ABSTRACT
In 2014, Sweden celebrated 200 years of peace. This is a truly remarkable feat for a formerly great European power whose influence rested partly on its military prowess. Taking this long period of absence of war into consideration, it might appear as no great puzzle that the business of caring for veterans of war has not taken centre-stage within the Swedish Armed Forces (SAF) or Swedish politics overall. For those who have no veterans of war, other areas of policy may naturally take precedence. Despite its fortuitous 200 years of peace Sweden has, however, been no stranger to the killing fields of the world, owing to its comparatively major commitment to peace support activities. This lengthy engagement in – primarily – United Nations (UN) peacekeeping and observer forces began in the Gaza Strip in 1956 and has included naval missions to Somalia and Lebanon, blue berets in many of the states of former Yugoslavia, Special Forces deployed to the Democratic Republic of Congo and finally the contingents sent to Afghanistan in support of NATO’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF). Coupled with a significant portion of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) being earmarked for foreign aid, this intense engagement in peace-support operations prompted former Foreign Minister Carl Bildt to dub his country a ‘humanitarian superpower’ (Government of Sweden 2013). Since the 1950s, Sweden has deployed some 60,000–100,000 soldiers to peacekeeping and peace-support operations around the globe (Swedish Armed Forces 2014, Swedish Official Inquiry 2014). The true number of men and women who have been deployed is as yet unknown (although the Swedish Armed Forces’ official figure is 85,000), since no complete statistical data are available. To an extent, this is a reflection of the fact that Swedish policies and organizational structures concerned with veterans’ affairs have – until recently – been lacking in a comparative perspective. 1
