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Wrap up: New trends
“Great expectations”
The Nordic Societal Security Programme: Joint Nordic
Conference, Stockholm,November 2014
Kenneth Pettersen

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Societal security research agenda – some key
themes/challenges
 Research agendas in the Nordic countries all relate to fundamental
challenges as well as requirements for impact.
1. How to define societal security?
 Key concepts
 Societal
 Security
 Safety
 Risk
 Vulnerability
 Robustness
 Trust
 Resilience
2. There are different narratives and different objects of study
 Societal security as identity vs
 Societal security as function
Function Identity
3. These are interrelated but ask for different methodologies and theory
 How to understand and manage the networks and “cultural” divides?

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Societal security research agenda – some key
themes/challenges II
4. Governance and public/private organization of societal
security
 What are the basic political functions that we have to
define threats?
 What is it that we have to look for and how?
 How to regulate critical societal functions?
 How to organize for reliability?
 How to organize to be prepared for the unexpected?
5. Resilience
 Societal security has to encompass generic capacities,
in addition to controlled variability to anticipated
problems we have to prepare for the unexpected
i.e. resilience at a societal level is different from
a systems/organizational level, but what is it and
what are the implications of a resilience rhetoric
on security?

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Safety for someone can be a danger for
someone else…

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Measures to reduce risk can do more harm
than good…

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Labelling someone as resilient can make
someone else less responsible…

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There is a distinct form of Nordic security
research emerging…
 Fundamental challenges that require long-term investment
 Looking beyond security as the politics of regret
 Looking beyond security as innovation
 Solutions are viewed as cross- and multidisciplinary
 Shared interest in research questions that lend themselves
to the social sciences and humanities
 Similar academia-public/private relationships characterized
by trust and understanding of each others goals and roles.
 Researcher's have access to data
 built on Nordic traditions for participatory research?
 Reflexive and critical approaches are welcomed and given
funding
 shared methodological approaches and concerns that could
benefit from increased collaboration
 Europe and the world is watching and are interested!