• Director of Studies for the department's master's level (global political economy, economic history and international relations)

My main research interests lie in the intersection of labour history, gender history, and military history. Other and related research interests include economic suffrage restrictions, labour coercion in contemporary Swedish history, the political economy of conscription, civil-military relations, LGBTQ in working life, fundraising, and the early Swedish welfare state. 

On-going research projects:

• Coercive labour relations: "Between free and unfree labour: labour relations and the welfare state. Sweden 1880-2022", funded by the Swedish Research Council. Substudy on coercive labour relations in civil and military prepardness for war.
• Economic suffrage restrictions in Sweden after the introduction of the universal vote. A substudy of the project: "Universal suffrage? Voting restrictions and disenfranchisement in Sweden after 1921" (see also the project's homepage: allmänrösträtt.se), funded by the Swedish Research Council.
• Gender, military labour and conscription: (1) "Gender equality, diversity and societal security", funded by NordForsk, and (2)  "Gender neutral conscription: infrastructure, implementation and historical context", funded by the Swedish Research Council.
• War, consumption and advertisment: "The Defense of Consumption: Advertising, gender and citizenship in Sweden during World War II", funded by the Swedish Research Council.

Previous research projects have dealt with e.g. LGBT in the Swedish military, military funding, and gender divisions of military labour.

 

A selection from Stockholm University publication database

• A Nordic model of gender and military work? Labour demand, gender equality and women’s integration in the armed forces of Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden

  2022. Anders Ahlbäck, Fia Sundevall, Johanna Hjertquist. Scandinavian Economic History Review

  Article

  This article traces the political process towards full formal integration of women in the military professions in Scandinavia and Finland, investigating the shifting roles played by military labour demands and politics of gender equality. It provides the first comparative overview of these developments in the Nordic region. The analysis demonstrates the importance of historical continuity in women’s military participation. Due to military labour demands, women were throughout the post-war decades recruited into a range of auxiliary, voluntary and hybrid capacities in the Scandinavian armed forces. The reforms opening the military professions to women in Denmark, Norway and Sweden in the 1970s were the outcome of a double crisis, as military needs for the regulation of these women’s organisational status coincided with new political demands for gender equality in the labour market. Corresponding reforms in Finland were delayed by the country’s lack of continuity in women’s military participation as well as its sufficient supply of male military personnel. A common Nordic model of gender and military work nonetheless emerged in the 1990s, marked by equal rights to military participation for women on a voluntary basis, combined with mandatory military conscription for men.

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• Contributivist Views on Democratic Inclusion: on Economic Contribution as a Condition for the Right to Vote

  2022. Jonas Hultin Rosenberg, Fia Sundevall. Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy

  Article

  Prior to the democratic breakthrough in most Western countries, the right to vote was premised on a person’s economic contribution. No country today reserves voting rights exclusively to contributors, but economic contribution matters once again. It matters for immigrants’ access to citizenship and its associated political rights, and it matters for emigrants’ attempts to keep the right to vote in their ‘home country’. Economic contribution has attracted very little attention in the literature on democratic inclusion. The few scholars who have discussed it have rejected it based on its expected implications, without going into detail about its different instantiations and normative underpinnings. This paper lays the foundation for a more thorough critique. Informed by historical practices, we distinguish between two main types of economic contributivist regulations: those that condition the right to vote on the size of the contribution, and those that condition it on compliance with legally required contributions. We suggest that contributivism can be based either on property rights or on reciprocity. We conclude the paper by contrasting contributivism with established principles of democratic inclusion (such as the all-affected principle), and by arguing that, unlike these other principles, contributivism is incompatible with the democratic ideal of self-rule.

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• Solving ‘the Uniform Issue’

  2022. Sanna Strand, Alma Persson, Fia Sundevall. Nordic Journal of Working Life Studies

  Article

  This article contributes empirical knowledge about the shifting ways in which the Swedish Armed Forces (SAF) has articulated and addressed ‘the uniform issue’, that is, matters concerning servicewomen’s access to adequate uniforms and other equipment, since the 1980s. Drawing on analytical tools employed within post-structural policy analysis, we demonstrate how ‘the uniform issue’ has gone from being articulated as a problem for servicewomen, and to be solved by servicewomen, to a problem for the SAF in its pursuit to become an attractive employer and a legitimate public authority. By shedding light on how ‘the uniform issue’ has been problematized in shifting ways since Swedish women first were allowed to serve in all military positions, this article also contributes important insights into broader scholarly debates about workplace discrimination, gender equality, and gendered occupational identities in military work.

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Show all publications by Fia Sundevall at Stockholm University