Oscar Larsson

Oscar Larsson
Swedish Defence University | SEDU · Department of Political Science

PhD
check out greyzone genomics theme: https://www.pi.lu.se/en/themes-0/greyzone-genomics

About

48
Publications
31,934
Reads
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414
Citations
Introduction
Oscar Larsson completed his PhD in Political Science at Uppsala University in 2015. The thesis concerned (meta-)governance and collaboration in Swedish crisis management. Governance, power and collaboration are the central starting points for Oscar's research efforts after the dissertation. He has done researched on governance and collaboration between public and private partners in segregated urban environments, rural integration, in dealing with trafficking victims, and in crisis management. For the past two years, research has focused on sovereign power, national security and civilian preparedness. Oscar is also interested in philosophy of science and social constructivism. He has published articles on how ideas, institutions and discourses can have structuring effects on actors.
Additional affiliations
November 2019 - December 2025
Swedish Defence University
Position
  • Professor (Assistant)
January 2017 - July 2017
Uppsala University
Position
  • Acting Assistant professor
January 2015 - present
Uppsala University
Position
  • Master Course Qualitative Methods
Description
  • Various qualitative methods and Philosophy of Social Sciences

Publications

Publications (48)
Article
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Colin Hay’s and Vivien Schmidt’s responses to my previous critical engagement with their respective versions of neo-institutionalism raise the issue of how scholars may account for the ideational power of political processes and how ideas may generate both stability and change. Even though Hay, Schmidt, and I share a common philosophical ground in...
Article
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Contemporary liberal and democratic states have 'securitized' a growing number of issues by advancing the notion of societal security. This is coupled with a proactive stance and the conception of building societal resilience in order to withstand future crises and disturbances. The preemptive logic of contemporary security and crisis management ca...
Article
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The notion of civil society, as an ontologically distinct sphere, separated from the state thereby serves as an antidote to the sovereign power of the state. Since the 1990s, we have seen reforms and organizational structures that advances the role of the market as well as the civil society along with a voluntary sector, often with the deliberate a...
Article
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The Covid-19 pandemic that emerged in the spring of 2020 caused severe political, social, and economic turmoil throughout the world. In spite of early warning signals from the World Health Organization, countries struggled to shape their policy responses and countermeasures for curtailing the spread of the virus while also minimizing the damage tha...
Article
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 dom...
Chapter
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NATO is often described as a military defense alliance. It is natural that such a system makes demands on its member states regarding the size of their military forces and defense budgets and, to some extent, on the orientation of their foreign and defense policies. But what changes might NATO membership bring to the civil state administration of t...
Article
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Regeringsformen fyller 50 år och är vid sidan av successionsordningen (1810), tryckfrihetsförordningen (1949) och yttrandefrihetsgrundlagen (1991) den grundlag som reglerar den exekutiva makten i Sverige. Den tyska filosofen och politiska teoretikern Carl Schmitt1 har problematiserat förhållandet mellan den exekutiva makten och den politiska rättso...
Article
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Although grey zone and hybrid threats, such as cyberattacks, information campaigns, and sabotage against critical infrastructure, are becoming increasingly common in the contemporary world, relatively little attention has been directed to similar threats in the maritime environment. The recent global pandemic, Russian aggression against Ukraine, th...
Conference Paper
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A security discourse that resides upon the concepts of the grey zone and hybrid threats is currently emerging among international security actors and policy-makers. In the current security environment, it is assumed that antagonistic actors threaten democratic states through a range of hybrid threats aimed at instilling confusion and inertia concer...
Chapter
This chapter aims to explain what post-structuralism is* and what kind of analysis that it offers to political sociology. Post-structuralists, within the field of discourse analysis, do not search for the essential nature of things, but rather for how the "things" are constituted through language and meaning-making, and thereby brought into being...
Article
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The aim of this article is to assess how the European Union advances its role as a global security actor and how it deploys the military forces provided by the member states. Tracing the current debate of the identity and means of the European Union, we analyze the two maritime operations, EU NAVFOR Somalia (Operation Atalanta) and EUNAVFOR MED (Op...
Article
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Many countries in the “Global North” that have enjoyed relative food security for a number of decades now face challenges that may lead to disturbances in food supplies. Global markets and global flows are not as self-evident as they were a few years ago and new modes of governance for managing national food security during crisis are required. Rec...
Chapter
Poststructural and other critical and nonfoundational approaches to International Relations have embraced governmentality as an analytical perspective to understand emergent problems in the international sphere. The possibility of understanding various forms of power that are more mundane and granular than sovereign power has been valuable to our u...
Article
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Two long-term trends characterized the response to the influx of asylum seekers in rural Sweden in 2015. First, current integration policies with an increasing focus on the individual migrant, especially in relation to education, employment and housing, provided the framework for the response. Second, the shift of rural governance from state contro...
Article
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The technocratic dimension of government—its reliance upon knowledge claims, usually in scientific guise—is of great importance if we wish to understand modern power and governance. In Power Without Knowledge: A Critique of Technocracy, Jeffrey Friedman investigates the often-overlooked question of the relationship between technocratic knowledge/po...
Book
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This book uses the very latest research to examine current interactions between religion, migration and existential wellbeing. In particular, it demonstrates the role of religion and religious organizations in the social, medical and existential wellbeing of immigrants within their host societies. By focusing on the role and politics of religion an...
Chapter
This book aims to engage with one of the more pressing issues in the contemporary world, namely migration, either forced or voluntary. It intends to do so by focusing on the wellbeing of migrants and the role of religion in processes of integration in host societies. The book brings together researchers from various disciplines taking on the challe...
Chapter
This concluding chapter of the edited volume provides empirical and theoretical insights on the topics and contributions of the individual chapters. At the core of the argument and purpose of the book was an interest to identify and discuss the conditions of co-existence and solidarity among different groups in society, as well as how individuals c...
Article
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The use of collaborations and partnerships that engage a variety of actors from both the public and private spheres has drawn attention during the last decade as a promising strategy for combatting trafficking and improving assistance to victims of trafficking. This article investigates the Swedish Civil Society Platform against Human Trafficking a...
Technical Report
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This report explores reception policies, practices and humanitarian responses to the current refugee crisis in Sweden, focusing on the aftermath of 2015 unprecedented refugee migration, and also providing a brief historical perspective. Sweden has been known as one of the most generous countries in terms of welcoming refugees and providing an easy...
Article
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Citizen Swedish security-and crisis management has since the beginning of the 1990s experienced discursive and organizational changes which has given rise to substantial shifts in responsibility-from state to individuals. This article aims to analyze and discuss the shift as well as the strategies deployed by the state to encourage crisis awareness...
Article
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Network governance has moved from being an analytical approach to an institutionalized way of managing public problems. This has given rise to a meta-governance stance in which collaboration by design is sought by governing authorities. Network governance has thus become a highly regarded practice that governs by means of formal autonomy, freedom,...
Chapter
Security and citizenship are closely connected concepts, but their complicated relations have received scant attention in security studies. This is perhaps more understandable in respect to traditional and conventional security studies, which were concerned with how states interacted through “high politics,” military capability, and various allianc...
Article
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Efforts to strategically implement governance reforms have become a common way in which to deal with complex social and political issues. The analysis presented in this article addresses recent governance reforms in Malmö, Sweden, that are intended to help resolve complex problems of urban segregation and social inequality. The article identifies i...
Article
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Sweden is well-known as the first country in the world to adopt client criminalization in the effort to control and eventually eliminate prostitution. Less known and discussed is the emergence of extensive collaborative governance arrangements that serve as complements to the legal framework. The aim of this article is to provide new knowledge as i...
Article
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This is an (extensive) review of Assembling neoliberalism: expertise, practices and subjects, edited by Vaughan Higgins and Wendy Larner, New York, NY, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, 331 pp., € 117.69 (hardback), ISBN 9781137582034 Hopefully it will be OA in the near future, until then use this link. https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/cGfCdr9RGm3G8Thhf...
Article
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The aim of this paper is to investigate the changing relations between individuals and public authorities within the Swedish crisis management system from 1995 to 2017. After the end of the Cold War, Sweden adopted a broader understanding of security that utilizes alternative governance strategies beyond sovereign means and focuses upon domestic se...
Chapter
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The nature of crisis requires collaborating partners to communicate effectively with each other in order to make informed decisions under conditions of uncertainty and to engage and call upon the assistance of additional actors in the security network to mitigate, prepare for, respond, and recover from crisis. To the extent that an actor, public or...
Article
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The lack of normative and ethical standpoints provided by Michel Foucault have been a source of confusion, debate and inquiry by a wide set of scholars. Foucault explicitly refrained from providing a normative theory regarding how power cold be organized. Richard A. Lynch offers a compelling excursion on this topic and explores Foucault’s own writi...
Article
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It is well recognized that contemporary crisis call for collaborative efforts across both organizational and jurisdictional boundaries. One of the key challenges for governments and public authorities responsible for organizing crisis management is to find adequate ways in which they can support decentralized and collaborative responses. This effor...
Conference Paper
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The purpose of this paper is to theorize the shifting relationship between public authorities and individuals in the Swedish crisis management system 1995-2017. Sweden has adopted a wider understanding of security and have an extensive focus on domestic security and protection of vital systems while applying alternative governance strategies beyond...
Article
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Network governance, which involves an informal and self-regulated set of public and private actors, who together address various political and social problems, has substantially altered the institutional landscape concerning the formation and implementation of public policy. A common view is that this has made it possible to enhance pluralism and d...
Conference Paper
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Research over the past two decades has focused on the shift that has taken place from municipal government to urban governance, which has been accompanied by questions concerning democratic accountability. But as policy makers and administrators have become increasingly familiar with governance, public actors have strategically chosen to engage in...
Conference Paper
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Governmentality studies have successfully explored the underlying rationality of political rule beyond the use of sovereign instruments by examining how government relies upon specific discourses, knowledge claims, subjectivities, and a productive conceptualization of power. I claim in this article that (network) governance has moved from being an...
Book
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Meta-governance recently emerged in the field of governance as a new approach which claims that its use enables modern states to overcome problems associated with network governance. This thesis shares the view that networks are an important feature of contemporary politics which must be taken seriously, but it also maintains that networks pose sub...
Article
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Colin Hay's constructivist institutionalism and Vivien A. Schmidt's discursive institutionalism are two recent attempts to theorize ideas as potential explanations of institutional change. This new attention to the causal role of ideas is welcome, but Hay and Schmidt do not take into consideration the constitutive and structural aspects of ideas. I...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
How can ideas help us explain political change? Colin Hay’s Constructivist Institutionalism and Vivien A. Schmidt’s Discursive Institutionalism are two recent frameworks that have theorized ideas as potential explanations of institutional change rather than stability. This new attention to the analytical role of ideas is welcome, but Hay and Schmid...
Chapter
Full-text available
(The text is in Swedish) This chapter investigates the erection and implementation of a new radio system in Sweden. The radio-system is called RAKEL and is to be used for security-communication. The Swedish state utilizes a range of meta-governance tools to get public and private actors connected to the system. I identify three ideals that are inco...
Article
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This article argues that existent critique against the discourse and practice of governance by networks fails to consider the more substantial political challenges that such a style of governance generates. By not addressing the depoliticization claims present in the discourse of governance by networks there is a continuation of the seemingly attra...

Questions

Questions (8)
Question
Help needed,
if I wish to find out if the EU has used force or performed violations of sovereignty of third countries during their naval operations, Atalanta and Sophia, where should I search to find reliable info?
any additional information beyond official web pages and reports (even if I would be happy to learn about those) is most welcome!
Any sort of research, books, chapters, articles on any of these two operations please alert me.
Question
Recently came across the concept of anthropocene in social science and philosophy but unsure how to relate to it, what is the added value from a social constructivist and/or critical perspective ?
Question
Have you or are you relating to the work of Niklas Luhmann, especially Law as a social system?
Question
Sounds like a grand project but there is already an existent and relevant literature that has developed and contiously advance post-structuralism in social and political theory? what is it that you find inadequeta with the existent literature and how do you wish to advance it? I will follow your project with great interest! May I end with some self-promotion of a recent article of mine that is highly related to your topic. It is listed here on RG but I also give you a pdf-file. All the best,
Oscar

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