The Swedish armed forces deterrent strategy today has a lot of similarities with the deterrent strategy applied by Sweden’s armed forces during the cold war era. However the resources, which constitutes the foundation on which the deterrent threats are based, differ a lot and have decreased severely since the 1960s.   This paper compares the deterrence strategy applied by the Swedish armed forces from the 60s with the one today and examines similarities and differences in order to put a military perspective on Swedish deterrence strategies and shine a light on problems regarding the Swedish deterrence strategy and its limited resources.   The result shows a lot of similarities within the deterrent threat issued by Sweden from the two eras and concludes that the biggest difference lies within the change towards a more collective actor deterrence. Which in turn constitutes a problem because it implicitly undermines Sweden’s military capability and doesn’t guarantee any kind of military support from another state, if attacked, what so ever.

Since the beginning of the 20th century air power has been seen as an offensive instrument in warfare. During the Cold War, Sweden had one of the largest air forces in the world despite a clearly defensive strategy. Today's Swedish Air Force has been reformed since the Cold War and there are uncertainties about how this has changed the use of air power. The purpose of this study is to investigate what changes occurred in the Swedish Air Force related to offensive and defensive use of air power. This is illustrated by examining and comparing the use of air power in the Air Force during the Cold War and today. The study is based on the theories of air power and illustrates the use of air power from multiple perspectives in order to provide as broad picture of the Air Force as possible. The results demonstrate that a change has occurred where air forces moved more towards working together with other forces over a broader range of applications than during the Cold War.

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This essay deals with Swedish neutrality- and ideology discourse during the early cold war years, when a group of Swedish left-wing intellectuals advocated a third position (den tredje ståndpunkten); a rejection of both sides in the cold war. This third position is, within the premises of this essay, partly regarded as a piece in a larger ideological puzzle, in which a middle point or a third way between capitalism and socialism was sought during the twentieth century. In the early Cold War context, the third ideological alternative also came to be defined in geopolitical terms; as a middle way between the US and the Soviet Union. The Swedish third position was never a complete political program or distinctly defined political movement. It reflects many different aspects of the early Cold War reality in a Swedish context: the feeling of homelessness among the political left after the outcome of the Soviet communistic experiment; post-World War two pessimism and exhaustion; the immense fear of an atomic war; the ideological conflict over Swedish national identity; the construction of the cold war dichotomy and the resistance to this hegemonic construction. The proponents of the third position advocated continued neutrality with an idealistic and pacifistic approach, as a way to prolonged world peace. They also saw the US and the USSR as equally aggressive, power-driven, and according to a few of them, equally unfree and undemocratic. They did not totally reject the idea of a ‘communist threat’, but rather did put this threat side by side with the ‘capitalist threat’. They thus went far beyond the official Swedish neutral policy, which was much more aligned towards the west, and according to which the neutral country could very well sympathise with the west or aid one side in an international conflict, as long as it remained non-belligerent, even though this policy sometimes called for a complicated balancing act for the neutral Swedish state.

Det är nu 55 år sedan byggnationen av Berlinmuren påbörjades. I en värld där miljoner människor är på flykt från krig, orättvisor och elände är händelserna kring då Berlin delades upp av en mur högaktuella. Den 13 juli 2015 skrev Dagens Nyheter om den rådande flyktingströmmen till Europa från Syrien och kringliggande länder. Rubriken löd då: ”Ungern har påbörjat stängsel för att hindra immigranter”. Berlinmuren byggdes för att försöka få bukt på en okontrollerad massflykt från öst till väst. En sådan massflykt upplever vi även idag. Hur beskrevs 1961 beslutet i media om att uppföra en mur som skulle hindra människor från att ta sig till friheten och vilken information fick egentligen samtidens människor när de läste dagstidningen till morgonkaffet?

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Målet för denna läroboksanalys är att undersöka hur Sovjetunionen och sovjetkommunismen framställts i tre svenska historieläroböcker från åren 1971, 1999 och 2021. Det relevanta innehållet från de olika läroböckerna har studerats genom ett funktionellt samt strukturellt perspektiv, för att se till vilket innehåll som framställs samt hur, och på vilket sätt läroböckerna och dess författare kan ha påverkats av den tid då de tillkommit.  Det finns främst två skäl till att det just är perioden 1971-2021 som valts ut för denna undersökning. Under 1971 hade det kalla kriget pågått i drygt tjugosex år, och det var inte sannolikt att historieläroböcker som producerats tidigare än så skulle förmedla särskilt mycket information om det pågående kriget. I den läroplan som börjat gälla 1969 ingick det dock som mål att undervisningen skulle belysa - bland annat - den politiska utvecklingen. Det betonades även att tonvikten skulle läggas på sådant som “i särskild grad bidragit till att skapa de förhållanden, problem och motsättningar som råder i världen idag. Ett väsentligt utrymme bör ägnas vår egen tid” (Skolöverstyrelsen, 1969, s. 184). I detta ingick även det kalla kriget, och en av de två supermakter som deltog i detta krig; Sovjetunionen. Den andra läroboken som studerats i detta arbete utgavs år 1999, alltså efter kalla krigets slut och efter den läroplan som började gälla år 1994. Denna bok studerades i syfte att undersöka vilka skillnader och likheter från perioden då kriget ännu pågick. Den tredje och sista boken gavs ut år 2021 och har granskats i syfte att undersöka vilka mönster, förändringar och kontinuiteter som går att urskilja från tiden då kalla kriget ännu pågick till den tid vi nu lever i.

Civilian control over military forces is a prerequisite within democracies in the study of civil-military relations. This requirement extends to military intelligence, as they are a part of the military. However, this relationship needs to balance secrecy with transparency concerns, a relationship which can prove difficult. In Sweden during the 1970’s, this discussion came to a fore when the intelligence organisation IB was revealed to the public. This sparked an ongoing debate within the academic community regarding the limits of intelligence organisations authority, their need for secrecy and the government’s ability to control them. This thesis aims to investigate IB and the government’s control over it during 1965-1973, the years it operated as the sole military intelligence organisation in Sweden. With perspectives derived from Peter Gills thoughts on intelligence control and oversight, this thesis examines the mechanism of intelligence control and inquiry that were present in Sweden during the relevant timeframe. The findings are then judged with Gill’s concepts as a framework, in order to evaluate IB´s role as an intelligence organisation within a liberal democracy. These findings will thereafter be compared with the image of IB as presented by leading contemporary politicians and intelligence commanders, in order to give nuance to the findings. The thesis will show, with support of the theory and methodology, that IB can’t be described as a national intelligence agency, but as a political police. Its lack of transparency, secret existence and politicly motivated goals are the main reasons for this result. The absence of key mechanism of control as described by Gill, made it impossible for the organisation to be controlled, with some reservations for the ruling party’s ability to do so. It also contextualises these findings with the presented opinions of the contemporary actors. These results shed new light on intelligence accountability during the cold war in Sweden. It also reaffirms previous findings on IB with the use of new perspectives. The Thesis provides another lens to view Swedish intelligence history through and contributes to that field of history.

Syftet med denna uppsats är att undersöka hur John Hedlund förhåller sig till det svenska samhället, hans s.k. ”teologi om världen”. Denna kommer att undersökas och analyseras med hjälp av tre frågor• Vilken är enligt Hedlund relationen mellan kristendomen och det moderna svenska samhället?• Hur ser Billy Graham på relationen mellan kristendomen och det amerikanska samhället?• Vilka likheter och skillnader finns i Hedlund och Graham när det gäller synen på kristendomen och samhället? Uppsatsen tar sitt avstamp år 1946. Utgångspunkten motiveras av att detta var ett viktigt brytningsår i Hedlunds verksamhet: han blev ”Nalenpastorn” med det svenska folket, och dessutom reste han detta år till USA för att studera de mötesserier som ”Youth for Christ” organiserade – dvs. den organisation som Graham då verkade för. Grahams Crusade i Los Angeles 1950 ses som det verkliga startskottet för hans karriär och redan senare samma år startade John Hedlund sin motsvarighet som han kallade för ”korståg”. Detta i kombination med både Sveriges och USA:s utveckling från efterkrigstiden och framåt gör tidpunkten till lämplig. Avgränsningen i slutet av denna uppsats sätts till de viktiga brytpunkter som både Sverige och USA kommer till mot slutet av 1980-talet. Jag menar att Sverige når en tydlig brytpunkt med Olof Palmes död 1986 medan det i det amerikanska fallet får bli kommunismens kollaps 1989.

The research problem that has been identified for this study is that earlier research has heavily depended on strained financial situations in military organizations in order to explain why interservice rivalry occurs. This study seeks to complement this by looking at other possible factors as to why interservice rivalry emerges.  The purpose of the study is to look at interservice rivalry within the Swedish military between 1965 and 1975 and to establish what kind of interservice interactions can be identified in this time period in which the Swedish military also suffered from downsizing. However, a different approach will be used to study this case. The study will utilize Major Nicholas J. Clemens's theory on interservice rivalry which is explained in his report Fighting to get along, 1993. In his theory, Clemens established two main causes as to why interservice rivalry occurs. These are uncommon doctrine and resource allocation between the different services within the military. These factors can be combined to establish four possible interaction types between the different service branches.  With this in mind the main research question of the study has been established; What does Clemens’ theory contribute to our understanding of Swedish interservice rivalry during the Cold War? The study uses a theory-consuming approach with its foundation in Clemens’ theory. The method used is a qualitative text analysis with a hermeneutic approach. The material used is military journals produced either specifically for a given branch of the military or an all-encompassing military journal.  Ultimately, the study concludes that the army and airforce had a hostile interaction and that the same is true between the army and navy. However the airforce and navy had a cooperative interaction.