One was to mobilize the competitive advantages of its Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA), and a second to systematically highlight Africa-related priorities. A third element was to boost the standing of the E10 category of members in day-to-day diplomatic practice. After securing a plurality of votes in the General Assembly, Swedish diplomats went to work with a unique constellation of concurrently serving likeminded countries, generally receptive to Stockholm’s priorities. The formula appears to have contributed to a solid performance in 2017–2018. That said, the UNSC is not conducive to individual E10 members having a lasting impact on its institutional memory.

Research problems are crucial in the sense that they provide new research with purpose and justification. So why, despite the abundance of guidance available from an extensive methods literature, do graduate students often struggle to develop compelling research problems? This article argues that the process of developing research problems epitomises the insecurity of doing research. We focus in particular on the anxiety that graduate students often seek to avoid or alleviate through a range of counterproductive coping strategies. The existing literature on research problems focuses predominantly on the technical aspects of doing research while neglecting how anxiety might affect the research process. This article seeks to rectify this shortcoming by providing advice on how graduate students can face such anxiety, and how professors can assist them in this endeavour. Drawing on theories about identity and anxiety, the article explains the allure of coping strategies such as gap-filling, while arguing that anxiety is not necessarily a negative emotion to be avoided at all costs, but integral to learning and creativity. It concludes by suggesting that compelling research problems can be constructed through the formulation of narratives that try to embrace anxiety, instead of seeking premature resolutions. 

International relations research acknowledges that states can have different security policies but neglects the fact that ‘models’ may exist in the security policy realm. This article suggests that it is useful to think about models, which it argues can become examples for emulation or be undermined through narrative power. It illustrates the argument by analysing Japan’s pacifism—an alternative approach to security policy which failed to become an internationally popular model and, despite serving the country well for many years, has even lost its appeal in Japan. Conventional explanations suggest that Japan’s pacifist policies were ‘abnormal’, and that the Japanese eventually realized this. By contrast, this article argues that narratives undermined Japan’s pacifism by mobilizing deep-seated beliefs about what is realistic and unrealistic in international politics, and launches a counter-narrative that could help make pacifism a more credible model in world politics.

What explains Japan’s security policy change in recent decades? Heeding the ‘emotional turn’ in International Relations, this article applies a resentment-based framework, which defines resentment as a long-lasting form of anger and the product of status dissatisfaction. Leveraging interviews with 18 conservative Japanese lawmakers and senior officials, the article discusses the role, function, and prevalence of resentment in the remaking of Japan’s security policy, premised on constitutional revision. The analysis reveals that conservative elites are acutely status-conscious; and that those who blame a perceived inferior status on Japan’s alleged pacifism are more likely to see revision of Article 9 as an end in itself. For a subset of conservatives, however, the goal is rather to stretch the Constitution to enhance Japan’s means of deterrence vis-à-vis objects of fear or in solidarity with allies. Overall, the article demonstrates that resentment provides a fruitful lens for analyzing status dissatisfaction in international politics. 

This essay takes literature laureate Kenzaburo Oe’s Nobel lecture from 1994, Japan, the Ambiguous, and Myself, as a point of departure for thinking about Japan, the ambiguous and how the already fragile and complex narrator that is I has evolved ambiguously over time in relation to a similarly ambiguous and changing imagination of Japan. Based on aikido practice—the narrator’s gateway to Japan—the essay ends up proposing a different understanding of and approach to ambiguity to Oe’s.

In the final analysis, is the security dilemma inescapable? Or can the protagonists in world politics learn to live with never-ending insecurities and the risk of attack without producing precisely the outcomes that they wish to avoid? This article explores this fundamental problem for International Relations theory by performing a thought experiment, in which it applies lessons from aikido to world politics. A form of Japanese budo, or martial art, aikido provides practitioners with a method for harbouring insecurities, and for dealing with attacks that may or may not occur, by empathically caring for actual and potential attackers. The article builds on practice theory in assuming that any social order is constructed and internalised through practices, but also capable of change through the introduction and dissemination of new practices. Although an unlikely scenario, aikido practice could serve as such a method of fundamental transformation if widely applied in world politics. Empirical examples ranging from international apologies and security cooperation to foreign aid and peacekeeping operations are discussed, suggesting that contemporary world politics is at times already performed in accordance with aikido principles, albeit only imperfectly and partially.

‘Othering’ – the view or treatment of another person or group as intrinsically different from and alien to oneself – is a central concept in the International Relations literature on identity construction. It is often portrayed as a fairly singular and predominantly negative form of self/Other differentiation. During the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic, Sweden at first glance emerged as exactly such a negative Other. This article problematises such a view of Othering. Departing from a narrative analysis of news reporting on Sweden’s management of COVID-19 in the United States, Germany and the Nordic states, the article proposes an ideal type model with four forms of Othering – emotional, strategic, analytic and nuanced – not recognised in previous research. These types differ in their treatment of the Other as more or less significant and in involving a more or less self-reflexive construction of the self. Although narratives in all these settings drew on previously established narratives on Sweden, they followed different logics. This has implications for our understanding of Sweden as an Other in the time of COVID-19, as well as of self/Other relations in International Relations more broadly.

This paper presents a Kelsenian perspective on international pluralism showing that international pluralism is not necessarilythe logical consequence of sovereignty but bestowed upon states by international law through the principle of equality. Thepaper argues that this leads to an improved concept of international pluralism as more than a by-product of sovereignty logic.Flowing from Kelsenian legal logic, international pluralism and legal cosmopolitanism share the same origin in theGrundnorm.Hence, this perspective on international relations appeases the perceived conflict between international pluralism andcosmopolitanism. Moreover, the paper suggests that the approach provides a different framework for analyzing internationalnorms and practices, their normative relationship and evolution

This article contributes to the literature theorizing military social order, embodiment, and resistance in IR. The military institution is known to resist change, and much research have been devoted to challenges to the gendered order of the military. One area that has received little attention, however, is the reluctance of many militaries in the West to facilitate veganism during service in spite of the increasing demand for vegan food options, diversity, and sustainability. Drawing on research on the military social order and gender theory, I conduct an unpacking of conflicting elements and representations of military and vegan bodies, and theorize this reluctance as institutional resistance. Typically, the military does not offer motivations for its stance – which makes it difficult to detect and counter. As a consequence, vegans are silenced and excluded, not facilitated to enter the military. This is a challenge to increasing attempts at governing sustainability and diversity in the military.

Kriget i Ukraina har redan fått många återverkningar, även i samhällen som inte direkt skakas av de fruktansvärda krigshandlingarna. I traditionella och sociala medier funderar människor kring vad som skulle hända om det blev krig i Sverige och hur detta skulle påverka vår vardag och våra relationer. En ofta förbisedd fråga i detta sammanhang är relationen mellan människor och djur. I denna artikel diskuteras hur totalförsvaret som samhällsorganisation och verksamhet kan utmanas av 2020-talets normer om förhållandet mellan människor och djur och djurs status som säkerhetssubjekt. Mot bakgrund av den traditionella totalförsvarstanken presenterar vi ett antal områden där djurens relationer med människor kan tänkas väcka frågor och komma i konflikt med delar av totalförsvaret: synen på säkerhet, juridiken i kris och krig samt utvecklingen av den sociala relationen mellan människor och djur. Artikeln avslutas med tankar kring hur ett totalförsvar som inkluderar djur skulle kunna se ut samt kring hur dagens totalförsvar i så fall skulle behöva förändras.

Although concern about the effects of international audiences consuming Russian state-sponsored media has been expressed, little empirical research examines this. The current study asks how audiences in Latvia respond to narratives projected by Sputnik Latvia – a Kremlin-financed news outlet. We begin a tripartite methodological approach with an analysis of the types of narratives the outlet projects. We then test how ethnic Latvian and Russian-speaking participants in Latvia respond to destruction narratives that portray Latvia as “failing,” the most prominent type in our analysis. We use two survey experiments that test an existing hypothetical mediation model predicting an array of affective and trust responses. We find evidence that exposure to destruction narratives triggered largely similar responses in both groups; however, exploratory analyses and post-survey focus groups are used to show that their motivations may be different. We conclude by discussing potential reasons for these differences, and the ramifications of these results.

Russia utilizes state-sponsored news media outlets, such as RT or Sputnik, to project antagonistic strategic narratives into targeted societies and perturb international audiences. While psychological responses to this conduct are frequently assumed, there is a lack of causal evidence demonstrating this. Using a transdisciplinary perspective, we conducted four survey experiments that tested two path models predicting possible cognitive and emotional responses to two narrative strategies that Russian state-sponsored media employ: destruction, which portrays a state as weak and chaotic, and suppression, which portrays a state as indecent and morally deviant. The experiments had between-participant designs, where participants read either an article demonstrating a strategy or a control text, and then indicated their responses to several trust and emotional variables. Participants were either Swedish or Dutch citizens, to build on previous analyses of Russian narration about Sweden and The Netherlands. Path analyses revealed significant differences between the conditions on several response variables. However, we found no evidence that these effects were mediated by generalized realistic or symbolic threat perceptions. We contribute preliminary insights into potential causal links between Russian antagonistic narrative strategies and specific psychological responses. This study, and its overarching research agenda, should have implications for practitioners seeking to counter Russian information influence.

This chapter analyses how Nordic health authorities and prime ministers used social media during the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic. The research questions address the extent to which they interacted with other actors on social media and what communication objectives they pursued in messages to the public. The data consists of health authorities’ Twitter communication and prime ministers’ Instagram posts. The results show that both the health authorities and prime ministers primarily interacted internally with domestic governmental and administrative actors. Still, they pursued different communication objectives. Whereas the health authorities mainly instructed the public on how to act, the prime ministers provided support and appealed for solidarity. National differences are observed. The Danish case stands out, as both the national health authority and the prime minister clearly focused on communicating support to the public.

The Anthropocene rupture refers to the beginning of our current geological epoch in which humans constitute a collective geological force that alters the trajectory of the Earth system. An increased engagement with this notion of a rupture has prompted a lively debate on the inherent anthropocentrism of International Relations (IR), and whether it is possible to transform it into something new that embraces diverse forms of existence, human as well as non-human. This article challenges that possibility. It shows how much of the current debate rests on the idea fulfilling future desirable ideals, which are pushed perpetually beyond a horizon of human thought, making them unreachable. As an alternative, the article turns to Jacques Derrida's understanding of the future to come (l'avenir), highlighting the significance of unpredictability and unexpected events. This understanding of the future shows how life within and of the international rests on encounters with the future as something radically other. On this basis, it is argued that responding to our current predicament should proceed not by seeking to fulfil future ideals but by encountering the future as incalculable and other, whose arrival represents an opportunity as much as a threat to established forms of international life.

This article develops a new approach to analysing intelligence failures. Rather than looking for their causes, intelligence failures are here analysed as part of a politics seeking to reify the value of rationality and the taming of power. To analyse this politics, the article draws on Bent Flyvbjerg’s notion of an asymmetrical relation of power/rationality, according to which power has a productive role that is inseparable from claims to rationality. The asymmetrical relation of power/rationality is used in order to challenge the instrumentalist language that pervades much of the literature on intelligence failures and what can be learned from them.

This chapter looks at how the emergence of surveillance capitalism, and specifically the change in contemporary mass surveillance and intelligence where the practice of watching and identification of suspicious behaviour is supplemented by the practice of modification and identification of profitable behaviour, is (re)constituting neoliberal, surveilled subjectivity. It argues that this gravitational shift from watching to modification makes the subject more steered than disciplined, putting its agency at even greater risk. Moreover, it ventures that more than putting the subject's agency at greater risk, this move also reconfigures the very meaning of agency in the context of surveillance and intelligence, by impelling us to understand it in temporal terms, as the capacity to move freely in time, instead of in spatial terms, as a mere extension of privacy. Advancing the analysis, the chapter explores and compares the Snowden and Cambridge Analytica cases through the memoirs of the two whistleblowers, Edward Snowden and Christopher Wylie, showing how Snowden's subject is private and disciplined, whereas Wylie's appears to be more agentic and steered.

This article contributes to our understanding of security devices by engaging with the distinctiveness of one particular and especially important device: the smartphone. Drawing from Barad’s understanding of posthumanist performativity and turning to the smartphone literature outside of security studies, it develops a conceptual account of the smartphone as a security device. The article suggests that the smartphone stands out from other comparable devices because humans have come to embody its connective features. Using the Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020 as an illustration, the article shows how the smartphone’s intra-action with users enable the crafting of new security practices through appropriations of embodied connectivity, especially when such appropriations are carried out on the streets. The police appropriated the smartphone to monitor social media activity and for geofencing, while the protesters appropriated it to obfuscate data and for livestreaming. By (re)locating the negotiation of competing security interests in the (extended) bodies of the protesters through the affordance of these practices, the smartphone contributed to the acceleration and intensification of a racialised spiral of surveillance and counter-surveillance.

This article examines how the smartphone contributes to the co-production of security through an analysis of Covid-19 contact-tracing apps. Building on existing research in security studies that mobilizes the science and technology concept of co-production the article proposes the notion of ‘appropriation’ as a concrete way of extending our understanding of the public/private co-production of security. Appropriation highlights how consumer technology may be repurposed for security and shows how private sector actors that own consumer technology not only influence, but actively condition the co-production of security. Bringing new, typically commercial, concerns to bear on security practices, appropriation also has the effect of complicating conventional understandings of the relationship between liberty and security. Focusing on the NHS Covid-19 app and its contentious relationship with Google/Apple’s framework for digital contact-tracing, the article demonstrates how the smartphone enables private sector actors to gain influence in the security domain. Google and Apple used their control over smartphone technology to compel the British health authorities to adopt a less effective but more privacy-preserving approach than they originally intended, and thus enforced a seemingly liberal response to an exceptional political situation

‘Visual turn’ scholarship in International Relations (IR) acknowledges the importance of new information and communication technology for the production and circulation of images but lacks sustained engagement with the technologies themselves and how they interact with humans in the visual production of security. This article brings the visual turn into conversation with Science and Technology Studies (STS) and mobilises Latour and Woolgar’s notion of inscription to show how the production of visual artefacts and their security effects are conditioned by human/device interaction. It advances the argument that the representational force of a visual artefact is dependent not only on the content and quality of the artefact itself, but also on the specific human/device relations that condition its production. To illustrate this, the article theorises the smartphone as an inscription device and the selfie as an inscription practice and analyses the case of Zelensky’s selfie videos from the first few days after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Selfies inscribe meaning to security issues by mobilising the photographic affordances of indexicality, composition, and reflection in unique ways. Specifically, they focus images on the communicative acts of their producers and play on the relationship between human and device to invoke feelings of immediacy, authenticity, and intimacy.

This thesis examines the smartphone as a security device through a comprehensive summary and four independent papers. The thesis starts from the observation that a central and yet underexplored characteristic of contemporary security politics is that the smartphone, as one especially important piece of consumer technology, is increasingly being transformed into a security device. Given the smartphone’s close connection to the human body and self, and the device’s dominant influence across societal domains, it is crucial to account for how the device operates in security settings and with what consequences. Combining an ‘analytics of security devices’ with the theoretical concepts of materialisation, co-production and inscription taken from Science and Technology Studies (STS), the thesis’ papers address the problem of how to understand the implications of the smartphone’s operation as a security device by providing background on the commercialisation of intelligence and surveillance (paper I), and by offering three different conceptualisations of the smartphone as a security device (papers II, III and IV). The papers also explore and illustrate these conceptualisations through empirical analyses of the smartphone’s role in the Black Lives Matter protests (paper II), the United Kingdom’s Covid-19 track and trace programme (paper III), and President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky’s communication through selfie-videos (paper IV). These case studies examine three important security practices that are enabled by the smartphone – surveillance, resistance and communication – and therefore also highlight how the smartphone mediates relations between a multitude of security actors: states, tech companies, citizens, politicians and audiences. Through these studies, moreover, the thesis shows that the smartphone produces security by (re)locating the practice of security and the negotiation of competing security interests to the human body, and thus makes security dependent on consumerist behaviour. This is politically significant because it entails a redistribution of agency and authority in the security domain, both between humans and machines and between public and private sector actors, which challenges the limits of what a democratic politics can do and what it can mean. 

In this article we explore how Swedish citizens perceive security threats, and how threat perceptions overlap with ideology, trust and demographics. The results show that concerns over security threats are foremost connected to an authoritarian outlook. In addition, four typical groups of security orientations were identifed. On the one end of the spectrum, we found one group with anti-immigrant, anti-feminist and anti-egalitarian opinions and low confdence in media and institutions. At the other end, we identifed a group dominated by women with university degrees, who believe in egalitarian tolerance and display trust in societal institutions. Even though the findings are in line with previous research on the radical right globally, we were intrigued by the existence of a clearly defned group of respondents that oppose feminism to the extent that it is even seen as a security threat. This is particularly striking given that Sweden is thought of as one of the most equal countries in the world, with a government pursuing a feminist foreign policy.

One of the mysteries in contemporary world politics is why in recent years Australia has been leading the world in its hawkish approach to China, its largest trading partner. More than most of its allies, the Australian government seems to regard the China emergency — fuelled by threat perceptions ranging from foreign influence operations to economic coercion — as more pressing than, say, climate change. This article extends and supplants existing explanations of this puzzle by providing a more theoretically oriented account. Situating Australia's China emergency in the context of its ontological (in)security, this article traces the rise of such insecurities and Australia's responses through the conceptual frameworks of state transformation and neoliberal governmentality, which together offer a more socially and historically grounded account of the dynamics of ontological (in)security. The article argues that the China emergency narrative, as a specific routinised form of neoliberal governmentality, both helps sustain Australia's dominant identity construction as a free, democratic, and resilient state, and provides a raison d'être for the national security state that has become part and parcel of the evolving techniques of neoliberal governmentality.

Als ‚gendered Organisation‘ basiert die organisationale Identität des Militärs unter anderem auf dem, was als stereotype Männlichkeit angesehen wird: starke, mutige und zähe Männer repräsentieren den idealen Krieger. Die zunehmende Zahl weiblicher Soldaten bedroht diesen Teil der Organisationsidentität. Soziale Medien wie Instagram dienen als Mittel zur Reflexion der Organisationsidentität. Der folgende Beitrag untersucht daher, wie die Streitkräfte mit der geschlechtsspezifischen Natur des Militärs umgehen, indem er die Darstellung von Frauen auf den Instagram-Profilen der schwedischen und der Schweizer Armee vergleicht. Unter Berücksichtigung des gesellschaftlichen Kontextes sowie der militärischen Besonderheiten beider Länder wird analysiert, ob Geschlechterstereotypen im Militär hervorgehoben oder reduziert werden und wie der weibliche Körper in Bezug auf die militärische Identität behandelt wird. Eine visuelle Inhaltsanalyse der Instagram-Posts aus dem Jahr 2018 zeigt, dass Frauen im Falle der schwedischen Streitkräfte in stereotypen männlichen Rollen dargestellt werden, während die Instagram-Bilder der Schweizer Armee, die Frauen zeigen, stereotype weibliche Attribute hervorheben.

Introduction: Despite the importance of national-level public health agenciesin times of a pandemic, there is limited comparative understanding of their must-have and forgotten pandemic-related communication topics.

Methods: To fill this gap in the literature, this article presents an analysis of COVID related communication topics by national-level health agencies in Italy, Sweden, and the United States using the IDEA (Internalization, Distribution, Explanation,Action) model on crisis message framing. The public health agencies included in the study are the Italian National Institute of Health (Istituto Superiore di Sanità;ISS), the Public Health Agency of Sweden (Folkhälsomyndigheten), and the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the US.

Results: Based on these agencies’ Twitter posts (n = 856) in the first 3 monthsof the pandemic, the article reveals a greater attention paid to action oriented (e.g., disease prevention) and explanatory messages (e.g., disease trends) than to distribution (e.g., transmission) and internalizing messages (e.g., risk factors) inall three countries. The study also highlights dierences in terms of referrals to other communication channels and communication topics, especially in terms of these agencies’ emphasis on individual risk factors (related to the risk of a personsuering from serious COVID-19-related health consequences) and social risk factors (related to the chance of an individual to become infected with COVID-19 because of the social context).

Discussion: The study’s findings call for better incorporation of information that is directly relevant to the receivers (internalizing messages) by public health agencies.

The future risk for droughts and water shortages calls for substantial efforts by authorities to adapt at local levels. Understanding their perception of drought hazards, risk and vulnerability can help to identify drivers of and barriers to drought risk planning and management in achanging climate at the local level. This paper presents a novel interdisciplinary drought case study in Sweden that integrates soft data from a nationwide survey among more than 100 local practitioners and hard data based on hydrological measurements to provide a holistic assessment of the links between drought severity and the perceived levels of drought severity, impacts, preparedness, and management for two consecutive drought events. The paper highlights challenges for drought risk planning and management in a changing climate at the local level and elaborates on how improved understanding of local practitioners to plan for climate change adaptation can be achieved.

Russian information influence as an enduring threatOn February 27 2022, the EU announced that it would ban the Russian state-sponsoredplatforms RT and Sputnik from the European media space. The controversialreaction demonstrates that European politicians take the destructiveness ofauthoritarian states’ international broadcasting seriously. This article addresses thenature of the threat, conceptualised as ‘malign information influence’ (MII): informationsponsored by authoritarian regimes or other hostile actors and projectedthrough international broadcasting outlets across borders. The article exploresreactions to Russian information influence and outlines key problems that it cancause, above all polarisation and the undermining of trust, media and democracy.It exemplifies Russian information influence towards the Ukraine and a number ofother states and exposes different channels, strategies and techniques. Effects arebriefly discussed. The article’s key argument is that information influence shouldnot be reduced to a problem of sudden ‘campaigns’ or ‘operations’. It is an enduring,long term, threat.