Sweden and the Cold War: A Historiography of a Work in Progress

Abstract

This article provides an updated and comprehensive historiography of Swedish military history research concerning Sweden’s security policy during the Cold War for an international audience in the English language. The article reviews the important books and articles on the subject from the early 1990s to the present and evaluates them in an accessible way also for those not familiar with Swedish Cold War history. The article identifies and makes use of three schools of research in order to categorize and systemize this research, namely a moderate school, a critical school, and a radical school. One of the main points of the article is that much of the differences between the critical and the radical school has to do with the fact that the two schools focus on different levels of analysis and thus in reality are more compatible than their proponents may think.