States claim legitimacy – in part – by protecting citizens from violence. Yet, fulfilling that claim requires asking some citizens to risk death on the state's behalf. This dissertation examines how democratic societies legitimate choices about soldiering, using Sweden's manpower system as an empirical case. It asks: How are governing choices concerning soldiering legitimated in policy texts, as articulations of security and its demands change over time? Covering the period from 1992 to 2024, the study traces Sweden's transformation across four periods: from universal to partial male conscription, through a so-called modernised duty, to an all-volunteer force, and finally to a hybrid system combining gender-neutral conscription with employed soldiers.

Soldiering constitutes an extraordinary practice that, in democratic societies, must be not only legally permissible but also publicly acceptable and politically legitimate. This dissertation argues that the legitimacy of soldiering policies is actively constructed through meaning-making practices that reconcile evolving security imperatives with democratic norms and military rationality.

The dissertation employs a qualitative, interpretive textual policy analysis, focusing on processes of discursive legitimation and delegitimation. Its empirical material comprises key Swedish security and defence policy documents. The dissertation integrates social contract theory, securitisation theory, and sociological legitimacy theory into a novel framework centred on the concept of the security contract: an evolving, implicit arrangement through which state–citizen obligations in the security domain are continuously renegotiated. The framework reveals how articulations of security as a policy problem structure the moral and political space in which soldiering policies become intelligible and acceptable, and how the boundaries of legitimate extraordinary measures are drawn and redrawn over time.

The findings demonstrate that discursive (de)legitimation operates as a process of reconciliation, weaving together security imperatives, democratic values, and military rationality into accounts that render governing decisions both necessary and appropriate. Governing choices have been legitimated through both affirmative claims and the delegitimation of alternatives. Sweden's trajectory defies binary categorisations: conscription and voluntary service have been repeatedly recombined, and the contemporary manpower model blends legal obligation, civic appeals, and material incentives. Importantly, across all four periods, the norm that participation in national defence constitutes a civic duty has remained an actively cultivated foundation on which the Swedish manpower system’s legitimacy is constructed.

The dissertation makes three interconnected contributions. Thematically, it foregrounds legitimation as a central object of analysis in the study of soldiering policy. Theoretically, it advances the security contract as a framework for understanding how state–citizen obligations are continually renegotiated. Empirically, it provides the first comprehensive longitudinal account of how Sweden’s soldiering system has been legitimated in policy documents across three decades of institutional transformation, culminating in NATO accession and the end of two centuries of military non-alignment. Amid renewed militarisation and recruitment challenges, the findings illuminate the normative and political work involved in building military capacity while sustaining the foundations of the social contract.