Swedish National Defence College

About: Swedish National Defence College is a education organization based out in Stockholm, Sweden. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Crisis management & European union. The organization has 218 authors who have published 569 publications receiving 8074 citations.

Perpetual Policing Wars

Abstract: ‘As of the opening years of the twenty-first century, the mightiest, richest, best-equipped, best-trained armed forces that have ever existed are … looking into an abyss.’1 The abyss to which Martin Van Creveld refers in the opening to his book The Changing Face of War (2006) is the prospect of regular (state) forces locked in counterinsurgency wars wherein they are unable to prevail, yet at the same time cannot concede defeat. Thus Van Creveld raises the prospect of ‘regular, state-owned armed forces being forever doomed to go on losing [wars]’.2 John Mueller draws the same conclusion when he states: ‘“Decisive” is a military term and does not pertain to police work. Wars may end, but policing never does.’3 The notion of ‘policing’ being logically ‘perpetual’, that is, perpetual by its very nature, will be explored in this chapter. Is Mueller is right to say that by metaphorically conceiving current wars as ‘policing wars’ the liberal world eschews any ability to end the wars it is fighting? This would appear to be an immediate conclusion from analogies between war and criminality and, by extension, war and policing. There are few aspirations to the use of policing as a means to putting a final end to criminality or disorder in society. Instead policing, in the domestic setting, is conceived as the means by which disorder is managed and kept to a minimum. What, may we ask, happens to war when it is conducted under such a logic? What, more profoundly, accounts for the seemingly contradictory impulse to think of war as perpetual policing?

On Agency: Policing Logics and War ‘Without Antagonism’

Abstract: No discourse on war emerges out of a vacuum: it gains resonance as a consequence of its constitutive ideals, preconceptions and values fitting with the structure of key social imaginaries. The theme of this chapter — agency — is itself a theme of liberal thought with its lead motifs of inter alia liberty, freedom of choice, equality among men before the law and so on. The subjects of liberalism, agency and internationalism constitute an amalgamation of strands that have been alluded to in previous chapters: here we zoom in on the relationship between law, politics, war and policing — a four-way relationship that constitutes the backbone of the metaphorical understanding of war as policing. The first part of the chapter will discuss how a liberal heritage can be seen to inform the contemporary discourse on war as ‘order-creating’. The eschewing of strong foundations in moral and ethical reasoning has thus not forged an abandonment of ideological claims, as is sometimes inferred, but rather new ways of expressing and justifying such claims.

Military leadership and emotion regulation in acute situations that contain moral dilemmas

Abstract: The aim was to gain a deeper understanding of individual emotion-focused coping strategies and institutionalised norms as regards emotion regulation in a short-and long-term perspective in relation to acute stressful situations that contain moral dilemmas. 15 participants at different hierarchical levels in the Swedish Armed Forces (SAF) were interviewed. Several individual emotion regulation strategies and organisational norms for emotional expressiveness were identified. These were integrated into a theoretical model. The study contributes by explicating a context-specific emotion culture that gives limited space for emotional expression as it is necessary to remain firm and cold in acute situations that include moral dilemmas. Leaders must be able to minimise emotional displays in order to contribute to operational efficiency (termed emotional containing capacity). Potential conflicts between a well-developed emotional containing capacity in acute situations and long-term adaptation to organisational norms in daily life after missions and practical implications are discussed.

Direct and sustained effects on leadership self-efficacy due to the inability to complete a parachute training course

Abstract: The present study examined a parachute training course intended to improve the leadership abilities of future military officers. Two research questions were examined. First, whether there were any ...