In the grey zone: Threat representations and security practices in the Swedish militarization process

Abstract

In Sweden, the national security objective to establish a total defence, which has been pending since the end of the Cold War, has been reintroduced. This has increasingly shifted the attention from civil crisis management to military defence, with subsequent increased resources for defence mobilization. A key threat representation in the current Swedish security narrative is the grey zone, which refers to a new, complex security situation framed as neither war nor peace. In this article, the idea of the grey zone is traced in the national discourse by analysing government policies and mass media content from 2010 to 2021. This threat representation has implications as it conditions perceptions and security work in particular ways. These implications are discussed in relation to the Swedish Security Protection Act and its impact on public administration, cooperative settings and daily work practices. While national policies stress how defence mobilization will provide security and benefit the societal response to all kinds of crises, these security practices may have unforeseen consequences, fostering a culture of suspicion and accusation. Moreover, practices of secrecy and suspicions may ultimately threaten the Swedish constitutional principles of transparency – one of the key core values that the Swedish total defence aims to protect.

Keywords

Grey zone militarization security narrative threat representation total defence

Introduction

The 1990s and early 2000s have been viewed as a paradigmatic shift in the Swedish security and defence sectors. After the Cold War, the focus was broadened towards societal security rather than military defence and war-thinking. New agencies, institutional structures and research environments were designated towards civil crisis management, with an increasing emphasis on preemptive measures to reduce vulnerabilities and possible future security risks (Larsson, 2021b; Rådestad and Larsson, 2020; Stiglund, 2021).

However, during the last 10–15 years, there have again been substantial changes in Swedish national security assessments (Larsson, 2021a). After decades of Swedish demilitarization (Holmberg, 2015), the previous political priorities of civil crisis management and domestic security concerns have now been moved down on the national security agenda. Government policies and security debates have been framed around the perception that the global security situation is worsening, with severe implications for Sweden’s security. A central feature of this narrative is the idea of the grey zone – an evocative threat representation aiming to explain the current complex, obscure and ever-present hybrid threats against Sweden.

The idea of the grey zone has emerged alongside the increased use of the term hybrid warfare in the international security discourse. Since Russia’s invasion of Crimea in 2014, hybrid warfare (see Hoffman, 2007) has been officially adopted as a key concept in the EU and NATO, increasing its popularity and shaping general strategies to respond to and counter hybrid threats (Caliskan and Cramers, 2018; Caliskan and Liégeois, 2021). Hybrid threats refer to a mix of conventional warfare, irregular conflicts, terrorism and criminal activities, aiming to undermine the legitimacy of the state without necessarily declaring war. Similarly, in the Swedish narrative of the grey zone, antagonistic threats are conflated with civil crises. This coupling of civil crisis management and traditional security threats has increasingly blurred the boundaries between civil and military spheres in Sweden (Larsson, 2021a).

The conflation of civil and military spheres is reflected in the national security objective to re-establish a Swedish total defence, an idea that dates back to the Cold War. Since Russia’s invasion of Crimea, the total defence has been reintroduced in security policy and planning as a solution to the so-called grey zone problem, along with compulsory military conscription and substantial increases in funding (Ericson et al., 2023). The total defence is thought to include all actors in Sweden on all societal levels. The Parliament, the government, state agencies, regions, municipalities, the private sector, voluntary and religious organizations, and each and every individual ‘are all parts of, and expected to contribute to, the total defence’ (Prop, 2020/21:30: 84). With this rhetoric, the Swedish civil sector has become increasingly influenced by rationales of militarism, securitization and secrecy (Ericson and Wester, 2022), in an ongoing process of militarization. Previous research has traced different features of this process, focusing on the mobilization of civil society (Ericson et al., 2023), securitization (Ericson and Wester, 2022) and debates about Swedish NATO membership (Hagström, 2020).

Processes of militarization come with significant political and structural implications for society (Holmberg, 2015), which depend on the national contexts. Sweden has a long tradition of openness and transparency in public administration (Bok, 2011; Larsson and Bäck, 2008). The right to access official documents and the freedom for public servants to communicate information are protected by the Swedish constitution and are essential to the democratic system, albeit national security and law enforcement are common exceptions to this rule. In addition, the country has a longstanding peaceful and alliance-free history. Because of these features, Sweden serves as an interesting case that can help us understand militarization processes better by pointing to important mechanisms in such developments: the evoking of fear and insecurity through security policy, and the subsequent efforts to administrate fear through bureaucratized security measures and administrative secrecy.

In this article, my aim is to provide a critical account of this development, and in particular, the grey zone that underpins it, using Sweden as a case. Drawing on the work of Massumi (2007, 2009, 2010a, 2010b), I set out to analyse the grey zone and open it up for critique by pointing to particular characteristics in this threat representation: its all-inclusiveness, its affective nature, its distinctive temporality. Throughout my analysis, I discuss the implications that may follow this idea, in relation to the re-establishment of the Swedish total defence and the implementation of an institutional system for protective security. My empirical material includes 60 policy documents central to recent years’ mobilization of national security in Sweden, concerning both the overall security situation as well as more detailed prescriptive policies that introduce a set of practices regulated in the updated Protective Security Act (2018: 585). This material is complemented by mass media articles where the rationales behind the changes in policy are publicly communicated by government officials and commented on by security experts.

This article is structured as follows. In the first and second sections, I outline the theoretical framework that has guided my analysis, including critical and feminist perspectives on militarization and characteristics of contemporary threat representations. Thirdly, I present the empirical material and method, focusing on post-structural policy analysis in which problem representations, such as threats, play a crucial role and translate into security practices. In the subsequent sections, I analyse the characteristics of the grey zone in three parts, and then go on to discuss its implications by highlighting the Swedish administrative system for protective security. Lastly, I conclude and make a call for further research.

A critical feminist perspective on processes of militarization

In this study, I have analysed militarization from a critical stance, drawing on critical feminist scholarship in security and defence studies. While feminist scholars often trace gendered power structures and ask research questions based on women’s experiences (Wibben, 2018), the analysis in this article instead draws on how feminist scholarship has paid sustained attention to militarism and militarization (Åhäll, 2016; Enloe, 2016; Stavrianakis and Stern 2018; Wibben, 2018). While there are many ways of defining these concepts (Mabee and Vucetic, 2018), I lean on a broad definition of militarization as a gradual social, political and psychological process in which military values and ideas increasingly shape the lives and practices of people, groups and institutions (Enloe, 2016). Hence, militarization entails transformation, not only in the security and defence sector but in civil society, when military rationales and priorities become broadly favoured in economic, political and cultural affairs. This does not imply the glorification of war. Instead, it implies the ambivalent and subtle ways of being influenced by and caught up in military ways (Eastwood, 2018), including logics and activities ‘much, much broader than war, comprising an underlying system of institutions, practices, values, and cultures’ (Sjoberg and Via, 2010: 7). It includes the mundane social relations that make violent war thinkable (Gray, 2016; Wibben, 2018), how military logics and representations shape the very structure of subjective perception (Crandall and Armitage, 2005), and how affects play a role in this process by underpinning everyday social practices (Åhäll and Gregory, 2013; Basham, 2016, 2018; Chisholm and Ketola, 2020; Gray, 2016). This process normalizes and legitimizes war (Hyde, 2016; see also Stavrianakis and Stern, 2018) when civil society begins ‘to see the world as a dangerous place best approached with militaristic attitudes’ (Enloe, 2016: 18). Such ideas concern notions of ‘us and them’ and determine who are seen as capable protectors in the light of perceived threats (Åhäll, 2016; Cockburn, 2004; Enloe, 2016; Young, 2003; Wibben, 2010).

Following these feminist scholars, I view threat representations as intrinsic to security policy, which relies on traditional security narratives that tend to include the following elements: threats that locate danger; object/subject to be secured; appointed security providers; and recommended measures for achieving security (Wibben, 2010). Hence, a process of militarization can be seen as beginning with, and being fuelled by, threats.

When national security as a concept is militarized, threats appear magnified, enemies seem to multiply, secrecy is more easily justified, intrusions of the state into civilians’ lives are easier to rationalize, and compromises to civil rights can become legitimized. (Enloe, 2016: 12)

Analysing threat representations is therefore key to understanding how repressive measures such as surveillance and increased policing of dissidents are justified and implemented, at the potential expense of democratic values, just processes and constitutional freedoms (Young, 2003). Such repressive measures can only come to make sense when security threats are introduced. Acceptance of threat representations makes militarized security practices seem logical and crucial.

The characteristics of threat representations

The term national security can entail protection from all kinds of harm, including civil crises such as pandemics, earthquakes, or climate change. However, in processes of militarization, antagonistic threats to the state are prioritized, meaning that it is other human beings that are framed as malevolent and dangerous enemies, outside or inside of the state (Enloe, 2016; Young, 2003). In my analysis of the grey zone – a representation of antagonistic threats in the post-9/11 Western world – I focus on three characteristics of contemporary threats: how they are narrated as omnipresent, how they are affectively charged, and how they convey and induce a particular temporality.

Firstly, threat representations tend to be described as omnipresent: all-inclusive and intangible, closely related to complexity, interconnectedness and uncertainty as features of modern society (Massumi, 2009). In this framing, threats become endemic and indistinguishable from everyday life, situating the world in neither wartime nor peacetime but instead ‘in a permanently critical condition’ (2009, 157). Threats against the state become multifaceted, borderless and domestic. As a consequence, any accident, incident or ambiguous sign of threat activity becomes a potential national security concern (Massumi, 2010a).

Secondly, potential threats are real in the sense that they are affectively real; they make people feel things in the present (Massumi, 2009). Threats inflict feelings of emergency and urgency, generating a wide range of intense individual emotions: anxiety, stress, anger, anticipated pain, but also empathy or antipathy, and excitement, thrill and motivation (Adey and Anderson, 2012; Anderson and Adey, 2011; Basham, 2018). An intensely felt reality translates into a felt certainty about the world, a ‘gut feeling’ (Massumi, 2010b: 55) to be acted on. This is how emotions foster a widespread ‘faith in action’ (Kaufmann, 2016: 99) and play a central role in governance.

Thirdly, threats are characterized by a particular temporality; they are potential. According to Massumi, ‘[t]hreat is from the future. It is what might come next’ (Massumi, 2010b: 53). While occasionally realized, most often threats remain in potential, and a potential is impossible to disprove. Since potential threats linger on, security can only be achieved by action against threats that have not yet emerged; actions pre actions. The only certainty is that you have to act now – quickly and intuitively – to do everything possible to preempt the potential.

These three characteristics of contemporary threats coincide and legitimize preemptive action. Such actions are based on an affective certainty about the existence of a threat, rather than an informed judgment about a set of objective conditions. They are legitimized through ‘the affective fact of fear, actual facts aside’ and consequently, ‘[p]reemptive action will always have been right’ (Massumi, 2010b: 54). In this way, the logic of preemption has a particular authority. Firmly embedded in an overall security narrative, government responses to threats are always logical, justified and correct, even if information turned out to be flawed, assessments were wrong, and there was no actual danger. In this sense, preemption is an operative logic of power, a grand rationale, defining a political age in the same way as the logic of deterrence defined the Cold War era (Massumi, 2007: n.p.).

This rationale drives militarization. When contemporary, antagonistic threats are represented as everywhere and all-the-time, so needs the military response to be, incorporating the civilian sphere. In The Administration of Fear, Paul Virilio points to how states organize and create security policies and institutional systems for ‘the orchestration and management of fear’ (Virilio, 2012: 15). Hence, the militarization process will position people, order social relations, and have implications for action (Wibben, 2010). Influenced by threat representations, societal actors organize, regulate, educate, train, and make plans to attend to the threat. Within the total defence, in the shade of the grey zone, people far beyond intelligence agencies and security experts are tasked with paying attention to certain things in certain ways. All incidents and accidents are potentially hostile. Therefore, as Massumi (2010a) stresses, scholars need to pay attention to this paying attention and ask how threat representations shape perceptions and influence practices. High stakes are involved, in terms of freedom, security and democracy.

Analysing security policy: Method and materials

In this study, I have applied post-structural policy analysis to trace the idea of the grey zone in the Swedish security policy discourse and provide an account of how this idea translates into security practices. My analysis relies on the assumption that security practices are discursive, meaning they reproduce rationalities, with material, social and economic effects. In other words, ideas impact the way societal actors talk and make sense of the world, and provide motives and symbolic meaning for their objectives, decisions and behaviours (Bacchi and Goodwin, 2016; Winther Jørgensen and Phillips, 2000). Ideas shape values and preferences and are, in essence, political constructs (Larsson, 2015), providing a narrated ‘order for the world’ (Wibben, 2010: 2) that transfers into social rules and security practices. Policy documents are tools for the government to communicate and prescribe such practices, outlining how societal problems, in terms of threats and vulnerabilities, must be solved and how (Bacchi and Goodwin, 2016). In Foucauldian tradition, this is how policies are seen to exercise power: through the way they produce truth, knowledge and rationales, as a basis for influence, resource allocation and action.

Holmberg (2015) has shown how the security and defence policy process can be traced in official documents and media reporting, as well as in the organization of public administration. In this study, my empirical material includes 60 government policies with relevance for the Swedish total defence. I have divided the policies I analyse into six different categories. First, the government receives official reports supporting legislative proposals from appointed committees or commissioners, published in the Swedish Government Official Reports series (SOU). Secondly, an important political organ is the Swedish Defence Commission. It functions as a link between the government and the Parliament, with representatives from all political parties. This committee publishes official reports in the Defence Ministry Publications Series (Ds). Thirdly, government agencies in the security and defence sector, such as the Armed Forces (FM) and the Civil Contingencies Agency (MSB), also provide formal input to the government’s security and defence planning. One example is the reports that account for long-term strategic military planning, covering important trends, future characteristics of potential conflicts and military development needs (FM, 2018). These different policies result in the fourth policy category: national security strategies and government bills (propositions), that serve as a basis for the fifth category: laws and regulations.

The sixth and last category includes more detailed policies developed by government agencies, aiming at specific sectors, actors or functions within the total defence, providing directives, instructions, educational material, handbooks and guidelines. I have included such policies from three agencies that prescribe security practices for both the military and civil security and defence sector: the Swedish Security Service (Säpo), the Civil Contingencies Agency (MSB) and the Swedish Defence Research Agency (FOI).

In this study, I have further assumed that mass media plays a central role in broad policy processes and general security development. Media coverage is an important part of what is considered a national security discourse (Holmberg, 2015) and reveals how threats are conveyed to the public and how officials argue for security measures. Therefore, a selection of Swedish mass media articles (45 publications) covering total defence issues and debates between 2010 and 2021, retrieved through database search, are included as complementary empirical material.¹ All translations of the empirical material are made by the author.

The omnipresent grey zone

In Sweden, the grey zone has emerged as a threat representation after Russia’s invasion of Crimea in 2014.² It appears alongside the application of the term hybrid warfare in security policy documents (e.g. Ds, 2014:20) when discussing general security developments and conflict patterns. Hybrid warfare, as well as the terms non-linear or irregular warfare, is used to describe a new and unconventional kind of warfare, in which hostile states utilize domestic terrorism and insurgency, as well as non-violent tactics including cyber attacks, information operations, political gestures and economic pressures, as means to reach their strategic objectives. The government bill, which outlined the directions for Swedish total defence planning during the period 2016–2020 (Prop, 2014/15:109), pointed to hybrid warfare as a scenario societal actors need to prepare for.

During the years after 2014, the Swedish security policy documents continue to draw up a broad, all-inclusive security situation, pointing to a wide range of threatening scenarios and a high level of complexity stemming from a global security situation that is ‘characterized by instability and unpredictability . . . difficult to assess and sometimes rapid’ (Ds, 2019:8: 41). In part, this threat representation relies on traditional Western notions of military threats where Russia, China, Iran, as well as borderless terrorism, are positioned as main adversaries. However, a wider range of domestic risks and global security issues is merged into the picture:

The challenges and threats against our security are more dynamic and unconfined than previously. They can be antagonistic as well as non-antagonistic. The threats against our security exceed borders and sectors. They can include terrorism, organized crime, interruptions in vital systems and flows, deteriorating states, economic crisis, political and religious extremism, threats against democracy and the justice system, social exclusion, migration flows, threats against values, climate change, cyber threats, natural hazards and pandemics, and armed attacks. The development of information technology challenges many traditional preconceptions about the scope, actors, and logic of security policy. (Ds, 2014:20: 21)

This merging of antagonistic and non-antagonistic threats creates a particular state of affairs, one in which civil crises are explicitly described as openings for antagonists: ‘non-antagonistic threats or crises can be exploited by an antagonistic actor to achieve their objectives’ (Ds, 2017:66: 15). This state of affairs, in which all undesirable situations become opportunities for hostile acts, is the grey zone.

In my empirical material, the term grey zone first appears in the Swedish policy discourse in 2014, in a public memo on ‘the fragmented battlefield’, which discusses features of modern warfare and future operational environments (FOI, 2014b: 3). According to the memo, the ‘arduous grey zone problem’ arises when covert warfare makes it difficult to know when to take measures to protect the civil society (FOI, 2014b: 12). Around the same time, the term also appears in a newspaper article written by the columnist and Swedish defence blogger ‘Wiseman’ (Bergqvist, 2014), who establishes the grey zone as a condition between peace and war in which information warfare and subversion supplement classical warfare. The term is later included in the Defence Commission’s reports Motståndskraft [Power to resist] (Ds, 2017:66) and Värnkraft [Power to protect] (Ds, 2019:8), defined as the ‘uncertainty that can emerge in the borderland between war and peace’ (Ds, 2017:66: 65). Drawing on this uncertainty due to new forms of indistinguishable threats, the grey zone is also a key concept applied by the Armed Forces in their strategic planning and military doctrines (FM, 2016, 2018, 2020), defined as ‘the strategic ambiguity that emerges between a state of normalcy and armed attack’ (FM, 2020: 16). In a media interview, the Supreme Commander of the Swedish Armed Forces has publicly emphasized the importance of seeing threats as a broad exposure of influence and pressures in hybrid warfare and grey zones (Gummesson, 2017). The grey zone also makes its way into societal sectors that are commonly not seen as members of the security and defence sector. For example, in a report from 2018 (FOI, 2018b) that aims to increase knowledge of security threats among practitioners in the energy sector, it is argued that ‘grey zone operations will be the dominant form of interstate rivalry in the foreseeable future’ (FOI, 2018b: 31).

With this continuous application, the grey zone – as this new, constantly ongoing, complex security situation – has gained momentum in the security discourse. In 2020, the Minister of Interior publicly stated that the most severe threat against Sweden is ‘the grey zone problem . . . a creeping impact that actually continues pretty much every week’ (Skoglund, 2020). This example demonstrates how the term has influenced Swedish political discourse, scoring high on the national security agenda. Moreover, the grey zone concept expands the demarcations for warfare. It demands an ‘expansion of the battlefield to include society in its entirety’ (FM, 2018: 18), turning a wide range of domestic concerns and features of international relations into issues of military concern. By doing this, many kinds of events become potential hostile acts and the grey zone hence widens the scope of interpretation.

The framing of the grey zone entails that it can never cease to exist. Since uncertainty and complexity are described as inherent features of modern society, there can be no remedy. Whether it is wildfires or pandemics, crisis always seems to be upon us in one way or another, and thus, the exposure to antagonistic threats is constant. Therefore, the Swedish grey zone constitutes a constant state of crisis, in which people, in the foreseeable future, will feel lost. As the head of the Swedish Military Intelligence and Security Agency stresses in a news article, the grey zone problem is difficult, ongoing and troubling, and ‘we don’t really know where we are in the grey zone’ (Sjöshult, 2018). This account is a telling example of when danger is conceptualized as a persistent ‘lack’ of knowledge (cf. Daase and Kessler, 2007), and yet, at the same time, it is all-inclusive, since the grey zone can be thought of as ‘everything before war’ (FOI, 2018b: 19). This discursive manoeuvre is in itself destabilising – ‘we can never know but threats are everywhere and all the time’. Security and peace are never givens. Threats are omnipresent, inescapable and perpetual.

The affectively charged grey zone

A telling example of frightening narratives is the content in the public report Motståndskraft (Ds, 2017:66), which relies on vivid accounts of coming war and despair. According to media commentary, ‘the gravity [of the report’s conclusions] is founded on hardboiled but realistic reasoning about how Sweden could potentially be affected. Grey zone problems. Vulnerability. Threats. Direct armed attacks’, which should give ‘more people than the Minister of Defence sleepless nights. Like the Swedish people’ (Arvidsson, 2017). The grey zone carries certain affective components.

A key affective component of the grey zone is the notion of hostility. Threats are described as imposed upon us by an enemy:

An attacker can consciously create the [grey zone] problem by acting as close to the verge of detection as possible and thereby surprise and deceive the defender, avoiding security alerts and counteractions. (Ds, 2017:66: 65)

According to the policies, covert antagonistic activities can include a combination of political, diplomatic and economic pressures, such as market manipulation, conscious disinformation, illegal intelligence gathering, threats to decisionmakers, cyberattacks and physical sabotages (Ds, 2019:8; FOI, 2018b). Moreover, incidents and accidents, previously seen as accidental or randomly occurring, also become framed as potentially intentional antagonistic acts or opportunities for exploitation.

The external antagonist can create “accidents”, infrastructural disruptions, infectious diseases, and fuel social turmoil. Antagonists cannot create extreme weather, climate change or natural disasters, but such events can still be exploited by internal and external antagonists. (FOI, 2018b: 35)

External antagonists are thus framed as capable of exploiting society’s technical and infrastructural vulnerabilities, and capable of using internal antagonists, such as radicalized extremists, terrorists and organized crime groups, in the process (FOI, 2017). Also the private sector provides hostile states with opportunities for infiltration and influence, since a ‘completely legitimate business associate can also be an agent for a state actor’ (Säpo, 2019a: 6). As a defence expert from the Swedish Defence Research Agency expresses in a news report: ‘little green men can come disguised in business suits’ (Röstlund and Sköld, 2017). Subversive warfare agents can be ‘virtually anyone in a grey zone situation’ (FOI, 2018c: 9, emphasis added).

However, antagonistic intent cannot easily be verified – perhaps never. Yet, the notion of enemy presence is chilling, and a defender must still act as if it is confirmed, because the grey zone must always be considered as a potential build-up to an armed attack, ‘preceded by the attacker who, during a shorter or longer time, conducts active, often covert, activities without starting war’ (Ds, 2019:8: 114).

Not only is the grey zone hostile, but it is also discouraging. It redefines features of contemporary societies that have previously been framed as positive progress – globalization, digitalization, technological development, democracy, diversity – as problematic and fragile. It transforms the agonistic features of democracy into potential antagonism and threats against values. Social protests, or even just individual opinions and behaviours that deviate from the norm, can be deemed suspicious. In several policies, democracies, with open economies and freedom of opinion, are presented to have ‘certain characteristics that an antagonist can exploit to gain advantages’ (Prop, 2020/21:30: 62). Sweden is depicted as a ‘dependent’ society (Ds, 2019:8: 43), reliant on, for example, international flows, resources and companies. Moreover, Sweden is described as an ‘increasingly heterogeneous, urbanized, secularized, internationalized and individualized’ and ‘multi-cultural’ society (Ds, 2017:66: 109). While diversity is claimed to be an asset to a small, open country, there are subtle hints at potential challenges, including ‘social unrest and different kinds of extremism’ (Ds, 2017:66: 61). It is also stated that Sweden lacks protection since the country has ‘developed according to peacetime rationalities’ (Ds, 2019:8: 142), and hybrid warfare is increasing societal vulnerability (FM, 2018).

These policy narratives are purposefully designed to make people feel both uncertain and concerned, in order to make them see things and do things. Hence, the grey zone imposes a particular way of perceiving, which entails being on a constant lookout for enemies and paying attention (Massumi, 2010a). Since ‘a credible management of the grey zone . . . entails, in close cooperation with other authorities, an active, outreaching conduct in all domains, including cyberspace, to disclose hostile acts and link these to an actor’ (FM, 2018: 41), it implies a constant military presence, either physical or psychological – a gut feeling – among those civil servants who are appointed as spotters, in the sought-after ‘joint multi-agency situation awareness’ (FM, 2018: 31).

When terrifying accounts of threats are discursively linked to credible management in this way, the proposed need for actions becomes charged with affects. In the grey zone, decisive actions must be taken, and this notion bleeds into society and reproduces itself. Threat narratives are constructed as a response to anxiety and fear (Young, 2003), which, in turn, generates additional anxiety and fear, which then increases the attention to threats to explain and manage our fear (Wibben, 2010). Hence, the practice of narrating threats and security becomes a self-sustaining and perpetual process fostering preemptive action, fuelled by uncertainty and affects.

The temporality of the grey zone

Through the policies, the grey zone imposes a particular form of temporality promoting urgent actions. Since it is argued to delay and impede the defender’s decision regarding ‘if and when resources – ultimately military means – can and should be deployed’ (FM, 2018: 23), it forms the rationale behind an important argument that the grey zone problem requires an ‘active, outreaching conduct’ (2018: 41) since the uncertainty cannot be expected to be clarified. In the grey zone, acting comes before investigating, verifying, confirming, or dismissing. Acting comes before knowing.

Providing early warning, which is a familiar term for intelligence agencies, becomes challenging in the grey zone (FOI, 2018a). Building capabilities to provide early warnings is high on the agenda within both the EU and the military alliance NATO, as a crucial part of the defence against hybrid warfare, which prompts Sweden to consider this as well. However, ‘the traditional idea of early warning needs to be balanced against ideas of early detection and early counteraction/reaction’ (FOI, 2018a: 10, emphasis in original). Waiting for better intelligence information becomes risky in the grey zone, since ‘the grey zone problem puts high demands on decision-making and actions’ (FOI, 2018a: 40). With a proactive and offensive approach, the goal is to influence the antagonists before they carry out subversive activities, through deflecting or deceiving them by creating diversions. Potential antagonistic threats must be addressed before they have been analysed and verified (FOI, 2020a). Therefore, in this temporal framing, the process of suspecting and responding is speeded up, driven by urgency and the logic of preemption.

The preemptive logic means that security can only be achieved by action against threats that have not yet emerged: actions pre actions, to preempt the potential threat. Moreover, threat alerts form their own ‘iterative series’ (Massumi, 2010b: 60) in the way that the very few occasions of realized threats blur and blend together with the potential, but perhaps never confirmed, incidents. In the all-inclusive uncertainty, children’s pranks become potential sabotages. Tourists’ drones become enemy surveillance. And even if such incidents are investigated and dismissed, they are still evidence of societal vulnerability. In other words, the false alarms also confirm, and thereby reproduce, the grey zone.

In the policies, it is continuously clarified that all actors are employed in this grey zone battlefield.

The grey zone problem cuts through administrative borders . . . . The management of the grey zone is therefore characterized by a combination of military means and means that fall outside of the Armed Forces area of responsibility and must therefore be coordinated based on a holistic view of the challenges. (FM, 2018: 32)

This framing requires a militarization that cuts through administrative borders, a ‘whole of government’ approach (Hoffman, 2007: 47), implementing the temporality of preemption into civil authorities. Moreover, the grey zone extends beyond the government bodies to include everyone – to increase the collective ‘power of action’ (MSB/FM, 2020). The Swedish population needs to be educated about the grey zone, as this knowledge is ‘crucial for our ability to resist and ultimately, with military means, defend our sovereignty, independence and our open society’ (Ds, 2017:66: 109). This encouragement to constantly think in terms of the grey zone to be able to ‘act early and forcefully, even with an incomplete decision basis’ (Ds, 2017:66: 66) fuels the process of militarization by the comprehensive fostering of a population to be constantly concerned about war, engaged in the temporal logic of preemption, paying attention and always ready to act.

Institutionalizing the grey zone

Broad policies, which aim to increase knowledge and awareness, seek to discursively shape practices by outlining ‘how we should think, not what we should think’ (FM, 2016: 1, emphasis in original). Complementary policies, which draw on security narratives, then emphasize how threats motivate concrete practices and behaviours, outlining what needs to be protected, by whom, and how. One example is military policies, where the military-strategic doctrines ‘convert the Swedish political will into military-strategic points of reference, which are developed in operative doctrines, regulations and handbooks’ (FM, 2016: 5).

On a macro level, policy recommendations sometimes suggest more policy work. In the previously mentioned report covering the implications of the grey zone for the energy sector, the political government is advised to understand what the grey zone demands, since if the grey zone is well understood, ‘it can lead to new approaches and new legislation for acting in a grey zone situation’ (FOI, 2018b: 35). In this way, the policy discourse feeds into the production of new policies and shapes political will. Similarly, many of the analysed policies point to the need for financial allocation, clarification of roles and responsibilities, and the implementation of different institutional solutions (FOI, 2020a) to counter the grey zone problem:

Managing hybrid threats and grey zone problems is facilitated if there is cohesive and coordinated societal strategy, spanning over sectors, government agencies, government offices and the international level. (FOI, 2021a: 43)

Funding, reorganization, allocation of responsibilities and a coordinated societal strategy are key policy-driven mechanisms in the process of militarization. Societal structures gradually change, and the grey zone becomes increasingly institutionalized, seen as a status quo – ‘the new normal’ (FOI, 2018b: 15).

In this process, broad policies set the tone and direction for more detailed policies, which aim to educate, regulate and guide practices within the security and defence sector. Such policies are created when national security government agencies develop strategic frameworks and tools (e.g. FOI, 2020b), guidelines supporting civil actors’ planning processes (e.g. Säpo, 2019a, 2019b, 2019c, 2019d, 2019e, 2019f), as well as materials for courses, workshops (e.g. FOI, 2014a, 2018c, 2021b), exercises and training (e.g. MSB, 2019). In 2017, the media reported on how educational courses were held for key staff in 25 civil defence government agencies. Access was limited, and the content included accounts of the current security situation and security policy: the ‘grey zone [was] covered in-depth’ (Holmström, 2017).

Threat representations are also intrinsic to many total defence activities since a key suggested method is scenario planning, which has a strong military legacy and is used for analysis and strategic planning within the military-industrial complex (FOI, 2017). The Swedish Defence Research Agency, which serves both the military and the civil sector with policy documents, has composed five generic threat scenarios to discuss and plan for. The fifth scenario, ‘Generic case 5’, concerns a ‘Protracted and escalating grey zone problem’ (FOI, 2018c: 1), thought to function as a ‘common basis for different sectors and agencies’ by providing ‘broad planning directions’ (FOI, 2018c: 3). The scenarios are suggested as key features of the total defence planning process, forming a basis for education and inspiration (FOI, 2017), ‘to widen the capability to imagine’ (2017: 32) and to analyse threats more deeply, resulting in concrete measures and strategies. However, scenarios are simply stories – future imaginaries packed with affects. While they may be plausible, the threats are described as potential, and, as Massumi (2010b) points out, a potential is impossible to disprove. Because of this, this mode of governance by scenario planning cannot be criticized since it cannot be refuted. As a security practice, it will always have been effective, in particular, if the outlined scenario never occurs.

To sum up, this analysis of the practice-oriented policies shows how affective threat representations motivate and translate into day-to-day security practices (cf. Anderson and Adey, 2011; O’Grady, 2019). In the total defence planning process, everyone is included and people are expected to learn, accept and adjust, and then, the grey zone fades into a backdrop. I view this as another important policy-driven mechanism in the process of militarization: how the grey zone settles over Swedish administration.

Protective security practices in the grey zone

Along with, but separate from, intelligence agencies, one specific institutional system is often highlighted in the policies as essential for robust security practices: protective security. This system is described as crucial for society’s collective ability to detect and preempt the grey zone threat:

Protective Security is vital to our ability to manage antagonistic threats and reduce vulnerabilities on all levels of society . . . a well-functioning security protection is the foundation for the whole total defence. (Prop 2020/21:30: 131)

In the mass media, several top-level security agency officials have publicly come together and pushed for protective security as foundational for countering the grey zone. They have argued the need for increased knowledge and more resources (Friberg, 2018; Thornberg, 2017), maintaining that protective security needs to be a prioritized issue at top-management levels in organizations.

The attacks are occurring here and now. Knowledge is our first line of defence . . . . [We must] raise awareness and engage more people in the protective security work. (Eliasson et al., 2020)

In my view, the institutional system for protective security (cf. FOI, 2020a: 28) is particularly important in the way it is designed to shape local practices and individual behaviours in detailed and often comprehensive ways, in a wide range of organizations. Protective security is not just general terminology for security measures; it relates to particular practices, which are regulated by specific legislation, the Protective Security Act (2018: 585). For example, this Act is included as one of the main regulatory frameworks for planning exercises and training for the civil defence (MSB, 2019).

This Act is certainly not the only law that regulates total defence activities, and moreover, this is not a new act. Already in 2011, the government suggested an update, neither tailored to serve the total defence nor the grey zone. Instead, an update was motivated with references to developments in information technology, increased privatization and outsourcing of public services, and to facilitate international collaboration (Dir, 2011:94), and, as reported in the media, manage the threat of espionage (Strandberg, 2012). After Russia’s invasion of Crimea in 2014, the government bill for the updated protective security act was delayed until 2018. In the meantime, as covered by the media, state agencies put pressure on local municipalities by sending out letters demanding increased preparedness for war, with specific demands that the municipalities must increase their protective security, participate in defence exercises and courses, and increase physical protective measures (Magnusson, 2016). In other words, the issue of protective security was already pushed by state agencies onto local agendas and budgets before the government bill was published. When the bill was published, it proposed that the updated law should be drafted to include a wide range of new actors and practices in comparison to the former law (Prop, 2017/18:89). While the grey zone is not explicitly mentioned in this bill, it echoes in the text, carrying the same logic of complexity and all-inclusiveness:

Today’s threats are more complex and dynamic, which subsequently entails that information relating to conditions in other societal sectors than the military defence, can be of significance for national security. (Prop, 2017/18:89: 41)

The substantially updated Act came into effect in April 2019, with a range of policy documents published to support it, often produced by the Swedish Security Service. They describe protective security as a general system of coordinated measures for holistic protection with no standard solution, making security protection a ‘complex area with many puzzle pieces to be assembled to protect Sweden’s security’ (Säpo, 2019b: 6).

Protective security applies to everyone who conducts ‘security-sensitive activities’ (Säpo, 2019c: 6), meaning that all actors, both public and private, that might engage in potentially security-sensitive activities must carry out specific tasks and procedures and adjust their bureaucratic structures. According to law, all actors must themselves analyse all their activities and information to assess if these could be security-sensitive. They must then classify information into four levels of secrecy, to fit with international standards. Moreover, they have to protect physical spaces where activities take place and information is kept, such as buildings and technical infrastructure. Guards, fences, surveillance and alarms are deemed necessary, as well as reinforced building structures, protective doors and glass, and security cabinets for storage (Säpo, 2019f: 12). Policies are prescriptive down to how meeting rooms need to be debugged, communication encrypted, and how documents must be marked with a red, framed label that clarifies their classification (Säpo, 2019e). Hence, the level of detail is very high, and with these practices, the issue of national security becomes deeply institutionalized. It settles in physical structures, routinized activities and bureaucratic procedures. Moreover, such procedures position some actors as knowledgeable, professional and reliable: some ‘know’ the threat and become responsible for telling those who do not. Some need to request security clearance, while others provide it. And others (Others) are deemed unreliable or disloyal, through protective security procedures for ‘staff security’. These procedures include screening employees and doing routine checks of the personal records of all persons taking part in security-sensitive activities. The stated purpose of the security clearance is to investigate potential personal vulnerabilities and ‘clarify if a person can be considered loyal’ to the protected security interests (Säpo, 2019d: 7). Staff security is thought to prevent people who are not reliable from engaging in security-sensitive activities and ‘[security] operators must systematically monitor the staff with the purpose of detecting deviations at an early stage’ (Säpo, 2019d: 6). Staff security practices provide an example of how the symbolic action of paying attention to potential enemies (Massumi, 2010a) is routinized in the grey zone. To prevent insider threats, co-workers need to be regularly assessed and checked. Trust transforms into vulnerability.

In the all-inclusive grey zone, where everyone could potentially be the enemy, the emerging institutional system of protective security resemble Virilio’s (2012) notion of an administration of fear. The state creates policies for ‘the orchestration and management of fear’ (2012: 15) and exercises power by ‘imposing a false and terrifying reality’ (2012: 16). False, since the world cannot that easily be divided into good and evil, friends and enemies. Terrifying, because no end is in sight:

The civil defence comprises the whole society . . . [it is] a process that will need to continue during many years to come . . . . it is a complex operation . . . a comprehensive work . . . [that] needs to be further advanced and deepened. (Prop, 2020/21:30: 125)

The total, and forever required, defence becomes a societal condition. The whole society becomes a military concern, and everyone in it becomes primed to pay attention and act to preempt security threats. In this way, through processes covered in this analysis, the grey zone becomes perpetually reproduced, and society becomes increasingly militarized.

Conclusion

The aim of this article has been to provide a critical account of the Swedish process of militarization. Therefore, the Swedish context matters. While dichotomic distinctions between war/peace and civil/military can be seen as problematic (Basham, 2018; Howell, 2018; Mabee and Vucetic, 2018; Sjoberg, 2013; Wibben, 2018), Sweden has been one of the few countries in the world that could be meaningfully described as liberal pacifist (Mann, 1996). In 2014, Sweden celebrated ‘200 years without war’, there were no compulsory military conscriptions, the military funding was limited, and the country had been priding itself on its ‘neutral’, ‘alliance-free’ and peace-loving history, regardless of how questionable such statements may be (Åhäll, 2016). The notion of change and increasing militarization must be interpreted against this backdrop.

Current developments indicate that the process of militarization is ongoing in Sweden; both old and new governments have continued to push national security issues on the political agenda and allocated even more funding towards the military and civil defence. Moreover, Sweden has applied for NATO membership in the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. I suggest that the grey zone has been an important feature of a very persuasive security narrative in this development. While some may consider it an acceptable and useful representation of reality, I argue that we need to ask critical questions about the grey zone idea and its implications for public administration and for democracy – especially since the related term hybrid warfare has been criticized for being a weak concept, many times applied incorrectly (Caliskan and Cramers, 2018) and too broad and ambiguous to be analytically useful (Caliskan and Liégeois, 2021). Any violence can be labelled ‘hybrid’ (Caliskan and Cramers, 2018; see also Van Puyvelde, 2015), and, similar to my argument in this article, Johnson (2018) suggests that the anxiety-driven mission to counter hybrid warfare seems to have caused a sense of disorientation and desire for urgent remedies.

In the grey zone, where the total defence involves all actors, where the security situation comprises all threats and all vulnerabilities, where uncertainty and complexity seem impossible to unpack, and peace is never a given, militarization becomes the only plausible solution to the societal problem of achieving security. According to the policies analysed in this study, society becomes nothing but a battlefield. Organizational structures and security practices emerge in the wake of the grey zone to engage in this battle. The rationales behind implementing new institutional systems, such as total defence and protective security, become natural, taken-for-granted ways of thinking. The policies foster an affectively and temporally charged preemptive approach, which interferes with deliberation, speeds up decisionmaking, and accommodates the broad institutionalization of animosity and administrative secrecy. The Protective Security Act imposes these issues on the highest strategic agendas of Swedish organizations, and through this, they divide people into us and them, those who know and those who do not know, those who are trusted and those who are untrustworthy and disloyal.

In the grey zone, where antagonistic and non-antagonistic threats are conflated, the inherent agonistic character of liberal democracy also becomes a destabilizing proof of the grey zone, when tensions in society – like the ups and downsides of diversity – are defined as threats against national security and state sovereignty.

In the grey zone, the total defence sets out to protect Swedish values, such as liberal freedoms, openness and transparency, but it does so by means of secrecy, increased control and administration of fear.

In the grey zone, the idea that democracy is resilient ‘eventually becomes a fatalist idea’ (FOI, 2020a: 21). Instead, in the official rhetoric, a credible total defence, protective security measures and improved warfare capability are presented as solutions to prevent and manage all civil crises, all conflicts, and the overall grey zone problem. The question is, at what cost?

When the state pushes for increased knowledge and awareness of never-ending antagonistic intent and introduces new institutional systems for total defence and protective security, consequences should be expected. As Cynthia Cockburn (2004) has stressed, militarization precedes violence. It brings with it an increase in the quantity of weapons, military influence in domestic politics, and compulsory military service. The police force grows, and a rhetoric of national security and secrecy limits freedom of expression and movement: ‘a militarized society is necessarily undemocratic’ (Cockburn, 2004: 31).

Therefore, researchers should observe this development closely. Future research on the Swedish context must keep a critical eye towards individual attitudes and local security practices, monitoring coming developments and implications for Swedish constitutional principles. In addition, government agencies must provide researchers access to security and defence arenas, since protective security policies can become an obstacle for researchers when access to the field becomes limited and conditioned (see Ericson and Wester, 2022).

Lastly, and importantly, future critical research should continue to collect accounts of counter-narratives and resistance towards this process of militarization, and ask when, where and how it can be reversed.

Footnotes

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Maja Svenbro

Notes

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