During the last 20 years there has been an international shift in contingency crisis politics. Different governments are increasingly emphasizing the importance of household preparedness as a strategy for civil crisis preparedness. Studies on these campaigns have analysed the language used to justify the importance of household preparedness and have revealed an ongoing change in the discourse which affects the power relations between the state and citizens. However, a large amount of research has been centred towards Anglo-Saxon countries leaving a scientific gap in our understanding of other contexts. This thesis aims to contribute to filling that gap by exploring the Swedish discourse on household preparedness, a country which has received less attention despite the unique integration of crisis and conflict management into the same policy. The study also aims to contribute to a wider scientific dialog discussing the views of crisis management strategies aimed at civilians. The analysis is based on poststructuralist theory and specifically Foucault’s tools for qualitative text analysis, here used as both theory and a method. The study concludes that the central concepts for the discourse are “household preparedness”, “resistance power” and “robustness”. The discourse is shaped by ideas based on decentralization, individual responsibility, and securitization as well as recent events such as the covid-19 pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The study identifies two main citizen roles; The first is the “ideal citizen” who has prepared their household for one week without additional aid from the government, is generous in helping others, and has an ability to collect and process information with critical reasoning. The other citizen role is the “help needing citizen” who struggles with achieving household preparedness and requires help from others. Lastly, this essay conclude that local civil society plays a traditionally larger role than earlier since it is expected to help citizens in need and share the responsibility for some of the crisis management with the government. Overall, the thesis fulfils its purpose, and acknowledges that future research could benefit from including alternative methods which capture how citizens perceive and justify household preparedness practices.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:umu-211199 |
| Date | January 2023 |
| Creators | Miles, Erika |
| Publisher | Umeå universitet, Statsvetenskapliga institutionen |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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