![]() Here, industrialists and spokespersons continue to exploit and reconstruct the historical Swedish nation-brand of being “innovators”, “humanitarians”, and somehow “neutral”. These technologies, I argue, are both associated with or feeding into military production, and tend to become wielded socio-politically in controversial arms export contexts. Moreover, I demonstrate how the major arms industry in Sweden has come to expand increasingly into “civil”- or “societal” security technologies, including products and services for surveillance and border control. The legal arrangement interlinking the fields of Swedish and US security practitioners, for example, is designed as a science and technology agreement but may just as well include counterterrorism cooperation, information sharing, and political opportunities. For example, I show how Swedish actors, including spokespersons coming from the state and its bureaucracies, have begun cooperating and competing in a more directly transnational context, and how their professional struggles and stakes are increasingly located in, framed as, or disguised by R&D in the security area. In the dissertation, I aim to render visible some key effects of these recent transformations of security and defence fields. Exploring these empirical issues, I draw on the works of Bourdieu and other critical thinkers and social theorists, and employ a perspective of field economies and symbolic power in order to offer a more profound reading of what is often imprecisely referred to as military-industrial complexes, and how these are changing in late modern societies. This transforming field is not only heterogeneous in how it mobilises both public spokespersons and private companies from both the civil- and military domains, but it is also distinctively situated in the larger context of Europe and its security industry that has emerged in similar ways in recent years in line with the ongoing militarisation of Europe and strengthening of the EU’s external borders and surveillance systems. Specifically, I analyse emerging actors and technologies positioned in the sociohistorical context of Sweden in the 90s and 00s, and how new threats and risks as well as new ideas for how to secure society became constructed and imposed in structures of so-called total defence that is, in the strong historical traditions in Sweden of war preparedness and domestic arms production. ![]() This dissertation investigates the recent transformations of security practice and arms industries in post-Cold War societies. We organise that framework around three central questions, which we present in the conclusion of the chapter. That includes outlining the book’s analytical framework to allow authors, starting with the core problematique of a Nordic Model for societal security, to explore whether unique histories, concepts and contexts allow us to generalize approaches to ‘societal security’ in the Nordic region. We then look into patterns of convergence, including a general push by some officials and scholars to promote a binding concept for the Nordic region. We outline the contours of what a Nordic Model might entail, demonstrating the tendency to conflate welfare models with security approaches. ![]() After framing the argument, the chapter makes clear the terms of our analysis and how we propose to explore the idea of a Nordic Model for understanding Nordic security approaches. This introduction chapter establishes the importance of delving deeper into the various ways that security has been conceptualised and acted upon in the Nordic region, with the goal to identify patterns of convergence and divergence. The entire book is available Open Access at. This chapter serves as the introduction to the edited book Nordic Societal Security.
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