Research project Cultural heritage transformations in times of insecurity and war preparedness
This project aims to understand how military conflict and a deteriorating security environment influence the production of collective memories and historical narratives of war and conflict.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 drastically transformed the European security landscape. We will study the impact of this development on Sweden's collective memory-making and military heritage. How does the new situation affect narratives regarding historical experiences of threat and protection? In what way is Sweden’s history of neutrality and of gendered norms of military violence reshaped?
Combining critical heritage studies (CHS) and feminist international relations (IR), we approach the remaking of collective memories through examining military heritage sites. In an earlier project our transdisciplinary group investigated military heritage sites across Sweden 2019-2021.
We will revisit several sites to identify changes in the narrations and exhibits, and conduct interviews to capture new ways of engaging with military remnants. Taken together, the materials collected before and after the invasion provide an opportunity to investigate the shifts in heritagisation.
By addressing memory-making in a tense situation with rapidly changing security politics, the project will contribute new original knowledge and theoretical understandings of the interplay between memory and national security. It will also encourage important democratic conversations on the political uses of the past.
Project description
The war in Ukraine and the military build-up in Europe have drawn attention to the role of cultural heritage for Sweden’s defence strategy. Security discourse now emphasizes the significance of collective memory for national defence, and heritage and security actors launch joint outreach activities. When preserving the past is framed as a matter of security, heritage institutions gain a new role. This raises fundamental questions about cultural institutions’ autonomy as well as about the purpose of heritage and how it should be displayed and narrated.
This transdisciplinary project explores how cultural heritage becomes a means to prepare citizens for war and strengthen national unity and resilience. It specifically aims to examine the uses of Sweden’s military heritage in times of increasing insecurity. How is military heritage mobilised as a national security resource? What new meanings are accorded military heritage and history? The project unites researchers from international relations, ethnology, gender studies, and art- and architectural history. We examine reformulations of heritage as a matter for war preparedness and how this is motivated in policy and by heritage and security actors. Through comparing fieldwork materials and documentation of military heritage sites from before and after the Russian invasion, we will be able to identify changes in exhibitions and in how actors make sense of the nation’s past, particularly its legacy of neutrality and gender equality.
Project members
Project managers
Maria Wendt
Senior lecturer, Associate professor
Members
Fredrik Krohn Andersson
Mattias Frihammar
Universitetslektor
Cecilia Åse
Professor