This article analyses how government officials in Finland and Sweden reconciled their national identities as historically non-aligned countries with NATO membership. The analysis builds on, and contributes to, feminist poststructuralist theorizing on militarized nationalisms. Despite the general conviction that nations and nationalisms are based on unity, they simultaneously rely on, and hide, gendered, racialized and classed differences. Violence is a central feature of militarized nationalisms, which is legitimized, in part, through a protection myth positioning men as the ultimate guardians of women’s security. The analysis is based on statements by government officials in Finland and Sweden following their NATO applications on 18 May 2022. Applying a comparative narrative analytical design, the analysis identifies four narratives that, in different ways, (re)inforced gendered, racialized and classed tropes that naturalized Finland and Sweden’s membership in NATO as necessary to (1) reconcile historical pasts, (2) defend the international rule-based order, (3) embrace a natural belonging to NATO and (4) become protectors of/from the North. Together, these narratives (re)instated militarized nationalisms in both countries and, in constructing notions of perfect unity, silenced conflicting experiences of violence and inequality within and between NATO, the Nordics and Finland and Sweden.

Contemporary developments in international affairs underscore the need for successful outcomes in the field of nuclear disarmament. However, feminist scholars have shown how linkages between masculinity and nuclear posturing continue to make disarmament appear as a policy of the weak, associated with emasculation and/or feminization. In this article I show how a feminist study of Swedish nuclear history has the potential to complicate, and disrupt, such linkages. Analysing a broad range of primary sources through a discourse analytical lens, the article shows how Sweden (re)constructed a white masculine self through its nuclear renunciation and disarmament engagement in the 1950s and 1960s. The article contributes with new insights about how gender, nuclear renunciation and disarmament interact; how lessons from the past can inform our understanding of disarmament dilemmas in the present; and the policy implications of such an analysis. Arguing that such knowledge is crucial for imaginative and transformative disarmament policy in the present, the article concludes that to reach a world free from nuclear weapons, it is crucial to expose, and challenge, those power relations that contribute to sustain a gendered and racialized nuclear order.

Den feministiska forskningen om genus och kärnvapen har framför allt handlat om kärnvapeninnehav. Det saknas därmed forskning som undersöker hur genus och policy om kärnvapen och nedrustning har skapats över tid i sammanhang där viljan att ska a kärnvapen har klingat av. I den här boken utgår författaren från det svenska fallet för att bidra till den feministiska förståelsen av genus, kärnvapen och nedrustning. Sveriges historiska roll inom den internationella nedrustningspolitiken, liksom den feministiska utrikespolitik som har tagit form på senare år, gör Sverige till ett särskilt intressant fall att studera. Med avstamp i feministisk teori undersöker boken hur konstruktionen av genus, nation och sexualitet hänger ihop med policy om nedrustning. Den fokuserar särskilt på hur mänskliga kroppar och känslor bidrar till att skapa mening om både identitet och policy. Till grund för analysen ligger en rik samling historiska dokument. Boken visar hur föreställningar om genus och nedrustningspolitikens utformning har (om)förhandlats över tid, och hur historiska studier kan bidra till förståelsen av samtida policyproblem.

This dissertation provides new knowledge about gender, nuclear weapons and disarmament. Previous feminist research has shown that in contexts where positive associations are made between military strength, masculinity and nuclear weapon possession, it is hard to imagine nuclear renunciation and disarmament as anything other than potential emasculation or feminization. Meanwhile, empirically based feminist theorization about gender, nuclear renunciation and disarmament remains a blind spot. This dissertation uses Sweden as a case to analyze nuclear weapon renunciation and disarmament from a feminist angle. As one of the countries that had the opportunity to acquire nuclear weapons – and considered doing so for some time – before deciding to become engaged with international disarmament aims instead, Sweden is an interesting case to study. The empirical focus is on disarmament policymaking in relation to the Swedish nuclear weapon debate (1954–1968) and the submarine crisis (1981–1989). The study draws on a broad set of primary sources, ranging from government speeches and parliamentary records to media output including comics and personal correspondence and diaries. Approaching the nuclear weapon debate and the submarine crisis as arenas for debating disarmament policy, and understanding disarmament policymaking as historically situated and marked by gendered, nationalized and sexualized power structures in specific contexts, the dissertation contributes empirical and theoretical insights relevant to feminist IR theory, and to nuclear history and IR studies more broadly. Contrary to previous feminist theorizing about disarmament as associated with femininity and/or emasculation, my findings suggest that Swedish disarmament policy was co-constructed with certain forms of masculinity, and that alternative policy discourses and identity representations were feminized and sidelined to the margins. The dissertation suggests that rather than assuming preconceived linkages between nuclear weapons possession and masculinity on the one hand, and disarmament and femininity on the other, it is necessary to challenge such binary conceptualizations and investigate how masculinities and femininities, and nuclear weapon and disarmament policy, have been co-constructed in specific historical contexts. The opposite, to depart from preconceived conceptualizations about gender and policy not only contributes to the reconstruction of gender, but also rules out alternatives to nuclearized security strategies and nuclearized masculinity. The dissertation provides a methodological and theoretical framework for further research on the making of disarmament policy from a feminist perspective.