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This chapter will contribute to the debate on understanding victory and defeat in modern war. Currently, scholars, governments, and international organizations debate how to manage great power competition and non-military warfare However, determining victory and defeat is difficult in ambiguous and long-lasting conflicts or even rivalries. If we do not understand what constitutes victory and defeat in non-military war, we can never properly assess the threat from this type of warfare or properly devise strategies to manage them. Moreover, not recognizing victory or defeat could unnecessarily prolong rivalries and possibly even set the stage for further escalation.

Western military organizations are widely held to be poor innovators – processoriented, resistant to change, and slow to learn, traits they share with other largebureaucratic organizations. This article argues that a particular knowledge ideal inmilitary organizations founded on the four interrelated biases of action, relevance,conflict, and hierarchy (ARCH), hinders criticism, in turn thwarting innovation. ARCHserves to collectively discourage criticism on the individual level; on the organizationallevel, it prevents criticism serving as mechanism of self-correction. Using thematicanalysis, these biases are identified through a most-different research design,comparing the military doctrines of the United States and Sweden. ARCH reflectsand reinforces a dominant Western vision of how war is waged. Improvements in theorganizational capacity for innovation may require a revision of institutional beliefs ofmilitary efficiency and warfare.

How should the diversity of Nordic War/Military Studies be explained? Despite having experienced similar external shocks to international security since the end of the Cold War, and notwithstanding their relative cultural homogeneity, university environments throughout the Nordic states have developed diverging conceptualizations of War/Military Studies. We demonstrate that this variation can be explained in terms of supply and demand factors in relation to teacher expertise and target professions for students, with proximity to the military profession as a main factor. This affect whether the subjects focus on the conduct of war or include issues in relation to the full “conflict cycle.” In addition, whereas we identify a Nordic consensus in favor of multi-disciplinary conceptualization of War/Military Studies, we find that constraining regulations for accreditation can motivate more mono-disciplinary conceptualizations. We argue that the examined factors can explain broad categorizations of conceptualization of Nordic War/Military Studies, but that further research should investigate the role of individual entrepreneurs and bureaucracy to flesh out disciplinary trajectories at the individual institutions. In conclusion, we propose that Nordic War/Military studies have the potential to converge on a shared ontological and epistemological approach, but that the field is best served by affirming divergent disciplinary foci and breadth.

What is the strategic logic of so-called ‘total defence’? At first glance, total defence may appear as one coherent strategic concept. Indeed, it was predominantly small, non-aligned states that pursued total defence during the Cold War. In this article, however, we demonstrate that depending on how ‘total war’ is understood, there are subsequently different strategic logics ingrained in total defence. We show this by developing a typology of different total defences; and by empirically illustrating variation in strategic logics over time through a historical analysis of the total defence(s) in Sweden. Recognising the inherent variation of total defence is important since it helps us to understand that hidden behind a nominal pursuit of a total defence strategy are multifaceted strategies.

Who will win the war in Ukraine? For centuries the outcome of war has been described in terms of victory and defeat. Since the Russian invasion began in February 2022, scores of articles in the daily press have touched on the issue of the Ukraine war. At the same time, an increasing number of analysts and scholars argue that the concepts victory/defeat are not the most adequate to describe the outcomes of several modern wars. It is empirically rare with unequivocal outcomes where one side unconditionally surrenders and war almost never follows a clear template. Superpowers are seemingly defeated by poor developing countries and planned blitzkrieg operations get stuck in the mud and lack of maintenance. At the same time, it is easy to see that there is a significant interest for the parties involved in a war to continue using the concepts victory/defeat because one of the few things that can legitimize the enormous costs of that war is precisely victory. In this text, the outcome of the Ukraine war – as it looks like in early 2023 – is analyzed according to Johnson and Tierney’s model of the so-called score-keeping and match-fixing.

The existence of a clear-cut division between “civil and military” is in many ways a foundation for international law and diplomacy. It is also a given starting point in many studies on current issues relating to war and peace, as well as in historical interpretations of past conflicts. Yet the civil–military dichotomy is not always a useful way of approaching complex matters, and by adopting such a starting point, some issues risk being overlooked. There are numerous historical examples, from the American Civil War, to wars of national liberation ending colonialization, to insurrections shaking political status quo such as the Marxist–Leninist revolutions; all illustrate that neither the agents of war nor the victims fit neatly into one of two clear categories. In a contemporary setting, non-traditional forms of warfare that make use of cyber space or autonomous systems further serves not only to undermine ideas of internal–external security but also to blur the distinction between civil and military. In the everyday making and implementation of policy, these concepts are indeed fluid and the borders between them highly variable, continuously contested, and renegotiated. As concepts, they can be seen as co-constitutive in the everyday usage. Civil and military are therefore best understood as norms, whose contents and interrelationship are contextually determined. At the same time, civil and military are organizational principles of the state, and as such the distinction is, arguably, too important, too deep-seated within the modern state- system, and too engrained in how legal and political order are understood to disappear in the near future.