Öppen föreläsning: The return and reimagination of military conscription in Europe

By the turn of the 21st century, conscription in Europe was in decline. Practitioners and academics described draft systems modelled on a male citizen-soldier who serves the nation in exchange for political rights and freedoms as inefficient and unmodern – incompatible with the “new wars” of the post-Cold War era.

Yet, since the early 2010s, Sweden, Lithuania and Ukraine have reactivated conscription, the Swiss and Austrian population have voted to retain it, and Norway as well as Denmark have expanded the draft to women. Meanwhile, debates about reintroducing national service erupted in e.g. Germany and France. Conscription appears to be making a comeback in Europe. These debates and decisions raise critical questions about how compulsory military service is motivated to European populations.

What functions are conscription ascribed in society and what problems is it imagined as solving? And given the longstanding role of conscription in producing and policing national, citizen and gender identities, what can we learn about these processes by studying its apparent return?

This talk discusses these questions with empirical evidence from conscription debates across Europe. It underlines how conscription is reimagined through elite discourses, and thereby adapted not only to new security environments, but also to emerging national(ist) and gendered projects of identity.

Dr. Sanna Strand is a post-doctoral researcher at Stockholm University. Her work focuses on the intersections between war, military power and recruitment, neo-liberal governmentality and gendered and sexualized (soldier) identities.

Co-organised by the FHS Gender, Peace & Security and Critical War Studies research groups.