Since the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Sweden has witnessed a substantial build-up of both military and civil defense. With this development, cultural heritage has been assigned a new role in war preparedness. This article addresses the question of what makes cultural heritage an appealing and productive national security asset in an established democracy. Focusing on the under-researched issue of heritage's domestic security role, the article explores the role and meanings ascribed to cultural heritage in contemporary security policies and war preparedness initiatives. The specific aim is to investigate how heritage is framed as a vital national security resource. What values are projected onto the past, and what security functions are attributed to cultural heritage? The study combines critical heritage studies (CHS) with feminist and critical international relations (IR) theories on security and militarization. Through a framing analysis highlighting central metaphors, the article demonstrates that heritage is ascribed a dual meaning: both as a national treasure that needs masculinized protection, and as a resource that strengthens defense willingness and enhances deterrence capabilities. The article argues that cultural heritage becomes a particularly productive security resource due to its capacity to activate a logic of threat. Moreover, the emotional force and gendered dimensions of heritage help depoliticize issues of security, potentially constraining critical discussions on rearmament and militarization.

This chapter combines critical heritage studies and feminist international relations in an analysis of temporality in Sweden’s Cold War military heritagisation. Sweden’s Cold War history is characterised by war-preparedness and a lack of significant military action, allowing for different framings of time in heritage presentations. Accounting for Sweden’s nonaligned yet heavily militarised stance during this period, we demonstrate how different temporal frames shape collective identity and ideas of security. Four temporal constructs are identified, of which two are discussed at length: parenthesis-time, suspending the timeline and reinforcing the idea of a perpetual threat, and phantasm-time, blurring the distinction between actual events and hypothetical scenarios, resulting in hyperdramatic narratives. These temporalities contribute to the promotion of military violence as a means of ensuring security while discouraging democratic discussions. Our analysis underscores the political significance of military heritagisation in shaping national identity and security perceptions.

In this article, the example of Cold War heritagizations in a Swedish context is utilized to reflect on conceptualizations of heritage regarding identity and authenticity within critical heritage studies and research on Authorized Heritage Discourse (AHD). Herein, heritage is perceived as a difference machinery in which difference-produced identities are enacted and performed, and a Deleuzian and Butleresque antiessentialist perspective is adopted to show how the illusion of actual, nondifferential identities is underpinned by a hypostasized reification of AHD. Based on the analysis of how gender has been actualized within official and informal heritagizations, the central discussion concerns the purported benefits of heritages and heritagizations from below, often articulated within critical heritage studies literature. It is argued that both official and informal Cold War heritagizations construct a naturalized gendered logic of protection, with the consequence that security policy issues regarding protection and military violence are placed in a nonnegotiable, extrapolitical sphere.

Det förflutna används ständigt för att ge mening åt nuet. I kalla krigets spår skildrar framväxten av ett nytt svenskt militärt kulturarv. Här visas hur minnen och lämningar från en tid fylld av rädsla och säkerhetspolitiska spänningar får nya innebörder när bunkrar och nedlagda militäranläggningar omvandlas till museer, lyxbostäder och spännande besöksmål. Genom fältbesök vid en rad militära kulturarvsplatser runt om i Sverige har författarna undersökt vilka miljöer, föremål och känslor som idag får representera kalla kriget. De visar hur dåtidens hemligheter, hotbilder och militärfordon både blir kittlande och fascinerande inslag i kulturarvet och förmedlar idéer om trygghet och beskydd. Här tas ett nytt grepp på kulturarvsfrågor genom att minnesskapande sätts i relation till säkerhetspolitik. Utifrån kritiska kulturarvsstudier och feministisk teori diskuteras den nationella gemenskapens gränser och vilken roll som genus och sexualitet har i berättelserna om hot och försvar. I en demokrati måste frågor om militärt våld alltid genomlysas och diskuteras. Med denna utgångspunkt granskas kulturarvets betydelse för förståelsen av hot och säkerhet. Boken uppmanar till reflektion om hur historien skrivs och om vad som krävs för att skapa trygghet. I kalla krigets spår är ett resultat av ett tvärvetenskapligt forskningsprojekt. Författarna är forskare vid Stockholms universitet och har skrivit boken tillsammans.

In the Traces of the Cold War. Threat, violence and protection as cultural heritage

Cultural heritage is not just something from the past, but always also reflects contemporary needs and desires. In the Traces of the Cold War describes the making of a diverse and innovative Swedish military heritage. The book shows how memories and material remains from a period characterized by fear and geopolitical tensions are infused with new meanings when bunkers, decommissioned military facilities and technology are transformed into luxury housing, attractive tourist destinations and museum exhibitions.

Through field-visits to military heritage sites across Sweden, the authors examine what material objects, narratives and emotions that today represent the Cold War. These examinations show how military structures and equipment from a time associated with threat and danger become captivating elements of the cultural heritage, while also communicating specific ideas regarding security and protection.

In the Traces of the Cold War takes a novel approach to cultural heritage by relating collective memory-making to security policy. Based on theoretical perspectives from critical heritage studies (CHS) and feminist international relations (IR), the analysis focuses on constructions of national belonging and underlines the role of gender and sexuality in narrations of security and protection.

In a democracy, the subject of military violence must always be a matter of ethical and political conversations. Setting out from this assumption, the authors critically discuss how Cold War heritagisation produces militarization as “natural” and necessary. The book invites reflection on how history is written as well as on what the requirements are for a safe and secure society.

In the Traces of the Cold War presents the results from an interdisciplinary research project. The authors are all researchers at Stockholm University and have written the book together.

Academic co-ordinator is Professor Yvonne Svanström, Department of Economic History and International Relations, Stockholm University, ORCID: 0000-0001-7070-6250

Känsloläget i försvarsdebatten har höjts, inte minst av Försvarsmakten själv. Frågan är inte längre om utan när kriget kommer. Den nya retoriken åkallar känslor förknippade med kalla kriget. En hotfull historisk period som idag används för att rättfärdiga försvarspolitik och signalera trygghet, skriver fyra forskare som tittat närmare på läget.

During and immediately after the Second World War, physicists and engineers in several countries worked intensively and in competition to develop nuclear weapons and to control the chain reaction creating nuclear energy. An experience of urgency and a sense of revolutionary future promise permeated the activities and largely outweighed the risks as they were calculated at the time. As a result, small experimental reactors were built at research institutes or universities relatively close to city centres and densely populated areas—the key localization factor being the physicists’ own geography. This chapter focuses on three of the early pioneering urban reactors, located in Chicago, Moscow, and Stockholm, which were all symbols of national prowess as humanity was entering the nuclear age, and later became objects of heritage processes. We scrutinize the early operations as well as the making of atomic heritage, through the conceptual lens of the ‘security theatre’. The concept highlights the relationship between, on the one hand, calculable risk and security, and on the other hand, perceived risk and security. We argue that, overall, the security theatre displays reversed characteristics if comparing the establishment period with the processes of heritagization in the way that the calculable risks were initially high but downplayed, while subsequently being low but exaggerated. This tension between calculable risk and perceived risk, we suggest, forms the key to the attraction of contemporary atomic heritage. This chapter is based on historic and contemporary written and visual sources, together with interviews and on-site visits.