Strands undervisning består för tillfället primärt i att handleda kandidat- och mastersstudenter i uppsatsskrivande. I sin tidigare roll på Göteborgs universitet var Strand ansvarig för en kurs i Säkerhet och konflikter i en förändrad värld samt undervisade och handledde brett inom fälten Kritiska säkerhetsstudier och Internationella relationer. Hon har även undervisat på kursen Postcolonial and Feminist theories of International Relations vid the New School, New York.

I sin forskning intresserar sig Strand för frågor som rör militära institutioner och identiteter, säkerhet och säkerhetsnarrativ samt genus, styrning och makt. I sin avhandling studerade hon hur den svenska övergången från värnplikt till en professionell och frivillig militär år 2010 påverkade bilden av Försvarsmakten i samhället. Avhandlingen adresserade frågor om hur militära medel, insatser och karriärer görs attraktiva och legitima hos medborgare samt hur reklam, interaktiva mediekanaler och andra marknadsföringsstrategier omformar civil-militära relationer i liberala demokratier.

Som post-doc vid Institutionen för Ekonomisk historia och internationella relationer bedrev Strand det VR-finansierade projektet Värnpliktens återkomst och omdaning i Europa. Projektet studerade på hur olika värnpliktssystem begripliggjorts och rättfärdigats av politiska och militära eliter i Europa på sätt som konstrureat vitt skilda föreställningar om nation, medborgarskap och kön.

Sedan 2025 leder Strand det VR-finansierade projektet Värnplikt, bosättarkolonialism och diskriminering av det samiska folket i Sverige samt forskar inom ramen för det VR-finansierade projektet Psykologiskt försvar under 2000-talet: att urskilja sanning från hot.  

Intresseområden:

• Military recruitment and retention
• Militarism and militarization
• Civil-military relations
• Psycological defence and disinformation
• Defense willingness ("Försvarsvilja")
• Governmentality, neoliberalism and marketization

I urval från Stockholms universitets publikationsdatabas

• Selling soldiering: Marketisation, gender complementarity and the promise of military femininity in 1990s Sweden

  2024. Sanna Strand, Fia Cottrell-Sundevall. Gender and History

  Artikel

  This article examines the first large-scale attempts to recruit women as soldiers and officers in 1990s Sweden, focusing on the techniques and promises employed by the Swedish Armed Forces (SAF). Building on a wide range of documents and audiovisual sources, we demonstrate how the SAF utilised various marketing techniques, including advertisements and sponsorships, to attract and ‘sell’ soldiering to young women. Analysing these efforts through scholarship on neoliberal governmentality and gendered military identity, we argue that these strategies marked the onset of military marketisation, reflecting broader neoliberal trends in 1990s Sweden. Moreover, we show how the SAF's marketing techniques promised women a narrowly defined, complementary, feminine military identity that reinforced existing gender stereotypes in the name of gender equality. Our findings shed new light on the instability of gender equality policies deemed progressive and pioneering and, in contrast, the stability of the global racialised hierarchies that inscribe some nations as gender equality forerunners.

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• The aspirational promise of soldiering: an analysis of military recruitment testimonials

  2024. Maria Stern, Sanna Strand. Critical Military Studies 10 (4), 526-546

  Artikel

  Young people across the globe willingly join the military, knowing that they may be required to kill, maim, and perhaps even die. Considering the starkness of this barebone condition, armed forces strive to make enlisting desirable through recruitment campaigns. While the appeal of military aspirational promises – particularly the promise of manhood – figure centrally in much critical scholarship, the detailed components of these pledges warrant closer scrutiny. This article therefore explores the aspirational promises pledged in military recruitment campaigns from the US Army and the Swedish Armed Forces. Based on a narrative analysis of video testimonials in which ‘real’ soldiers tell their enlistment stories, we lay bare the overarching story grammar made up of distinct plot points (lack, hardship, agency and growth) that comprise the aspirational pro-mises in these campaigns. In tracing these plot points in two dis-tinct sites, the article offers well-needed insight into how the appeal of contemporary soldiering is being constructed and how this appeal attempts to govern potential soldiers. Despite their differ-ences, the campaigns present soldiering as a or the way to regulate and govern the self in relation to norms about what constitutes a successful, self-fulfilled or complete citizen-subject. The aspira-tional figures in the testimonials promise that one can redress one’s deficiencies and transcend the racialized, gendered, and classed, etc. limits one confronts in oneself and in civilian life. These soldier stories, despite their hyperreal climaxes and journeys, appear to be real and lived and theirs. Vitally, they could also be ours.

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• Preserving and progressing: Tensions in the gendered politics of military conscription

  2024. Saskia Stachowitsch, Sanna Strand. European Journal of International Security 9 (3), 468-490

  Artikel

  After all-male universal conscription had been deactivated in many European countries in the post-Cold War era, the past decade has seen a surprising reversal of this trend, with several countries reactivating, voting to retain, or even extending military conscription to women. Due to the strong historical link between conscription and the formation of hierarchical gender orders, this paper conducts a feminist analysis of debates on conscription in Sweden and Austria and asks how gender served to legitimise the ‘return’ of mandatory military service. We find that a neoliberal, individualistic discourse legitimised Sweden’s gender-neutral conscription as an efficient and progressive model that presents as competitive, while the Austrian all-male model was justified on the basis of conservative, communitarian sentiments of fostering responsible male citizens and preserving a solidaric national community. Moreover, while conscription was envisioned as strengthening Swedish defence and war preparedness, conscription in Austria was rather associated with containing militarism and preventing involvement in armed conflict. Despite these differences, we suggest that hierarchical notions of masculinity and femininity, intersecting with classed and racialised dichotomies, served to render conscription acceptable and even appealing in both cases.

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• The Reactivation and Reimagination of Military Conscription in Sweden

  2024. Sanna Strand. Armed forces and society 50 (4), 1175-1195

  Artikel

  The post-Cold War tendency of abandoning conscripted for volunteer forces appears to be reversing, and many countries have recently expanded or reintroduced mandatory military service. This article offers insights into the contemporary “return” of draft models by exploring how the reactivation of (this time gender-neutral) military conscription was justified and made possible in Sweden. The study, based on a discourse analysis of political and policy documents and interviews with defense officials, shows how Sweden’s new conscription was envisioned as “modernized” in its reimplementation phase; a system distinguished from the familiar republican citizen- soldier model. Instead, the article shows how conscription was reimagined when linked to characteristics of (neo)liberal government and citizenship: voluntarism, individualism, and gender equality. The study’s unique contribution to knowledge is thus an improved understanding of how conscription is ascribed meaning, legitimacy, and appeal and consequently how its return and retainment is enabled, across national contexts. 

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• Embodying Military Muscles and a Remasculinized West: Influencer Marketing, Fantasy, and “the Face of NATO”

  2022. Elsa Hedling, Emil Edenborg, Sanna Strand. Global Studies Quarterly 2 (1)

  Artikel

  In 2018, North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) carried out Trident Juncture, its largest military exercise since the Cold War. The event was promoted on social media featuring Lasse Matberg as “the face of NATO.” Matberg is an Instagram influencer, model, and lieutenant in the Royal Norwegian Navy, with an impressive physique and Viking looks. He frequently appears on NATO’s social media accounts and lends his own platform to share activities such as working out with the Secretary-General. Drawing on the notion of “fantasmatic logics”, we study how visual narratives of influencer marketing can contribute to making war preparations appear normal, void of political significance and even desirable. The figure of Lasse Matberg is read in conjunction with international rearmament and increasing geopolitical antagonism bound up with ideas of “traditional masculinity” and “feminization.” We argue that the muscular yet ambiguously “soft” figure of Lasse Matberg projects a symbolic remasculinization of the West, operating through a fantasmatic logic that seemingly reconciles the contradiction between a West, which is imperial and militarily muscular on the one hand and caring, democratic, and progressive on the other. By shedding light on NATO's use of influencer marketing to promote a military exercise, this article contributes novel insights into the ways in which the figure of the NATO soldier and NATO military buildup are produced as appealing, allowing an ambivalent gendered geopolitical imaginary to emerge.

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• Periods, Pregnancy, and Peeing: Leaky Feminine Bodies in Swedish Military Marketing

  2022. Maria Stern, Sanna Strand. International Political Sociology 16 (1), 1-21

  Artikel

  The notion of “leaky” female bodies has long rationalized the exclusion of women from military service. Yet, in an attempt to bolster enlistments by appealing to women, the Swedish Armed Forces (SAF) embarked on a marketing strategy that aims to break with gender stereotypes in order to fill its ranks. Most notably, in a 2018 recruitment campaign, an SAF billboard posed the question “Can I have my period in the field?” This article probes how the leaky female body is mobilized in SAF marketing campaigns and outreach activities. While remarkable for their commitment to gender parity, we aver that there is more going on in these campaigns that seemingly render women's bodies normal and unproblematic as military bodies than a move toward gender equality. The representations of female soldiering bodies that emerge reproduce a familiar form of militarism that promotes the necessity of a battle-ready military corps that is predictable, and poised for warring. Moreover, these explicitly feminist SAF campaigns also beckon with the possibility of becoming that transcends the bodily limitations of sex/gender in civilian as well as military life, in war as well as in peace—to become perhaps something/someone/somewhere else that only military service can offer.

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• Solving ‘the Uniform Issue’: Gender and Professional Identity in the Swedish Military

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

  Artikel

  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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• The birth of the enterprising soldier: governing military recruitment and retention in post-Cold War Sweden

  2022. Sanna Strand. Scandinavian Journal of History 47 (2), 225-247

  Artikel

  The promise of becoming a normal or even ideal citizen of the nation-state has long been central to the politics of military recruitment and retention. However, what this promise has entailed, and how the image of the soldier has been constructed, varies across time and place. This article illustrates and historicizes the emergence of a distinct soldier image, closely associated with the neoliberal ideal of responsible, active, and entrepreneurial citizenship, in the context of Sweden. The paper adopts a genealogical approach and views ‘the enterprising soldier’ through the contemporary history of military reforms in post-Cold War Sweden. Central to these reforms was the move from universal conscription for men to a recruitment policy that gradually came to rely on voluntarism for all, a shift that culminated in the introduction of an all-volunteer force in 2010. To illustrate the significance and potential appeal of ‘the enterprising soldier’, the paper exemplifies how this image has been promoted and presupposed in three sites: (1) military recruitment materials, (2) military career planning schemes, and (3) military-private sector partnership programmes. Through this genealogical endeavour, this paper contributes new insights into how the image and promise of soldiering has transformed alongside neoliberal reforms of the armed forces.

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• Löften om manlighet: Feministiska perspektiv på militär rekrytering

  2021. Sanna Strand. Feministiska perspektiv på global politik, 223-236

  Kapitel

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• Wokeness and weakness: Why women in (fitting) military uniforms are ridiculed

  2022. Sanna Strand. Critical Military Studies, 1-6

  Artikel

  Despite decades of military gender integration and women’s increasing presence in military ranks globally, military uniforms and equipment are still designed after the measurements of a ‘standard male body’ in many countries. Servicewomen are therefore – on a group level – less likely to be provided with fitting, functional, and safe military gear. So why is it taking so long to provide servicewomen with adequate uniforms and equipment? US right-wing TV host Tucker Carlson may inadvertently have provided one answer to such a question. 

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