This article combines feminist international relations theory with critical heritage studies to theorise how gender and sexualities shape heritage as a national security resource. By analysing the mobilisation of gender in military memory initiatives coproduced by Swedish heritage and security actors, we expand the literature on populist ‘illiberal memory-making’ and demonstrate that situations of insecurity may prompt gender-conservative and militarised memory-making also in stable liberal democracies. In response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Swedish cultural heritage has been framed as part of the national defence and a means to prepare citizens for war. By examining this novel heritagization, we reveal how today’s security politics appear to emanate naturally from history. Associations between territory and heterosexuality communicate nativist versions of history and delineate who is entitled to protection. The mobilisation of gender in heritagization makes the nation seem transcendental and supports military violence as a precondition of national security and survival. In relation to contemporary security policy, values and emotions connected to femininities and masculinities both delegitimise earlier security doctrines and pave the way for rearmament and militarisation. Gendered military heritagization contributes to shaping violence as a ‘security truth’ and restricts alternative perspectives and democratic conversations.

This chapter combines critical heritage studies and feminist international relations in an analysis of temporality in Sweden’s Cold War military heritagisation. Sweden’s Cold War history is characterised by war-preparedness and a lack of significant military action, allowing for different framings of time in heritage presentations. Accounting for Sweden’s nonaligned yet heavily militarised stance during this period, we demonstrate how different temporal frames shape collective identity and ideas of security. Four temporal constructs are identified, of which two are discussed at length: parenthesis-time, suspending the timeline and reinforcing the idea of a perpetual threat, and phantasm-time, blurring the distinction between actual events and hypothetical scenarios, resulting in hyperdramatic narratives. These temporalities contribute to the promotion of military violence as a means of ensuring security while discouraging democratic discussions. Our analysis underscores the political significance of military heritagisation in shaping national identity and security perceptions.

How are opportunities to critically reflect upon military violence and militarization shaped by museal representations of a country's military history? Inspired by a critical heritage perspective and feminist international relations research, this article contributes to the scholarly discussion of the political implications of military memory making. The aim is to analyse how military violence is framed in official heritagization of the Cold War period in Sweden. Based on fieldwork at three military museums, the article discusses how framings of violence affect opportunities to politically and ethically engage with military issues and the use of force. A central question concerns how gender underpins representations of violence at the museums and how this gendering affects politicization. The analysis discloses that military violence is framed as sacred sacrifice, as ‘pure’ technology, as play and as (male) omnipotence. The argument made is that such gendered frames obscure and depoliticize problematic aspects of military violence.

Det förflutna används ständigt för att ge mening åt nuet. I kalla krigets spår skildrar framväxten av ett nytt svenskt militärt kulturarv. Här visas hur minnen och lämningar från en tid fylld av rädsla och säkerhetspolitiska spänningar får nya innebörder när bunkrar och nedlagda militäranläggningar omvandlas till museer, lyxbostäder och spännande besöksmål.

Genom fältbesök vid en rad militära kulturarvsplatser runt om i Sverige har författarna undersökt vilka miljöer, föremål och känslor som idag får representera kalla kriget. De visar hur dåtidens hemligheter, hotbilder och militärfordon både blir kittlande och fascinerande inslag i kulturarvet och förmedlar idéer om trygghet och beskydd.

Här tas ett nytt grepp på kulturarvsfrågor genom att minnesskapande sätts i relation till säkerhetspolitik. Utifrån kritiska kulturarvsstudier och feministisk teori diskuteras den nationella gemenskapens gränser och vilken roll som genus och sexualitet har i berättelserna om hot och försvar.

I en demokrati måste frågor om militärt våld alltid genomlysas och diskuteras. Med denna utgångspunkt granskas kulturarvets betydelse för förståelsen av hot och säkerhet. Boken uppmanar till reflektion om hur historien skrivs och om vad som krävs för att skapa trygghet.

I kalla krigets spår är ett resultat av ett tvärvetenskapligt forskningsprojekt. Författarna är forskare vid Stockholms universitet och har skrivit boken tillsammans.

This article examines how the war in Ukraine and the subsequent re-orientation of Swedish security and defense policy leading up to a NATO-application, has been discussed in Swedish public debate. We ask what work gender does in the sense-making of the war and the changes in security policy. Departing from feminist theories of security and gendered protection, the study discusses the ambiva-lent ways in which gender and the trope of Sweden as a gender equal nation is negotiated in the media (print media and television) and by policy makers. The gendered imaginaries of masculinist protection and the vulnerability of women and children legitimize violence as the most adequate way to respond to this new situation. Gender is used to depoliticize security politics and to frame militarization as unavoidable. In this context, gender equality is both seen as a value worthy of protection and as an internal threat weakening men, and inclining women to object to the military responses suggested. We argue that the production of masculinity and militarization promotes a security ideology imbued with violence, hierarchies, and control.

Cold War military remnants and experiences have recently been turned into museums and tourist attractions in many European countries. Recognizing such memory making as essentially political, we examine the role of gender and sexuality in the making of a Cold War military heritage. Combining critical feminist and intersectional Cold War research with gender perspectives on military memory, this article contributes to feminist conceptualizations of the relationship between gendered security and the production of memory. By highlighting narratives and spatial, visual, and acoustic arrangements, we investigate state-sponsored museum displays of two national security crises in the Swedish context: the 1952 Soviet downing of a DC-3 airplane and the submarine hunts in the Baltic Sea in the early 1980s. The analysis reveals how gender works to construct a geopolitical outlook, enable emotional identifications, and restore national order. Heterosexuality and hierarchical gender norms emerge as prerequisites for national security. We argue that when visitors are encouraged to feel gendered national security, opportunities to critically reflect upon Cold War histories decrease, promoting the depoliticization of security politics and militarism.

This article showcases how a feminist perspective provides novel insights into the relations between military heritage/history and national security politics. We argue that analysing how gender and sexualities operate at military heritage sites reveals how these operations dis/encourage particular understandings of security and limit the range of acceptable national protection policies. Two recent initiatives to preserve the military heritage of the Cold War period in Sweden are examined: the Cold War exhibits at Air Force Museum in Linköping and the redevelopment of a formerly sealed off military compound at Bungenäs, where bunkers have been remade into exclusive summer homes. By combining feminist international relations and critical heritage studies, we unpack the material, affective and embodied underpinnings of security produced at military heritage sites. A key conclusion is that the way heritagization incorporates the ‘naturalness’ of the gender binary and heterosexuality makes conceptualizing security without territory, or territory without military protection, inaccessible. The gendering of emotions and architectural and spatial arrangements supports historical narratives that privilege masculine protection and reinforce a taken-for-granted nativist community. A feminist analysis of military heritage highlights how gender and sexualities restrict security imaginaries; that is, understandings of what is conceivable as security.