Stefan Borg | Swedish Defence University (original) (raw)

Journal articles by Stefan Borg

European Journal of Social Theory, 2023

This article contributes to an understanding of the backlash against liberalism by reconstructing... more This article contributes to an understanding of the backlash against liberalism by reconstructing the emergence and development of an increasingly influential strand of Anglo-American thought that challenges liberalism, known as postliberalism. The central diagnostic claim of postliberalism is that the two dominant forms of post-WW2 liberalism, market liberalism and social liberalism, instead of being somehow opposed, have coalesced around an all-encompassing sociopolitical project that above all else seeks to maximize individual autonomy. As a result, postliberals hold, the liberal order has become increasingly unable to cultivate the communal resources on which human sociability depends and erodes the values liberalism purportedly defends. The article argues that a central, albeit not necessarily insurmountable, challenge for postliberalism lies in moving from a critique of liberalism to proposed remedies for its perceived deficiencies, without slipping into a political project with clear illiberal rather than merely non-liberal implications.

European Political Science, 2023

While traditional and non-traditional issues of security are at the very top of the policy agenda... more While traditional and non-traditional issues of security are at the very top of the policy agenda, security studies has been subject to much criticism. These concerns have often been framed in terms of challenges to the field's relevance. This paper seeks to further the debate on relevance in security studies. Specifically, the paper examines the field in three major dimensions of relevance: responsiveness, diversity, and intellectual pluralism. Unlike previous disciplinary investigations, which have solely focused on United States (US) security studies, this paper examines trends pertaining to relevance in security studies in the USA as well as in Europe. The paper finds some evidence of responsiveness, a slight trend toward a more equitable share of female authors, and conflicting evidence when it comes to intellectual pluralism. The paper suggests that the field appears more as a 'broad church' than 'irrelevant cult' when its output in the USA, as well as in Europe, is taken into account.

Parameters, 2022

Concerns raised over the impact of changing demographics, domestic polarization, and the return o... more Concerns raised over the impact of changing demographics, domestic polarization, and the return of near-peer competition on US military manpower challenges are overstated. Drawing on open-source materials and interviews, this article discusses factors often neglected in conversations on this topic and provides leadership and policymakers with a scholarly overview of an important yet understudied issue facing the US armed forces.

There is an extensive and rapidly growing body of literature on armed Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehi... more There is an extensive and rapidly growing body of literature on armed Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicles (UCAVs) focused on the US War on Terror. However, smaller Unmanned Aerial Vehicles for military use, or what this paper refers to as tactical UAVs utilised by small states, have received much less scholarly attention ̶ despite their rapid proliferation in the last decade. In order to start rectifying this dual neglect of more limited UAVs employed by small states, the paper makes an empirical contribution to the study of tactical UAVs. Drawing on a substantial number of interviews and studies commissioned by the Swedish Armed Forces, the paper examines the Swedish UAV program, which is in certain ways representative of a smaller state's efforts to incorporate UAVs into its armed forces. The paper argues that it is crucial to think in terms of systems rather than the UAV as a free-standing resource to be used on its own. If utilized along with other ISR assets, tactical UAVs may have a significant role to play in asymmetric conflicts.

This article contributes to the debate on long-term trends in Transatlantic relations. It does so... more This article contributes to the debate on long-term trends in Transatlantic relations. It does so by examining some of the ways in which the central ideational foundation of the Transatlantic area, namely "the West", has become increasingly contested in a highly polarized US domestic discourse. By drawing on, and contributing to, the constructivist scholarship on Transatlantic relations, which argues for the importance of collective identities for long-term foreign policy orientation, the article examines how the notion of "the West" became increasingly politicized under Trump's presidency. The article then examines the Democrats' understanding of the US place in the world and shows that the US commitment to Europe is premised and contingent upon a joint commitment to democracy, rather than an imagined ethnonationalist bounded community. As an identity-conferring concept between the US and Europe the paper shows, "the West" no longer fulfils a unifying function in US mainstream public discourse.

This article addresses the question of how the EU exercises power in international politics and, ... more This article addresses the question of how the EU exercises power in international politics and, in particular, whether or not there is anything distinctive about the ways in which it does so. Taking a relational approach to power, where the focus is on practical knowledge and perceptions of self and other, the paper departs from the assumption that such a question has to be evaluated in specific settings. Extrapolating from the EU's attempt to influence outcomes in Tunisia and Morocco following the Arab Spring, this paper proposes that the power of ambiguity captures some of the distinctiveness of the EU as a global actor. The paper highlights the ambiguity of what the EU is in the eyes of others, which opens up avenues for exercising power that others lack, not necessarily in accordance with a well-defined agenda, but understood as the production of effects in delimited settings.

This article examines how unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), or drones as they are more popularly k... more This article examines how unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), or drones as they are more popularly known, have changed practices of Israeli warfare. In order to do so, the article proceeds in three steps. First, it traces the emergence and development of the Israeli UAV programme. Second, it examines the main factors that have enabled its expansion. Third, it turns to some of the main implications of UAVs for the way in which the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) wages war. The article argues that the combined tactical use of UAVs employed for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) tasks has amounted to a strategic effect: by dramatically enhancing the field of perception, UAVs have enabled the IDF to better control the battle rhythm. UAVs in the Israeli context have enhanced the IDF's operational sustainability, since one's own casualties have been virtually eliminated and civilian casualties have been stretched out over, rather than concentrated in, time. Throughout the article, the changing character of the UAV is emphasized. To capture this change and to unravel the interactions among technology, warfare and broader societal forces, the article draws on actor-network theory.

The securitization of health concerns within the European Union has hitherto received scant atten... more The securitization of health concerns within the European Union has hitherto received scant attention compared to other sectors. Drawing on the conceptual toolbox of actor-network theory, this article examines how a 'health security assemblage' rooted in EU governance has emerged, expanded, and stabilized. At the heart of this assemblage lies a particular knowledge regime, known as epidemic intelligence (EI): a vigilance-oriented approach of early detection and containment drawing on web-scanning tools and other informal sources. Despite its differences compared to entrenched traditions in public health, EI has, in only a decade's time, gained central importance at the EU level. EI is simultaneously constituted by, and performative of, a particular understanding of health security problems. By 'following the actor', this article seeks to account for how EI has made the hunt for potential health threats so central that detection and containment, rather than prevention, have become the preferred policy options. This article draws out some of the implications of this shift.

This article critically examines a poorly understood aspect of the European security landscape: e... more This article critically examines a poorly understood aspect of the European security landscape: early warning systems (EWSs). EWSs are socio-technical systems designed to detect, analyse, and disseminate knowledge on potential security issues in a wide variety of sectors. We first present an empirical overview of more than 80 EWS in the European Union. We then draw on debates in Critical Security Studies to help us make sense of the role of such systems, tapping into conceptual debates on the construction of security issues as either "threat" or "risk" related. Finally, we study one EWSthe Early Warning and Response System for infectious diseasesto understand how it works and how it reconciles riskversus threat-based security logics. Contrary to assumptions of a clear distinction between risk-and threat-based logics of security, we show that EWSs may serve as a "transmission belt" for the movement of issues from risk into threats.

This article engages genealogy as a form of critique in International Relations. It demonstrates ... more This article engages genealogy as a form of critique in International Relations. It demonstrates that Foucault's genealogy has had an important, albeit hitherto unexamined, impact on how critique is understood in post-structuralist International Relations. Specifically, the article argues that a genealogical disposition tends to inscribe violence as foundational to the human condition, and genealogically informed empirical applications in International Relations risk reproducing this gesture. In the first part, the article returns to the first generation of post-structuralist International Relations and also examines examples of contemporary scholarship using frameworks of governmentality and biopolitics. The second part of the article traces the problem of ontologically inscribing violence back to Foucault's genealogical phase. Drawing on the work of John Milbank, the article then contrasts a genealogical ontology of violence with one that refuses violence as foundational. The article ends by arguing that empirical scholarship drawing on governmentality and biopolitics should be careful not to read the genealogical ontology of violence into their analyses of global political life.

This article contributes to a theoretical understanding of rights claiming as a specific form of ... more This article contributes to a theoretical understanding of rights claiming as a specific form of political practice. The article develops and defends a post-foundationalist understanding of rights discourse as a way of making a claim to social change through appealing to a universal and illustrates such an understanding with the contestation over women's rights in post-revolutionary Tunisia. To develop this argument, the article draws on Jacques Rancière's notion of political subjectification and Ernesto Laclau's engagement with the relation between the universal and the particular. To examine the relevance of such conceptualisation, the article turns to the struggle over women's rights in post-revolutionary Tunisia, where secular and sacred understandings of the universal have been invoked frequently through rights discourse. In this context it is shown that claims to the universal give rhetorical force to rights discourse, and instead of depoliticising social relations, which rights discourse is often charged with, such claims are vital for political efficacy. However, whereas Laclau's position helps us to understand rights as a language of resistance, a more robust defence of the universal is needed to defend rights in terms of emancipatory political change. To pursue this argument, the article turns to Rancière's defence of axiomatic equality.

In the early 1990s, John Ruggie famously referred to the European Community as an emerging 'postm... more In the early 1990s, John Ruggie famously referred to the European Community as an emerging 'postmodern polity'. This article elaborates on the 'postmodern promise' of European integration that Ruggie invoked, and formulates such a promise of European integration as one of radically breaking with the violent practices characteristic of the modern state. We argue that such a promise is immanent albeit historically marginalized in the project of European integration itself, exemplified in the article with a tradition called integral federalism. The article then evaluates such a 'post-modern promise' in current practices of European integration against the background of a poststructuralist-informed critique of the violent effects of desires for bordered entities and identities. Such a poststructuralist sensibility enables the article to point to the problems of 'scaling up' the state in a project of integration that also set out to challenge and subvert its organizing principles.

This article engages the problem of Orientalism in Western elite foreign policy discourse on the ... more This article engages the problem of Orientalism in Western elite foreign policy discourse on the Arab uprisings. Reconstructing discursive representations among US and EU foreign policy elites, it argues that the Arab uprisings were inserted into a liberal civilizing narrative that emphasizes the underlying identity of 'the Arab world' and 'the West.' In this narrative, human rights play a crucial role. Difference, to the extent acknowledged, is inscribed temporally rather than spatially. Such a narrative thus breaks with Orientalizing ways of representing the Arab world as irredeemably different. Having noticed the hierarchical rendition of subjectivity that the liberal civilizing narrative nevertheless enacts temporally, the article also discusses challenges to the liberal civilizing narrative. It concludes by arguing for a politics of rights claiming approach to make sense of the Arab uprisings.

The European Union is often conceptualised as an entity that is profoundly different from that of... more The European Union is often conceptualised as an entity that is profoundly different from that of the modern state. Through a reading of the recent humanitarian crisis precipitated by large-scale migration into Greece, the paper challenges the understanding that the crafting of the European Union ('Euro-crafting') is qualitatively different from the crafting of the modern state. Conceptually, the paper proposes that Euro-crafting should be thought through in relation to practices of statecraft, instead of a priori postulated as qualitatively different from such practices. Putting such an understanding of Euro-crafting to work, the paper explores the recent humanitarian crisis precipitated by large-scale migration into Greece and demonstrates how practices of Euro-crafting mirror the major desire-driven practices of modern statecraft; practices of ordering, bordering, and identification.

Book reviews by Stefan Borg

Book chapters by Stefan Borg

Books by Stefan Borg

Papers by Stefan Borg

Security Dialogue, 2019

The securitization of health concerns within the European Union has hitherto received scant atten... more The securitization of health concerns within the European Union has hitherto received scant attention compared to other sectors. Drawing on the conceptual toolbox of actor-network theory, this article examines how a ‘health security assemblage’ rooted in EU governance has emerged, expanded, and stabilized. At the heart of this assemblage lies a particular knowledge regime, known as epidemic intelligence (EI): a vigilance-oriented approach of early detection and containment drawing on web-scanning tools and other informal sources. Despite its differences compared to entrenched traditions in public health, EI has, in only a decade’s time, gained central importance at the EU level. EI is simultaneously constituted by, and performative of, a particular understanding of health security problems. By ‘following the actor’, this article seeks to account for how EI has made the hunt for potential health threats so central that detection and containment, rather than prevention, have become the preferred policy options. This article draws out some of the implications of this shift.

European Journal of Social Theory, 2023

This article contributes to an understanding of the backlash against liberalism by reconstructing... more This article contributes to an understanding of the backlash against liberalism by reconstructing the emergence and development of an increasingly influential strand of Anglo-American thought that challenges liberalism, known as postliberalism. The central diagnostic claim of postliberalism is that the two dominant forms of post-WW2 liberalism, market liberalism and social liberalism, instead of being somehow opposed, have coalesced around an all-encompassing sociopolitical project that above all else seeks to maximize individual autonomy. As a result, postliberals hold, the liberal order has become increasingly unable to cultivate the communal resources on which human sociability depends and erodes the values liberalism purportedly defends. The article argues that a central, albeit not necessarily insurmountable, challenge for postliberalism lies in moving from a critique of liberalism to proposed remedies for its perceived deficiencies, without slipping into a political project with clear illiberal rather than merely non-liberal implications.

European Political Science, 2023

While traditional and non-traditional issues of security are at the very top of the policy agenda... more While traditional and non-traditional issues of security are at the very top of the policy agenda, security studies has been subject to much criticism. These concerns have often been framed in terms of challenges to the field's relevance. This paper seeks to further the debate on relevance in security studies. Specifically, the paper examines the field in three major dimensions of relevance: responsiveness, diversity, and intellectual pluralism. Unlike previous disciplinary investigations, which have solely focused on United States (US) security studies, this paper examines trends pertaining to relevance in security studies in the USA as well as in Europe. The paper finds some evidence of responsiveness, a slight trend toward a more equitable share of female authors, and conflicting evidence when it comes to intellectual pluralism. The paper suggests that the field appears more as a 'broad church' than 'irrelevant cult' when its output in the USA, as well as in Europe, is taken into account.

Parameters, 2022

Concerns raised over the impact of changing demographics, domestic polarization, and the return o... more Concerns raised over the impact of changing demographics, domestic polarization, and the return of near-peer competition on US military manpower challenges are overstated. Drawing on open-source materials and interviews, this article discusses factors often neglected in conversations on this topic and provides leadership and policymakers with a scholarly overview of an important yet understudied issue facing the US armed forces.

There is an extensive and rapidly growing body of literature on armed Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehi... more There is an extensive and rapidly growing body of literature on armed Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicles (UCAVs) focused on the US War on Terror. However, smaller Unmanned Aerial Vehicles for military use, or what this paper refers to as tactical UAVs utilised by small states, have received much less scholarly attention ̶ despite their rapid proliferation in the last decade. In order to start rectifying this dual neglect of more limited UAVs employed by small states, the paper makes an empirical contribution to the study of tactical UAVs. Drawing on a substantial number of interviews and studies commissioned by the Swedish Armed Forces, the paper examines the Swedish UAV program, which is in certain ways representative of a smaller state's efforts to incorporate UAVs into its armed forces. The paper argues that it is crucial to think in terms of systems rather than the UAV as a free-standing resource to be used on its own. If utilized along with other ISR assets, tactical UAVs may have a significant role to play in asymmetric conflicts.

This article contributes to the debate on long-term trends in Transatlantic relations. It does so... more This article contributes to the debate on long-term trends in Transatlantic relations. It does so by examining some of the ways in which the central ideational foundation of the Transatlantic area, namely "the West", has become increasingly contested in a highly polarized US domestic discourse. By drawing on, and contributing to, the constructivist scholarship on Transatlantic relations, which argues for the importance of collective identities for long-term foreign policy orientation, the article examines how the notion of "the West" became increasingly politicized under Trump's presidency. The article then examines the Democrats' understanding of the US place in the world and shows that the US commitment to Europe is premised and contingent upon a joint commitment to democracy, rather than an imagined ethnonationalist bounded community. As an identity-conferring concept between the US and Europe the paper shows, "the West" no longer fulfils a unifying function in US mainstream public discourse.

This article addresses the question of how the EU exercises power in international politics and, ... more This article addresses the question of how the EU exercises power in international politics and, in particular, whether or not there is anything distinctive about the ways in which it does so. Taking a relational approach to power, where the focus is on practical knowledge and perceptions of self and other, the paper departs from the assumption that such a question has to be evaluated in specific settings. Extrapolating from the EU's attempt to influence outcomes in Tunisia and Morocco following the Arab Spring, this paper proposes that the power of ambiguity captures some of the distinctiveness of the EU as a global actor. The paper highlights the ambiguity of what the EU is in the eyes of others, which opens up avenues for exercising power that others lack, not necessarily in accordance with a well-defined agenda, but understood as the production of effects in delimited settings.

This article examines how unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), or drones as they are more popularly k... more This article examines how unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), or drones as they are more popularly known, have changed practices of Israeli warfare. In order to do so, the article proceeds in three steps. First, it traces the emergence and development of the Israeli UAV programme. Second, it examines the main factors that have enabled its expansion. Third, it turns to some of the main implications of UAVs for the way in which the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) wages war. The article argues that the combined tactical use of UAVs employed for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) tasks has amounted to a strategic effect: by dramatically enhancing the field of perception, UAVs have enabled the IDF to better control the battle rhythm. UAVs in the Israeli context have enhanced the IDF's operational sustainability, since one's own casualties have been virtually eliminated and civilian casualties have been stretched out over, rather than concentrated in, time. Throughout the article, the changing character of the UAV is emphasized. To capture this change and to unravel the interactions among technology, warfare and broader societal forces, the article draws on actor-network theory.

The securitization of health concerns within the European Union has hitherto received scant atten... more The securitization of health concerns within the European Union has hitherto received scant attention compared to other sectors. Drawing on the conceptual toolbox of actor-network theory, this article examines how a 'health security assemblage' rooted in EU governance has emerged, expanded, and stabilized. At the heart of this assemblage lies a particular knowledge regime, known as epidemic intelligence (EI): a vigilance-oriented approach of early detection and containment drawing on web-scanning tools and other informal sources. Despite its differences compared to entrenched traditions in public health, EI has, in only a decade's time, gained central importance at the EU level. EI is simultaneously constituted by, and performative of, a particular understanding of health security problems. By 'following the actor', this article seeks to account for how EI has made the hunt for potential health threats so central that detection and containment, rather than prevention, have become the preferred policy options. This article draws out some of the implications of this shift.

This article critically examines a poorly understood aspect of the European security landscape: e... more This article critically examines a poorly understood aspect of the European security landscape: early warning systems (EWSs). EWSs are socio-technical systems designed to detect, analyse, and disseminate knowledge on potential security issues in a wide variety of sectors. We first present an empirical overview of more than 80 EWS in the European Union. We then draw on debates in Critical Security Studies to help us make sense of the role of such systems, tapping into conceptual debates on the construction of security issues as either "threat" or "risk" related. Finally, we study one EWSthe Early Warning and Response System for infectious diseasesto understand how it works and how it reconciles riskversus threat-based security logics. Contrary to assumptions of a clear distinction between risk-and threat-based logics of security, we show that EWSs may serve as a "transmission belt" for the movement of issues from risk into threats.

This article engages genealogy as a form of critique in International Relations. It demonstrates ... more This article engages genealogy as a form of critique in International Relations. It demonstrates that Foucault's genealogy has had an important, albeit hitherto unexamined, impact on how critique is understood in post-structuralist International Relations. Specifically, the article argues that a genealogical disposition tends to inscribe violence as foundational to the human condition, and genealogically informed empirical applications in International Relations risk reproducing this gesture. In the first part, the article returns to the first generation of post-structuralist International Relations and also examines examples of contemporary scholarship using frameworks of governmentality and biopolitics. The second part of the article traces the problem of ontologically inscribing violence back to Foucault's genealogical phase. Drawing on the work of John Milbank, the article then contrasts a genealogical ontology of violence with one that refuses violence as foundational. The article ends by arguing that empirical scholarship drawing on governmentality and biopolitics should be careful not to read the genealogical ontology of violence into their analyses of global political life.

This article contributes to a theoretical understanding of rights claiming as a specific form of ... more This article contributes to a theoretical understanding of rights claiming as a specific form of political practice. The article develops and defends a post-foundationalist understanding of rights discourse as a way of making a claim to social change through appealing to a universal and illustrates such an understanding with the contestation over women's rights in post-revolutionary Tunisia. To develop this argument, the article draws on Jacques Rancière's notion of political subjectification and Ernesto Laclau's engagement with the relation between the universal and the particular. To examine the relevance of such conceptualisation, the article turns to the struggle over women's rights in post-revolutionary Tunisia, where secular and sacred understandings of the universal have been invoked frequently through rights discourse. In this context it is shown that claims to the universal give rhetorical force to rights discourse, and instead of depoliticising social relations, which rights discourse is often charged with, such claims are vital for political efficacy. However, whereas Laclau's position helps us to understand rights as a language of resistance, a more robust defence of the universal is needed to defend rights in terms of emancipatory political change. To pursue this argument, the article turns to Rancière's defence of axiomatic equality.

In the early 1990s, John Ruggie famously referred to the European Community as an emerging 'postm... more In the early 1990s, John Ruggie famously referred to the European Community as an emerging 'postmodern polity'. This article elaborates on the 'postmodern promise' of European integration that Ruggie invoked, and formulates such a promise of European integration as one of radically breaking with the violent practices characteristic of the modern state. We argue that such a promise is immanent albeit historically marginalized in the project of European integration itself, exemplified in the article with a tradition called integral federalism. The article then evaluates such a 'post-modern promise' in current practices of European integration against the background of a poststructuralist-informed critique of the violent effects of desires for bordered entities and identities. Such a poststructuralist sensibility enables the article to point to the problems of 'scaling up' the state in a project of integration that also set out to challenge and subvert its organizing principles.

This article engages the problem of Orientalism in Western elite foreign policy discourse on the ... more This article engages the problem of Orientalism in Western elite foreign policy discourse on the Arab uprisings. Reconstructing discursive representations among US and EU foreign policy elites, it argues that the Arab uprisings were inserted into a liberal civilizing narrative that emphasizes the underlying identity of 'the Arab world' and 'the West.' In this narrative, human rights play a crucial role. Difference, to the extent acknowledged, is inscribed temporally rather than spatially. Such a narrative thus breaks with Orientalizing ways of representing the Arab world as irredeemably different. Having noticed the hierarchical rendition of subjectivity that the liberal civilizing narrative nevertheless enacts temporally, the article also discusses challenges to the liberal civilizing narrative. It concludes by arguing for a politics of rights claiming approach to make sense of the Arab uprisings.

The European Union is often conceptualised as an entity that is profoundly different from that of... more The European Union is often conceptualised as an entity that is profoundly different from that of the modern state. Through a reading of the recent humanitarian crisis precipitated by large-scale migration into Greece, the paper challenges the understanding that the crafting of the European Union ('Euro-crafting') is qualitatively different from the crafting of the modern state. Conceptually, the paper proposes that Euro-crafting should be thought through in relation to practices of statecraft, instead of a priori postulated as qualitatively different from such practices. Putting such an understanding of Euro-crafting to work, the paper explores the recent humanitarian crisis precipitated by large-scale migration into Greece and demonstrates how practices of Euro-crafting mirror the major desire-driven practices of modern statecraft; practices of ordering, bordering, and identification.

Security Dialogue, 2019

The securitization of health concerns within the European Union has hitherto received scant atten... more The securitization of health concerns within the European Union has hitherto received scant attention compared to other sectors. Drawing on the conceptual toolbox of actor-network theory, this article examines how a ‘health security assemblage’ rooted in EU governance has emerged, expanded, and stabilized. At the heart of this assemblage lies a particular knowledge regime, known as epidemic intelligence (EI): a vigilance-oriented approach of early detection and containment drawing on web-scanning tools and other informal sources. Despite its differences compared to entrenched traditions in public health, EI has, in only a decade’s time, gained central importance at the EU level. EI is simultaneously constituted by, and performative of, a particular understanding of health security problems. By ‘following the actor’, this article seeks to account for how EI has made the hunt for potential health threats so central that detection and containment, rather than prevention, have become the preferred policy options. This article draws out some of the implications of this shift.