Societal security and threats to democracy

The research project will investigate how different actors in the public debate assess whether certain actions or people are a threat to democracy, despite the fact that such assessments are often political and uncertain.

In 2002, 13 countries around the world were classified as autocratizing, while in 2022 the figure had reached 42, implying that threats to democracy is one of the most urgent societal security issues for democracies. Indeed, in Sweden, there has been a remarkable increase in references to threats to democracy in the media since 2000. Following the 2022 Swedish election, scholars debated the risk of autocratization in Sweden. Such debates suggest that the process through which potential threats either are accepted as actual threats or dismissed is political and characterized by epistemic uncertainty.

This project’s main research question is: How do actors involved in societal debates over threats to democracy determine whether particular acts or actors constitute threats to democracy, given the political and uncertain character of this endeavor?

Analysing the debate over threats to democracy

The project will first analyse the Swedish debate over threats to democracy to better understand how specific issues come to be accepted as threats to democracy while others do not. The second phase will analyse what extraordinary measures are adopted to deal with such threats. The third phase will conduct semi-structured interviews with actors who have analysed and debated threats to democracy in Sweden, such as researchers, journalists and politicians, as well as security professionals, whose job it is to identify threats to better understand how they determine whether specific acts or actors are indeed threats to democracy.