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Sweden, military intervention and the loss of memory
... Sweden's external self-narrative has been normatively couched within its 200-year history of peace, UN activism, internationalist tradition, support for international law and proportionately generous provisions of overseas development assistance (Bergman Rosamond 2015;Agius 2006) and more recently the adoption of a feminist platform for the conduct of foreign policy (Aggestam and Bergman Rosamond 2016). Scholars have identified a link between Swedish internationalism and peace-orientated foreign policy and its security doctrine of non-alignment, and previously neutrality (Bergman Rosamond and Agius 2018). ...
... Moreover, there is a tendency within the Swedish military to assume a strong link between the values and norms underpinning Swedish 'everyday life', and its efforts to promote peace, human rights, and democracy through its global military commitments (Statens Offentliga Utredningar 2014, 187). There is, however, less self-reflection on how Swedish military engagements overseas for the sake of promoting human rights and peace in places like Afghanistan might also be construed as western interventionism, with Swedish soldiers offering protection in a masculinist sense (Agius 2018) to suffering others in faraway places (Bergman Rosamond and Kronsell 2018;Bergman Rosamond and Agius 2018). Still, the Swedish military has sought to gender mainstream its military institutions, most importantly, by recruiting more women to international operations, which is in line with its ardent support for the United Nations Women, Peace and Security agenda (Kronsell 2012;Bergman Rosamond and Kronsell 2018;Försvarsberedningen 2004; Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs 2016; Government Offices of Sweden 2018; Statens Offentliga Utredningar 2014, 27). ...
... Such, traumatic experiences in Afghanistan were rarely debated before Sweden adopted an official veteran policy in 2010 (Interview 1 2016) -it sought to mobilize support for soldiers who had served abroad and who had encountered and been part of violent practices while doing so. The shift towards cosmopolitan notions of responsibility within the Swedish armed forces facilitated this move, with an increasing number of soliders having taken part in war-like operations, involving robust peacekeeping (Bergman Rosamond and Agius 2018). Against the backdrop of that development, it was no longer as controversial to commemorate the otherregarding acts of Swedish veterans (Statens Offentliga Utredningar 2007, 77, 2007. ...
This article aims to enable a conversation between cosmopolitan thought, with focus on individual ethical experiences and reflections, and research on embodied military experiences. While we derive our ethical reasoning from cosmopolitanism, we concede that it lacks sensitivity to individuals’ other-regarding reflections and acts. Moreover, it does not sufficiently problematize the ways in which cosmopolitan deliberations are mediated in consideration of other desires and interests – what we define as mediated cosmopolitanism. To illustrate and substantiate our theoretical claims we draw on a selection of interviews and other material. We provide a two-step analysis, first by identifying the key themes in Sweden’s cosmopolitan military self-narrative, enabling us to determine the extent to which it intersects with individual veterans’ ethical reflections. Second, we conduct a discursive analysis of veterans’ embodied ethical reflections, that have emerged from their participation in international operations. We identify a cosmopolitan sense of obligation amongst Swedish veterans across our material, with such individuals articulating a wish to do good beyond borders. Notions of cosmopolitan responsibility, moreover, arise from veterans’ actual human encounters with civilians on the ground and through support for small-scale aid projects. However, veterans’ ethical reflections are rarely purely cosmopolitan, rather mediated through their wish to serve the nation, support fellow soldiers as a key part of the operation, acquiring new professional skills and the desire to seek new adventures. We argue that the concept of mediated cosmopolitanism captures such mixed ethical sentiments and embodied experiences. We conclude by summarizing our key arguments.
... 59 Nonetheless, Sweden continuously maintained that its involvement in Afghanistan was a peace operation, informed by cosmopolitan ethical ambitions, rather than an attempt to align itself with NATO, despite its contribution being of a 'robust' nature. 60 Thus, the NATO-Sweden partnership is complex, with many of the stories centring on practical cooperation, rather than being driven by shared strategic values. 61 Below, we discuss the broad contours of Sweden's adoption of an FFP in 2014-a shift that was rooted in the country's support for the WPS agenda. ...
Sweden was the first state to adopt a Feminist Foreign Policy (FFP) in 2014, drawing on its state feminist tradition and support for the United Nations' Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda. Yet following the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and Sweden's move to seek NATO membership—abandoning its policy of non-alignment—a gendered silence on FFP pervaded. Significantly, this therefore predated the official abandonment of FFP following the election of a new government in October 2022. NATO membership was viewed as incompatible with FFP. Yet, NATO has long sought to project itself as a gender-just actor, including through engagement with the WPS agenda culminating in its inclusion in the 2022 Strategic Concept. Further, Sweden—as a NATO partner—had been a stalwart of the alliance's work on WPS. This article contributes to understanding the role of gendered silences in shaping strategic narratives, in this case concerning Sweden's NATO membership bid. It provides insight for policy-makers and diplomats on the impact gendered silence can have on the wider efficacy of FFP and WPS, even during processes such as NATO enlargement which might otherwise be viewed as ‘gender neutral’, particularly when imbued with urgency.
The article emphasises the challenges in the implementation of gender equality-focused policies in military missions and demonstrates the backlash these policies can create in everyday social interaction in military missions. A qualitative method of thematic analysis was used to study 17 in-depth interviews with former civilian and military personnel in the International Security Assistance Force and Resolute Support Mission in Afghanistan. The discursive exploratory analysis displayed that normative masculine constructions foster an environment in which women are perceived as: a threat to the unit they are part of; disruptive to male bonding in the unit; an objectified body; and an essential part of the successful mission in Afghanistan. Gender equality-focused policies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization face resistance in implementation because they threaten resources perceived greatly important in the organisation: normative masculine constructions. The military fails in attempts to manage diversity, and the military culture further values and reinforces sameness.
Gender justice and equality have risen to prominence in the constitution of foreign and security policy. This article locates the analysis of feminist foreign policy (FFP) within the wider context of Sweden's state feminist tradition as well as its pursuit of “gender cosmopolitanism” in global politics. Both “gender cosmopolitanism” and Sweden's state feminist tradition provided fertile ground for the formal adoption of FFP in 2014. The article employs poststructural discursive techniques that enable the identification of the statist feminist and cosmopolitan foundations of feminist foreign policy. More specifically, the article provides a discursive analysis of the ethical and feminist ambitions, normative contents, and pitfalls of FFP. Though FFP is grounded in other-regarding cosmopolitan care for vulnerable women and girls beyond borders, it exhibits a range of pitfalls and inconsistencies, such as equating gender with women and, at times, privileging results-oriented strategies over thoroughgoing gender analysis of structural injustices such as gendered violence. The article ends with a discussion of Sweden's attempts to translate the feminist and cosmopolitan contents of FFP commitments into policy practice, with a focus on the eradication of gender-based violence.
Sweden’s feminist foreign policy is founded on the broad idea that gender equality is central to security. This article focuses on how the politicisation of this gender-security nexus is discursively articulated and practiced in the case of feminist foreign policy. The problematic is unpacked by analysing the politicisation of the women, peace and security agenda and global gender mainstreaming. To empirically illustrate the gender-security nexus more specifically, we analyse how these politicisation processes are reflected in Sweden’s support for global peace diplomacy and gender protection. The article concludes by offering three final remarks. First, Sweden’s feminist foreign policy is an expression of several, at times competing, forms of political rationality. Second, while the fluctuation between de-politicisation and re-politicisation of security may seem productive in terms of policy outcome it can also create contradictions and ambiguities in regards to feminist foreign policy practice. One such outcome is the tendency to conflate gender and women across a number of de-politicised policy initiatives launched by the Swedish government. Third, the re-politicisation and contestation of the gender-security nexus is likely to increase in the coming decades because of shifting global power configurations in the global world order.
This book presents new developments in Scandinavian memory cultures related to World War II and the Holocaust by combining this focus with the perspective of history didactics. The theoretical framework of historical consciousness offers an approach linking individual and collective uses and re-uses of the past to the question how history can and should be taught. It also offers some examples of good practice in this field. The book promotes a teaching practice which, in taking the social constructivist notions of historical consciousness as a starting point, can contribute to self-reflecting and critical thinking - being fundamental for any democratic political culture.
This chapter argues that the way that assemblage is employed as a loose metaphor almost deprives it of any theoretical meaning. In contrast, other intellectual projects claim that assemblage is more than a metaphor, it is a promising theoretical source of inspiration for developing new frameworks of research. In this chapter I argue that it is important to reflect on the different potentials of these projects. Contrary to Sassen, I argue for engaging in more depth with Deleuzian assemblage thinking. Against De Landa, I argue that formulating a consistent theory of assemblage and remaining on the philosophical level is misleading. Partaking with Collier and Ong, I argue that assemblage thinking implies an empiricist project, providing a parsimonious and open ontological vocabulary meaningful for conducting empirical research.
Politicians frequently make use of mythologized understandings of the past to mobilize memory as an instrument of politics in the present. Despite the postwar “memory boom”, collective remembrance remains a slippery concept. In politics, collective memory exerts its influence both from the bottom up, as interpretations of the past affect the identities and understandings of political elites, as well as from the top down, as statements by public figures place certain events into the national consciousness while silencing or forgetting others. In addition to summarizing the existing literature, this integrative review proposes a discursive conception of the politics of memory. I argue that research into political memory should focus on (1) the substantive content of collective memory as expressed by actors within state institutions and (2) on the interactive channels through which ideas about the past are conveyed, disputed, silenced, and negotiated outside these formal settings. I substantiate this argument – and demonstrate the relevance of collective remembrance to politics – by drawing examples of the role that memories of World War II continue to play Italian and Slovenian internal politics, as well as in their relations with each other.
This chapter examines the role of phenotype in the way Chineseness as an identity is constructed both in the public and private sphere. Essentialised constructions of Chineseness are contrasted with hybridised constructions of Chineseness. The chapter problematises the homogeneity of Chineseness yet recognises that stereotypes and ethnic group categories persist and inform our everyday lives. Framed around Rogers Brubaker’s Ethnicity without groups and Fredrik Barth’s Ethnic groups and boundaries, this chapter explores how bounded ethnic groups continue to be treated as entities and, at the same time, recognises that such ethnic boundaries are permeable. Phenotype or physical features are perpetuated and reinforced as markers of ethnic identity among Australian-born Chinese through the racialisation of identity, the perceived stigma of being Chinese, the fostering of stereotypes and being perceived as a perpetual outsider. How the individual reacts to the essentialisation of ethnic identity depends upon the intersectionality of a range of conditions and this chapter considers the various outcomes of ethnic identity construction.
The 1948 war led to the creation of the state of Israel, the fragmentation of Palestine, and to a conflict which has raged across the intervening sixty years. The historical debate likewise continues and these debates are encapsulated in the second edition of The War for Palestine, updated to include chapters on Saudi Arabia and Lebanon. In a preface to this edition, the editors survey the state of scholarship in this contested field. The impact of these debates goes well beyond academia. There is an important link between the state of Arab-Israeli relations and popular attitudes towards the past. A more complex and fair-minded understanding of that past is essential for preserving at least the prospect of reconciliation between Arabs and Israel in the future. The rewriting of the history of 1948 thus remains a practical as well as an academic imperative.
This book investigates the role of irregular migrants in the transformation of citizenship, and argues that irregular status is an immanent (rather than aberrant) condition of global capitalism, one that is formed by the fast-tracked processes of globalization. It describes how irregular migrants complicate the boundaries of citizenship and stretch the parameters of political belonging. It explains that this group is comprised of refugees, asylum seekers, “illegal” labor migrants, and stateless persons, and argues that they occupy new sovereign spaces that generate new subjectivities. The book casts irregular migrants as more than mere victims of sovereign power, shuttled from one location to the next. Incorporating examples from the United States, Australia, and France, it shows how migrants reject their position as “illegal” outsiders and make claims on the communities in which they live and work. It says that, for these migrants, outsider status operates as both a mode of subjectification and as a site of active resistance, forcing observers to rethink the enactment of citizenship. The book connects irregular migrant activism to the complex rescaling of the neoliberal state. Mapping the broad dynamics of political belonging in a neoliberal era, the book provides an insight into the social and spatial transformation of citizenship, sovereignty, and power.
How has memory - collective and individual - influenced European politics after the Second World War and after 1989 in particular? How has the past been used in domestic struggles for power, and how have 'historical lessons' been applied in foreign policy? While there is now a burgeoning field of social and cultural memory studies, mostly focused on commemorations and monuments, this volume is the first to examine the connection between memory and politics directly. It investigates how memory is officially recast, personally reworked and often violently re-instilled after wars, and, above all, the ways memory shapes present power constellations. The chapters combine theoretical innovation in their approach to the study of memory with deeply historical, empirically based case studies of major European countries. The volume concludes with reflections on the ethics of memory, and the politics of truth, justice and forgetting after 1945 and 1989.
Only recently have international relations scholars started to seriously examine the influence of collective memory on foreign policy formation and relations between states and peoples. The ways in which the memories of past events are interpreted, misint.
'Imagined Communities' examines the creation & function of the 'imagined communities' of nationality & the way these communities were in part created by the growth of the nation-state, the interaction between capitalism & printing & the birth of vernacular languages in early modern Europe.
Feminist security studies (FFS) scholarship advocates the analysis of women’s war experiences and narratives to understand conflict and military intervention. Here we add a non-great power focus to FFS debates on the gendered discourses of military interventionism. We zoom in on Danish and Swedish women soldiers’ reflections on their involvement in the ISAF operation in Afghanistan. Their stories are deconstructed against the backdrop of their states’ adoption of a cosmopolitan-minded ethic on military obligation. Both states employed women soldiers in dialogic peacekeeping in Afghanistan to establish links with local women and to gather intelligence, tasks that were less frequently afforded to male soldiers. However, feminist FSS scholarship locates military intelligence gathering within racial, gendered and imperialist power relations that assign victimhood to local women. This feminist critique is pertinent, but the gendered and racial logics governing international operations vary across national contexts. While such gender binaries were present in Danish and Swedish military practice in Afghanistan, our article shows that dialogical peacekeeping offered an alternative to stereotypical constructions of women as victims and men as protectors. Dialogical peacekeeping helped to disrupt such gendering processes, giving women soldiers an opportunity to rethink their gender identities while instilling dialogical relations with local women.
It is currently estimated that 455,000 Palestinians live as stateless refugees in Lebanon (UNRWA, 2012a). However, as ‘non-citizens’ of Lebanon, Palestinians lack even the most basic civil, political, social and economic rights in the country and are excluded from active participation in Lebanese public life. This raises important questions about how Palestinian young people develop a sense of ‘national’ belonging and come to identify with concepts of ‘citizenship’ in the context of exile and in the absence of state structures and institutions, such as schools. Moreover, it raises questions about how young Palestinians come to embrace a sense of national belonging within the context of shifting discourses in Palestinian society and ever-changing notions of authentic ‘Palestinianness’.
Ünan elaborates on the forms of interaction between 2013 Gezi protests and the LGBT rights movement in Turkey. Diverse identity groups collaborated during the Gezi protests and challenged the legitimacy of the conservative/neoliberal urban planning policies of the government and police brutality. LGBT populations, both at individual and organizational levels, took part in the protests and carried out an active struggle. The chapter addresses the influence that the LGBT movement and the Gezi protests had on each other, reciprocally. The LGBT struggle for visibility is carried a step further through protests like Gezi, and collaboration with diverse social groups. © Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited 2015.
Somalia. March 4, 1993. Two Somalis are shot in the back by Canadian peacekeepers, one fatally.Barely two weeks later, sixteen-year-old Shidane Abukar Arone is tortured to death. Dozens of Canadian soldiers look on or know of the torture.The first reports of what became known in Canada as the Somalia Affair challenged national claims to a special expertise in peacekeeping and to a society free of racism. Today, however, despite a national inquiry into the deployment of troops to Somalia, what most Canadians are likely to associate with peacekeeping is the nation's glorious role as peacekeeper to the world. Moments of peacekeeping violence are attributed to a few bad apples, bad generals, and a rogue regiment.In Dark Threats and White Knights, Sherene H. Razack explores the racism implicit in the Somalia Affair and what it has to do with modern peacekeeping. Examining the records of military trials and the public inquiry, Razack weaves together two threads: That of the violence itself and what would drive men to commit such atrocities, and secondly, the ways in which peacekeeping violence is largely forgiven and ultimately forgotten. Race disappears from public memory and what is installed in its place is a story about an innocent, morally superior middle-power nation obliged to discipline and sort out barbaric third world nations. Modern peacekeeping, Razack concludes, maintains a colour line between a family of white nations constructed as civilized and a third world constructed as a dark threat, a world in which violence is not only condoned but seen as necessary.
Can society operate without gender and even biological sex classifications? Queer Post-Gender Ethics argues that we could exist, formulate our relationships and be sexual in more androgynous ways. Outlining a political vision for how a post-gender sociality might be achieved, it presents queer social practices for a truly gender neutral world.
While there is an acknowledgment of the importance of geographic and historical context in contemporary feminist scholarship on the relationship between domestic violence and warfare, there remains an assumption that mainstream narratives will tend to separate these forms of violence or, if connections are acknowledged, warfare will be given primacy. Based on ethnographic research in northern Uganda, I demonstrate how the presence of Orientalist narratives of violence in peacebuilding programs disrupts these assumptions by not only drawing connections between domestic violence and warfare but prioritizing domestic violence. I argue that these narratives of violence, and their associated geographic imaginaries, contribute to uneven geographies of intervention – geographies in which racialized bodies and intimate spaces are associated with war and thereby seen as appropriate sites for peacebuilding. By engaging with peacebuilding programs as sites of geopolitical negotiations in which variously scaled actors are vying for position in the post-war landscape, I argue that the tendency for peacebuilding programs to focus on a singular site of intervention – ‘the Acholi home’ – says less about the centrality of this site to the creation of peace than it does about the centrality of this site in maintaining the networks of mutual legitimization amongst peacebuilding partners.
The Occupy Gezi movement has been a staging ground for the creativity of micro-practices, and it embodies the importance of the politics of everyday life. The claim to protect the park is not merely metaphorical. The park signifies the physicality of the public sphere. Ideally it is the concrete space, open space for citizens where they can manifest freely their presence and interact with each other. The public square Gezi movement represents a new threshold for democracy where old cleavages between authoritarian secularism and Islam are surpassed and new forms of citizenship are rehearsed. The Gezi Park movement opened up a new arena of creative experience and provided a home for democratic imaginaires growing and resonating from Istanbul, Turkey.
Palestinian children and young people living both within and outside of refugee camps in the Middle East are the focus of this book. For more than half a century these children and their caregivers have lived a temporary existence in the dramatic and politically volatile landscape that is the Middle East. These children have been captive to various sorts of stereotyping, both academic and popular. They have been objectified, much as their parents and grandparents, as passive victims without the benefit of international protection. And they have become the beneficiaries of numerous humanitarian aid packages which presume the primacy of the Western model of child development as well as the psycho-social approach to intervention. Giving voice to individual children, in the context of their households and their community, this book aims to move beyond the stereotypes and Western-based models to explore the impact that forced migration and prolonged conflict have had, and continue to have, on the lives of these refugee children. © 2005 Dawn Chatty and Gillian Lewando Hundt. All rights reserved.
The Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda has developed at the United Nations over the course of the past 15 years, and there have been critical engagements with it for nearly as long. In this article, we first take stock of the operationalization of the WPS agenda, reviewing its implementation across a number of sectors. In the second section, we expose the tensions that have marked the WPS agenda from the start. With others, we argue that there has been a narrowing of the agenda's original scope, reducing it to the traditional politics of security rather than reimagining what security means. We highlight this reduction primarily through an analysis of the tension between the ‘participation’ and ‘protection’ pillars of the agenda. Further, we argue that the WPS agenda faces a current challenge in terms of the actors entrusted with it. Although in some ways involving civil society, the consolidations and implementation of WPS principles at the national and international levels have become increasingly state-centric. Third, we imagine some possible futures of the agenda, from a trajectory characterized by increasing marginalization or even irrelevance, to new avenues like the emergent, albeit tentative, ‘Men, Peace and Security’ agenda. We close with an argument for a revival of the WPS agenda beyond a fixation on states, beyond a narrow heteronormative or essentialist focus on the ‘Women’ of the WPS resolutions, and moving towards the radical reimagining of security as peace that inspired the original architects of these important resolutions.
The purpose of this article is to explore whether gender-blind sexism, as an extension of Bonilla-Silva's racialized social system theory, is an appropriate theoretical framework for understanding the creation and continued prevalence of rape myth acceptance. Specifically, we hypothesize that individuals who hold attitudes consistent with the frames of gender-blind sexism are more likely to accept common rape myths. Data for this article come from an online survey administered to the entire undergraduate student body at a large Midwestern institution (N = 1,401). Regression analysis showed strong support for the effects of gender-blind sexism on rape myth acceptance.