How Can Anthropologists Study Public Militarization?

By Klas Lundström

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among Sweden’s peace movement during the country’s hasty integration into NATO, this essay examines how public militarization is produced not only through policy and military infrastructure, but through everyday pedagogies of silence, fear, and moral realignment. By emphasizing the perspectives of activists and public servants sidelined in an increasingly militarized public sphere, the essay argues that anthropology is uniquely positioned to chronicle and theorize the ongoing “Natofication” of Swedish society in real time.

It is Wednesday and mid-February 2025 in central Stockholm. The hour is late, and the meeting turns sour as the attendees together realize that the road toward world peace is long, a journey demanding rain-soaked endurance, frozen fingers, and the hard work of pushing through snowstorms long before the other side can be glimpsed. On the horizon, they discern a sustainable world order—one that privileges diplomacy and peace over militarization and armed conflict.

            An old-timer and experienced peace activist in his bourgeoning 70s nods in my direction. “Before long even the guy over there, the anthropologist, will risk burning a public career by merely writing about us—hell, even being in the same room as us will mark him as a traitor.” He smiles but his remark is sincere. “That’s where we’re heading, folks,” he adds and observes the room; a windowless basement lounge that bears more than one resemblance to a bunker—poor reception, stuffy air, the hibernated cold seeping through the cement wall from the adjacent underground.

            This is where the members of a Swedish peace advocacy group get together on a semi-monthly basis to join forces at times of state-funded armament and ongoing sniper attacks from governmental representatives and heavy fire from military lobbyists and NATO proponents who depict peace activists as enemies of the state and useful idiots in cahoots with “foreign powers.”

Shortly before the meeting is adjourned, a young man in his mid-30s gets the final word: “We must discuss how scholars and public servants are being pressured due to their social commitments and hanging out with the ‘wrong crowd.’”

He pauses and then continues:

This development is of real concern and is not going away any time soon. We don’t really know what Sweden’s NATO entrance will bring in the long run in terms of research freedom and pressure from “higher powers” to tow the “NATO line” in terms of writing about militarization, peace, and military exercises on Swedish soil? Will the rationality of war become the truth of real peace, like the détente phase during the Cold War had us all believing that nuclear arms were necessary to secure world peace?

As a public servant affiliated with a university, he describes a growing “culture of silence” in academic and administrative corridors—cultivated by invisible pressures and reinforced by public narratives following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and Sweden’s hasty and chaotic process of joining NATO. The man likens this development with a gangrene at an early stage—serious, but still very much curable.

            “Where will it end?” he asks both himself and the others in the room:

Will we end up self-censoring ourselves for fear of losing our jobs and positions? Will certain topics be considered to constitute “a threat to national security” and could we end up seeing certain publications stopped with reference to espionage laws where certain information can be deemed to be of “sensitive” and “inappropriate” nature? We don’t know—and that’s the scary part.

This climate of fear is by no means restricted to academic chambers and intellectual corridors, nor is it the result of a sudden shift in public debates. Instead, it has been a slow-burner during Sweden’s step-by-step integration into NATO through military exercises and various treaties (e.g., the Host Nation Support, “Värdlandsavtalet”). Russia’s invasion of Ukraine merely provided the Swedish NATO lobby a political pretext to secure an official membership in the military alliance, with whom Sweden has already an established military cooperation (Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya). In tandem with Sweden’s entry into NATO, social movements saw their public funding slashed to near-non-existent levels, subsequently evicting numerous peace groups from offices they no longer—also due to implemented market rents—can afford to lease.

During the NATO membership application process, Swedish media echoed the gospel of militarization and draped anti-NATO voices and concerns in fearful and suspicious colors. In op-eds and interviews, defense lobbyists and leading politicians labeled peace activists as “Putin’s useful idiots” and “traitors,” while numerous peace activist groups I spent time with in 2024 and 2025 spoke of revoked demonstration permits and editorial rejections to reply to certain claims about their work and objectives. A similar situation to that of the Swedish Palestine Movement, which has collectively been accused of antisemitism, of organizing “illegal demonstrations,” and of posing a threat towards politicians.

In a global community dominated by armed conflicts and an ever-more desperate political hunt to claim oil reserves and energy commodities, peace and diplomacy are thrown at the backburner and seldom discussed or treated as a serious option either by political leaders or influential media outlets. Military aid packages are swiftly approved for Ukraine while long-term strategic plans to tackle environmental collapses in the Amazon, on Borneo, or in West Papua shine in absentia.

In this complex storm, the Swedish peace movement at large, and social movements in particular (including the Swedish Palestine Movement) find themselves at a crossroads, pushed out of offices and social meeting places and unsure of their future positionality and access to public space in an era of militarization and a shrinking public debate on NATO, military armament, and diplomacy. As anthropologists, equipped to ethnographically engage social movements in situ and to conduct participant observation that captures personal and collective perspectives excluded from public debate, we are uniquely positioned to chronicle the ongoing “Natofication” of Swedish society and to theorize the structures and pedagogies through which militarization comes to be imagined as the safest path to peace.

Here, I lean myself towards the theories of “studying-up,” first initiated by Laura Nader in the 1970s and specifically outlined in a militarization context by Hugh Gusterson in various publications in recent years. As the latter suggests, it is essential to “gain a panoramic perspective of relations of oppression and domination from within the citadels of the elites but on behalf of those below.” Regarding Sweden and its non-discussed embracement of NATO as an alliance, ideology, and political project, anthropology can not only contribute to the understanding of the collective thought on this “Natofication” and short- and long-term impacts on individual lives and collective memories of Sweden’s 200 years as a non-aligned global actor, often called upon as a peace broker and neutral player in complex armed and political conflicts.

“Studying-up” in this context therefore requires following militarization not only into elite institutions, but into the mundane infrastructures of funding cuts, permit revocations, and the quiet disciplining of speech. My fieldwork in 2024 and 2025 collected perspectives and witness accounts from a peace movement in transition, forced to adapt and adjust to a sweeping militarization from above and a political excavation of public funds that has displaced numerous peace groups and solidarity networks from permanent offices to temporary shelters. Long-term strategic planning has been replaced with time-consuming applications for whatever funds are available to seek, all the while peace activists find themselves labeled as, at best, “dreamers” estranged from reality, or, at worst, as “traitors” that should be “lined up against the wall and shot” (as a pro-NATO interviewee suggested to political scientist Linus Hagström in 2021).

            It is not a coincidence that the language of force and violence has trickled down from the top of the NATO tower. Former NATO secretary general Jens Stoltenberg (in a speech on 5 January 2023) was blatantly clear that “weapons are the way to peace,” not just referring to the war in Ukraine but also to give ammunition to the global rearmament bonanza, which has seen military spending rise in Sweden and soon constitute over 3 percent of the GNP. Those figures merely add ammunition to the peace movement which claims that slashed public funding to social movements is politically motivated and an attempt to “shut us up.”

            In more than one sense, militarism as a political project and the militarization of society as an ideological scheme must be studied along multiple fronts, as a multi‑sited ethnographic field—present both outside, in the streets where peace activism has persisted since the 1880s, and inside the fences of military facilities, where exercises not only deepen the bond between NATO and Sweden but also serve as a shop window for military‑industrial actors such as BAE Systems, SAAB, and Hägglunds.

This ethnographic material makes clear that public militarization is not merely enacted through policy or military infrastructure, but through everyday pedagogies of silence, fear, and moral realignment—processes that anthropology is uniquely equipped to render visible. The Swedish peace movement is among the oldest organized pacifist society in the world, which makes it an established path to enter as an ethnographer. The ongoing adjustment and reorganization of the peace movement, grappling with funding cuts and a “Natofied” reality, has not marked the end of pacifism as a tool or way of life. Rather, it has transformed into something else—into something even more rebellious, resisting a cemented narrative shaped by an “Orwellian” language that has become our own: war is peace and silence is gold.

Speaking up for peace and support for Gaza has become certainly perilous for international scholars and residents that now risk being deported in the wake of stricter political laws regarding asylum and residence permits. The following examples illustrate how this climate materializes in practice:

• In February 2025, Daria Rudneva, a Russian peace activist and advanced mathematician at Stockholm University, was deported despite her outspoken criticism of Vladimir Putin and Russia’s war in Ukraine. Deemed a “security threat” by the Swedish Security Service (SÄPO), she was banned from reentering Sweden and the Schengen area until 2045.

• In November 2025, Swedish police detained David Alcer, a research engineer at Lund University, following his climate activism, including disrupting the Swedish Eurovision Song Contest Selection in 2023. Despite being settled in Sweden and affiliated with a key research facility, he now risks deportation—a decision widely regarded as unconstitutional.

“For those who do not risk being deported or sacked from work, silence can never be an excuse,” one interlocutor tells me over a cup of coffee in central Uppsala. This experienced peace activist refuses to deem the peace movement’s enforced adjustment to Sweden’s “Natofication” as anything but an opportunity it must not forsake: “Slashed public funding was the best thing that could ever have happened to the peace movement,” he says, and lays out the “golden opportunity” Sweden’s NATO entrance and subsequent militarization have given peace as a long-term idea and project: 

Now the peace movement is regarded as a sunken ship that no one counts on anymore, let alone takes seriously. That makes us free and we no longer owe the state anything. We are free to roll up our sleeves and demand our rightful place in society. It’s like moving away from home—to stand on your own feet is not dangerous, it’s liberating.

For anthropologists, this moment does not merely call for documentation, but for an ethnographic insistence on presence—on refusing silence where silence itself has become state pedagogy.

About the author