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This chapter advances embodiment as both a research topic and a method in the military humanities. Embodied experiences of servicemembers have been explored in a wide range of disciplines, yet embodiment in war and military training has not been viewed as a coherent field of inquiry. Drawing on a hermeneutic approach, the chapter highlights the centrality of exploration and the ways in which the researcher's embodied experiences may serve as a methodological tool for interpretation. The main part of the chapter consists of the authors’ auto-reflection on their own and each other’s publications, elaborating on how embodiment, first, has guided their research processes, and second, affects the reading itself. The findings show that the author’s own experiences of intimacy and emotional understandings served as methodological foci and returned as analytical themes in their empirical studies. The findings and developed approach have implications for the military humanities, as they offer new ways to inquire into and understand the military profession and servicemembers’ experiences. By foregrounding the life-worlds of servicemembers, the findings also have implications for servicemembers themselves, highlighting the ever-present human needs that military organizations ought to include in their understandings of personnel.

This article interrogates how the UN forces’ engagement in heavy fighting in Congo 1961 was narrated in Swedish radio at the time. Drawing on previous research on the act of listening and the affective framing of war engagements, it explores how the violent hostilities were experienced by those living the ‘long peace’ back in Sweden. The analysis elaborates on how radio broadcastings convey and/or engender feelings of presence and intimacy, suspense and sorrow, fear and estrangement, pride and national belonging. By doing so, it brings into view one of the many peripheral and often hidden, though enduring, Cold War histories.

Given its history of more than 200 years of peace, few countries in Europe have waited for war as long as Sweden. The Swedish military experience in modern history is thus one of endlessly waiting – of preparing for war but not fighting it. To find oneself ‘stuck’ in a space between war and peace is essentially a Swedish experience that cuts across time, and which has affected soldiers and military as well as society at large. As part of a larger research project on military boredom in the Swedish past and present, the present study explores how military inactivity and waiting affect notions of soldier identity, masculinity, feelings of meaningfulness, military ideals and morale. The paper outlines the theoretical points of departure and research design for a diary study with Swedish soldiers currently employed by the Swedish army. 

This article interrogates how the shift to a more robust mandate in Bosnia was made intelligible to the Swedish TV audience. The turn to peace-enforcement and NATO command in December 1995 represented a clear break with Swedish tradition and identity, and essentially signified a turning point in Sweden’s policy on the use of force. The analysis reveals how four characterizations of the Swedish UN soldiers served to make sense of recent events and ultimately paved way for future policy changes; throughout the six-month period under scrutiny, the depictions, very broadly, moved from weak soldiers and failed warriors, to honourable peacekeepers and unique combat soldiers. The Swedish peacekeeper figure is thus reconstructed, essentially accommodating an increased involvement in activities of peace-enforcement and war-like operations.

This article constitutes an addition to the scant literature on military boredom. It offers a close reading of field reports written by Swedish military chaplains during the Second World War and seeks to explore the lived experience of waiting for war. It analyses how the military inactivity of Swedish soldiers were depicted and how it was thought to impact morale and motivation. This article showcases how military boredom may be studied through archival research and how the study of boredom as a military phenomenon benefits from an exploration of various kinds of experiences, on as well as (far) off the battlefield.

The present article advances a conceptual framework for the critical study of the representation of war and military violence. Essentially, it offers a conceptualization of dis/appearances of violence in public discourse, which combines the concepts of in/visibilization, de/naturalization, and dis/identification. Though they overlap and interweave in terms of what they capture, all three are considered relevant to fully elaborate how violence may dis/appear in narratives on war-like operations. Furthermore, the article exemplifies how one may make use of the conceptual framework, by exploring the representation of violence in Swedish public political debate at the time of active engagement in peace-enforcement and offensive military operations. More specifically, the empirical illustration critically examines the parliamentary debates on ONUC in Congo 1960-1964 and ISAF in Afghanistan 2002-2014. The analysis reveals and details how violence continuously tends to disappear as a reality, as a dilemma and/or as Sweden's own practice and choice. At present, the scholarly debate mainly focuses on the US or the UK. To advance our understanding of the ways in which violence is normalized and made possible, we need refined conceptual tools that allow us to explore the complexity and political work of representations of war and violence in various contexts. 

The chapter critically engages with the literature on combat motivation, morale, and cohesion; it contends that historical and contemporary scholarly debates on why soldiers fight have largely overlooked and diminished the role of society and socio-political discourses, whilst keeping an unnecessarily narrow focus on the here and now of combat. Inspired by critical war studies and the cultural study of war, the chapter encourages students, scholars, and practitioners to consider and problematize the home/front relationship and its practical implications for military operations. It accentuates that the will to fight is constantly in the making, inherently unstable, and always already socially and historically situated; fundamentally, the will to fight is contingent on (shifting) notions of legitimacy in society at large, whereas public discourse in turn is shaped by the experience of combat and its representations. Thus, interlinkages between society’s and soldiers’ construction of meaning are worth uncovering and theorizing further.