Showing papers by "Swedish National Defence College published in 2005"

The Politics of Crisis Management: Public Leadership Under Pressure

Abstract: Crisis management has become a defining feature of contemporary governance. In times of crisis, communities and members of organizations expect their leaders to minimize the impact of the crisis at ...

Molding Minds That Form Policy: How to Make Research Useful

Abstract: How can policy-relevant ideas be effectively communicated to practitioners? While the existing literature has focused on what kind of theory and research are policy relevant, it does not say much about how this knowledge can be communicated. If you want to make a difference, you must know how to reach your target. We take note of the important, but in this context often overlooked opportunities for knowledge diffusion that are provided by the education of young minds and the training of mid-career officials and officers. This article first discusses three contending perspectives on the relationship between scholars and practitioners. It then makes a conceptual elaboration of conditions for communicating research to practitioners, drawing on a wide body of literature on the power of ideas. We conclude by summarizing pointers for how scholars may reflect and how we can act, if we wish to enrich foreign policy practice with research-based ideas.

Indirect leadership in a military context: a qualitative study on how to do it

Abstract: Purpose – To develop a theoretical understanding of how indirect leadership is done in a military context.Design/methodology/approach – A grounded theory approach was used. Twenty-two high-level Sw ...

Swedish Strategic Culture after 1945

Abstract: This article examines the evolution of Swedish strategic culture during the twentieth century and up to the present.Although Sweden is the only Scandinavian country that has stayed out of war since the age of Napoleon, it still has proud military traditions stemming from Sweden's age of empire (1561–1721) and from the Cold War period, when this nonaligned country became partly self-sufficient in modern military technology, producing its own fighter-jets, tanks and submarines, even planning to acquire nuclear weapons in the 1950s. On paper, Sweden maintained an impressive number of armed forces (850,000 men after mobilization), although at the end of the Cold War their equipment and training left much to be desired. Only around the year 2000 did this huge Cold War defence complex begin to be dismantled. In line with the Swedish administrative-political culture (which is often traced back to the seventeenth-century statesman Axel Oxenstierna), the military enjoyed a high degree of autonomy compared with mos...

Understanding men's attitudes toward women in the Swedish armed forces

Abstract: We examined attitudes toward women in the military in a random representative sample of 1,320 male officers from the Swedish Armed Forces. We expected age, education, rank, years of military service, sexist beliefs, and interpersonal contact to correlate with men’s attitudes toward women in the military. Correlational analyses indicated that individuals expressing more positive attitudes toward women in the military tended to be younger, more educated, and higher in rank, were less likely to endorse sexist ideologies, and had greater interpersonal contact with women in the military. Regression analyses showed that education, rank, sexism, and contact emerged as the best predictors of these attitudes. Further examination of the effects of contact on these attitudes indicated that the quality of the contact experience was uniquely important in understanding men’s attitudes toward women in the military. We discuss the implications of these findings for promoting greater acceptance of women in the military.

Learning and transfer from a simple dynamic system.

Abstract: The amount of learning gained from being assisted in completing the task of bringing a predator-prey system into equilibrium by controlling the predator population was investigated. Learning was explored both by post-task questioning and by testing for transfer to another predator-prey task. Participants were 28 undergraduate psychology students, all female. They were randomly and evenly split into an experiment group that was subjected to a learning session with the first task before being tested in the second task, and a control group that only performed the second task. What was most needed in the first task was help in sticking to analytically derived conclusions by resisting "common sense" responses. There was a significant transfer effect on performance to the second task, stemming from learning shown by half the participants in the experiment group. The other half showed hardly any learning. Learning in about half the subjects has proven a stable finding.

Personality disorders in a Swedish peacekeeping unit

Abstract: There is a lack of knowledge about the incidence of personality disorders and their consequences among peacekeepers. Moreover, most studies are follow-up studies in which, if at all, personality tr ...

The Iraq War: European Perspectives on Politics, Strategy and Operations

Abstract: 1. Puzzles and Propositions in the Iraq War 2. What were the Bush Administration's Goals in Invading Iraq? 3. The Iraq War and the Transatlantic Relationship 4. Russia's Choice: Preserve the Status Quo 5. Iraq's Political Strategy before and during the War 6. Sweden, the Western World and the War that Saw the Birth of Iraq: Implications of the Events in 1914-1921 for the Present Conflict 7. The Iraq War and International Law: From Hugo Grotius to George W. Bush 8. Brute Force or Coercion: Two Perspectives on Conflict Management, Stefan Ring 9. Doctrine, Expertise and Arms in Combination: A Reflection on the Iraq War 10. The Iraq Air War in 2003: Back to the Future? 11. The Struggle for Credibility during the Iraq War 12. Conclusions