Research project Making a Military Heritage: Gender and Nation in Sweden’s Cold War History
Research project based at Stockholm University and funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond: the Swedish Foundation for Humanities and the Social Sciences, 2019-2021.
Images from the field work sites.
The aim of this project is to explore how Sweden’s Cold War history is given societal meaning when military areas, artefacts and activities are turned into a national heritage. By examining how heritagization within a military context engages with gendered and ethnified representations of security/threat, belonging/exclusion and friends/enemies, the project encourages important democratic conversations on national values and inclusion: What defines national belonging and who should protect the nation’s values? What distinguishes a threatening other?
About the pictures on this research project site: Unless indicated otherwise, all images on this website are photos taken by the research team. Copyright Making a Military Heritage: Gender and Nation in Sweden’s Cold War History – Med ensamrätt.
Project description
Today neo-nationalism, growing populism, and migration draw attention to issues of national belonging, borders and citizenship. Europe also witnesses increased geopolitical tension and rearmament in what has been termed a “new cold war”. At stake in these political controversies are notions of national identities – of who we are, the history we share and the values we should defend.
In this political situation, constructions of the national heritage and collective memories become increasingly disputed. The centrality of war legacies in defining the national collective, make memories of past wars and military conflicts particularly charged. In Sweden, initiatives have recently been taken to preserve the material and cultural expressions from the Cold War period. Abandoned defence establishments and the remnants of the “people’s defence” (folkförsvaret) are now becoming part of a military heritage. In addition to military structures authorized as state heritage sites, a manifold of entrepreneurs and civil organizations transform military sites into museums, commercial tourist establishments and residential areas. In this project, we investigate the processes that articulate geopolitical threats and memories of fear and insecurity as heritage, and specifically examine negotiations of national belonging, citizenship and gender.
Heritagization of war and conflict is well studied in an international perspective but the extensive production of Cold War military heritage in Sweden is largely unexplored. The Swedish case stands out as particularly intriguing since a potentially “dark heritage” needs to be reconciled with prominent narratives of peace and neutrality (Stråth 2000). Another tension concerns the history of male conscription with its associated ideals of masculine protection vis-à-vis the importance of gender equality for contemporary national self-understanding (Kronsell 2012).
The aim of this project is to explore how Sweden’s Cold War history is given societal meaning when military areas, artefacts and activities are turned into a national heritage. Constructions of heritage are conceptualized as political processes involving complex power relations. This perspective makes a transdisciplinary approach particularly valuable. Researchers from political science, gender studies, ethnology, and art and architectural history collaborate in examining sites representing official, commercial and informal uses of the military heritage. Which images of the past are privileged, and what experiences marginalized, when the collective memories are established? How are material structures conceptualized as heritage, and how do individuals engage with remnants of Sweden’s Cold War history? In what ways do official, commercial and informal heritage contexts interconnect?
The project design transcends traditional political science and international relations’ state centrism and focus on high politics, as well as ethnology’s prioritizing of individuals’ every-day cultural meaning-making. Incorporating perspectives from art and architectural history acknowledges the importance of the materiality of heritage sites and makes it possible to examine how physical structures and spatiality condition what experiences and historical narratives are made possible.
This research rests on the idea that national self-understanding as well as conceptions of threat, hinge on historical understandings and narratives. By examining how heritagization within a military context engages with gendered and ethnified representations of security/threat, belonging/exclusion and friends/enemies, the project encourages important democratic conversations on national values and inclusion: What defines national belonging and who should protect the nation’s values? What distinguishes a threatening other?
Project members
Project managers
Cecilia Åse
Professor
Members
Maria Wendt
Senior lecturer, Associate professor
Fredrik Krohn Andersson
Senior lecturer, associate professor
Mattias Frihammar
Universitetslektor
More about this project
Research team
The four researchers are all senior lecturers at Stockholm University and well anchored in the international fields of Feminist International Relations and Critical Heritage Studies. The researchers cover competence in gender and nationalism, war/violence and heritage studies and between them they have substantial experience of the relevant methods: textual analysis, analysis of architecture/visual material and ethnographic fieldwork.
International advisory group
Bo Stråth, Professor of History, University of Helsinki
Professor Helaine Silverman, Department of Anthropology, University of Illinois
John Tosh, Professor of History, specializing in war and masculinity, University of Roehampton
Field work sites
The research design is based on fieldwork at strategically selected military heritage sites. Below you will find the sites the research team has visited so far.
Gotland: Visborg Area, Bungenäs and Gotlands försvarsmuseum
Boden: Rödberget Fortress, Kalixlinjen Museum, Defense Museum
Linköping: Swedish Air Force Museum
Activities
Throughout the research project (2019-2021) you can follow the progress and latest news below. Here you will find an overview of field site visits, seminars, and the release of latest project publication.
2019
January 29-30 2019: Initial field work at The Naval Museum, Karlskrona
January 31 – February 1 2019: Initial field work at the Swedish Air Force Museum, Linköping
February 20-22 2019: Initial field work a the Gotland sites
March 21-22 2019: Initial field work at Aeuroseum, Gothenburg
May 14-16 2019: Initial field work at the Boden field sites
September 24 2019: Initial field work at Arsenalen, Strängnäs
October 4-5 2019: Meeting with international advisory group
2020
January 31 2020: Field work at the museum of The National Defence Radio Establishment (Swedish: Försvarets radioanstalt, FRA), at Lovön, Stockholm
February 29 2020: Follow up field work at Arsenalen, Strängnäs
June 29-July 2 2020: Field work at The Arholma norra fort, Norrtälje
August 26-28 2020: Follow up field work at the Gotland sites
2021