Current deterrence strategies have long been adapted to the binary conflict spectrum that assumes a clear line between peace and war. However, the nature of war has shifted, which means that aggressions take place below the established boundary of an armed attack. The objective of the study is therefore to trace whether there are Swedish strategies to deter aggressions that takes place below the threshold of an armed attack in strategic policy documents. To do this, the study conducts a qualitative text analysis of strategic documents using a theoretical framework where principles for deterring an attacker between peace and war are analyzed against the documents.
The results show that there are traces of strategies to deter aggressions that takes place below the threshold of an armed attack. These include cooperation between authorities, resilience through total defense and credibly enabling the escalation of the use of force from peace to war. The findings from the strategic documents also highlights a wide range of problems with the new type of assaults. Normality, security crisis and armed attack reflect the same types of aggressions in the documents, which makes it problematic to really know where the line is drawn for an armed attack. Furthermore, there is a need for a broader view where Sweden needs to regulate the powers of military forces and other authorities, while developing the deterrence strategy for a multi-dimensional conflict spectrum.