The following section showcases select research projects from the Societal Security Initiative calls. These presentations offer a comprehensive view into the research, detailing its background, outcomes, and significance. They highlight the diverse range encompassed within the societal security research field.
Nordic Multiagency Approaches to Handling Extremism
Project leader: Tore Bjørgo, University of Oslo
Project duration: 2018-2022
Participating countries: Norway, Finland, Denmark, Sweden
Funding from NordForsk: 9,5 million NOK
In the Nordic countries, the prevention of radicalization and violent extremism relies on an existing crime prevention collaboration within the SSP framework (school, social and health services, and police). The core tenet of this approach is that early radicalization prevention is best organized as a joint effort, where individual cases are assessed in a holistic manner, and relevant information is shared. However, despite similarities in the multiagency setup, important national and local differences exist concerning the legal leeway for exchanging personal information and the practical implementation of preventive measures. The project investigated how this variation in multiagency approaches to preventing radicalization and countering violent extremism shapes perceptions of legitimacy and levels of mutual trust - among involved stakeholders as well as among public authorities and citizens - in Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Finland.
Furthermore, the research delved into the extent to which variations in perceived legitimacy, trust, and justice are linked to differences in the effectiveness of multiagency collaboration and the prevention of radicalization. The project offers a comprehensive comparison of legal frameworks, institutional setups, perceptions, and practices related to the Nordic multiagency approaches to countering violent extremism. It provides a critical analysis of varying implementations, systematically exploring how core components of a Nordic governance model contribute to, and may be preconditions for, effective multiagency collaboration and secure societies. In doing so, the research aims to provide a more informed platform for disseminating Nordic experiences and models of governance to other countries in the field of radicalization prevention and countering violent extremism.
The question of how different agencies can work better together at the local level to reduce the threats from violent extremism is of great relevance and urgency for policymakers and practitioners in all the Nordic countries. The study found that some Nordic countries have developed models and procedures that are more effective and identifies some of the factors behind this outcome. Close interagency collaboration in the fields of preventing extremism, crime, and other social issues is a hallmark of Nordic societies.
In the analysis of national policies governing the multiagency approaches, based on comparisons of legal frameworks, action plans, and other policy documents, the research uncovered several key findings:
- Multiagency setups in the Nordic region are similar in some dimensions, organized in a three-level structure: the governing/executive level, the coordinating level/practice level where local actors are responsible for working with clients. Denmark’s approach is most exclusively formatted to handle extremism, while the other countries use already established structures that address various societal challenges, including extremism. Differences are also observed in the coordinating function, with the head of the multiagency groups coming from the police in Denmark and Finland, from the municipality in Norway, and representing the social services in Sweden.
- When comparing the legal frameworks that govern confidentiality and secrecy between authorities in the four Nordic countries, the research found that they are quite similar. However, important differences exist in the Danish Administration of Justice Act (§112-114), which facilitates the exchange of information for preventive purposes under certain conditions to a greater extent than in the other countries. All countries provide considerable leeway for interpreting legislation.
- The police acts in Denmark and Norway place a greater emphasis on prevention and collaboration than similar police acts in Sweden and Finland. This weaker preventive mandate partly explains why the police in Sweden are far less involved in interagency collaboration than the police in the other Nordic countries.
- The research identified differences in the policy and setup of the multiagency approaches stemming from different institutional logics. Two distinct logics were teased out: a societal security logic and a social care logic. The Danish approach leaned most towards a social security logic, followed by Finland. The Norwegian, and particularly the Swedish approach, leaned more towards a social care logic. These institutional logics both shape and (re)produce the actions, challenges, and possibilities for multiagency teams to cooperate.
Good practices of interagency collaboration require some basic conditions to be fulfilled, including legislation that facilitates partnership and information sharing, a high level of trust in public institutions among the population and relevant minorities, and a high level of trust between practitioners in relevant agencies. The most streamlined and effective model for interagency collaboration to handle extremism is clearly found in Denmark. This is attributed to strong preventive mandates, legislation that facilitates the exchange of personal information between agencies for preventive purposes, longstanding experiences of interagency collaboration between school, social services, and the police (SSP), the implementation of the Infohouse model in all municipalities, and a common tool used by the involved agencies to assess whether a case of concern for an individual constitutes a security risk.
Interagency collaboration is also well developed in Norway, albeit with significant variation between different municipalities and uncertainties among practitioners about the extent to which they can share sensitive information on individuals of concern with partners from other agencies. Information sharing is mostly based on consent (from the individual or parents) but sometimes relies on personal trust between practitioners, stretching the rules for a good purpose. There is a need for clearer regulations and more uniform practices. Although some Norwegian practitioners would like to have similar legislation for facilitating the exchange of information as in Denmark, others are skeptical, as this might undermine trust relations with clients and professional ethics and values. Finland’s Anchor programe, inspired by Danish and Norwegian experiences of interagency collaboration, has a stronger participation from the health sector than the other Nordic countries.
Sweden is clearly lagging behind the other Nordic countries in interagency collaboration. The police play a relatively marginal role, partly due to a weaker preventive mandate, as well as legislation (and interpretation) on confidentiality and information sharing, and, most importantly, dominant professional logics. Clarification and rethinking of possibilities for information sharing and interagency collaboration models that also include the police are recommended.
Lessons for the Nordic welfare states from the COVID19-pandemic
Project leader: Simen Markussen, The Ragnar Frisch Centre
Participating countries: Norway, Denmark, Finland, Sweden
Project period: 2023-2026
Funding from NordForsk: 9 million NOK
In the Nordic countries, the deep societal, cultural, and institutional similarities, characterized by a generous social security system, active labour market policy, high labour market participation, and high social mobility, were put to the test during the pandemic, challenging the social and economic resilience of the welfare state model. Despite these commonalities, there were significant differences in the policies implemented across the Nordic welfare states to deal with the pandemic, including measures such as school closures and the design of wage compensation schemes. These implemented policies and institutional variations may have implications for the resilience of the welfare state when confronted with global crises like the pandemic.
The Nordic countries have been at the forefront of utilizing administrative microdata in social science research. While administrative data offer numerous advantages compared to other data sources, conducting comparative studies using such data faces several challenges, resulting in a scarcity of cross-country studies. This research project’s ambition is to overcome these obstacles and establish a comprehensive collaboration for Nordic comparative microdata research.
The project has multiple objectives, including making significant contributions to research on various topics, such as the social gradient in schooling and youth mental health, unemployment hysteresis, the effects of labour market institutions, and the optimal design of social insurance policies. Additionally, the project aims to provide high-quality descriptive analysis of the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic in the Nordic countries. This analysis is expected to enhance our understanding of the crisis and generate new hypotheses for future research. Furthermore, the project will offer credible evidence to improve the foundation for policy design in the Nordic countries, particularly in preparation for future crises.
Importantly, the project lays the groundwork for an ambitious comparative research agenda by combining registry microdata for the Nordic countries and providing documentation and codes to facilitate future comparative research endeavours. This research initiative is inherently Nordic in nature, fostering collaboration among research groups from four countries, utilizing data from all four countries collectively, and explicitly considering both similarities and differences in institutional details across countries. Such research would be challenging to undertake in any single country alone.
The research project is expected to yield several sets of results, all of which will contribute to the research frontier and be of high relevance to policymakers. It aims to investigate whether similar economic shocks, filtered through policy and institutional variations, lead to different outcomes for otherwise comparable individuals (e.g., those with similar socio-economic backgrounds, working in similar firms, residing in similar regions). Any observed differences in outcomes would be attributed to variations in policies. Overall, the research intends to enhance our understanding of the current health crisis by allowing for a careful comparison of the economic crisis’s effects and its aftermath in all four participating Nordic countries in great detail.
The first set of results from the project will focus on the social gradient in the impact of school closures on learning and mental health among young people in the Nordic countries. The research will leverage different school closure policies across these countries to assess how students from various socio-economic backgrounds are affected by the disruption of schooling. It will investigate whether these policies exacerbate socio-economic gradients in human capital development and mental health. These findings will be valuable for policymakers when designing future crisis-management policies, enabling them to target their interventions effectively. Additionally, the results will shed light on how well the Nordic school systems address fundamental issues related to equality in education.
The second set of results will provide valuable insights into how labour market interventions implemented during March to May 2020 have influenced labour market dynamics. This analysis will contribute to the refinement of future crisis-management policies while offering a deeper understanding of the inner workings of the welfare state. For example, the research will explore the impact of graduating into a recession on later-life labour market outcomes. Denmark’s extensive unemployment insurance system for recent graduates will be compared with the experiences of graduates in the other three participating Nordic countries to determine whether immediate labour market protection mitigates or exacerbates the effects of graduating in a recession. The research design also allows for insights into differences in institutions and rules related to sickness absence, short-term disability, active labour market policies, and more. Ultimately, these insights will inform the optimization of the current and future Nordic welfare state.
The third set of results will investigate the role of social insurance in reducing the spread of the virus by mitigating contagious presenteeism. This research will shed light on the argument for more generous sickness insurance, which compensates sick workers to stay away from the workplace, potentially resulting in reduced overall sickness absence. The analysis will test the extent to which differences in sickness insurance schemes, both between and within countries during the pandemic, led to higher rates of contagious presenteeism due to less generous insurance coverage. Moreover, it will explore whether these factors can explain why Sweden had higher mortality rates among the elderly population during the COVID-19 pandemic. Beyond its immediate relevance to discussions on high infection rates among elderly individuals in Sweden, these findings will be highly valuable for future policymakers when designing effective policies to combat seasonally recurring influenza pandemics.
Reinterpreting Sector Responsibility in Nordic Crisis Management after COVID-19
Project leader: Rasmus Dahlberg, Royal Danish Defence College
Participating countries: Norway, Denmark, Finland, Sweden
Project period: 2023-2026
Funding from NordForsk: 9 million NOK
When COVID-19 hit the Nordic Countries in early 2020, a distinct Nordic crisis management principle known as the sector responsibility principle was subjected to its hitherto most dramatic test: managing a full-scale crisis response across virtually all societal sectors and with an open-ended timeline, which stretched for months and, as it turned out, years. Sector responsibility showed its worth as a flexible, efficient and effective structuring principle in the Nordics during the decades leading up to 2020. However, after two years with COVID-19, Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian government commission reports all concluded that the sector responsibility principle had if not failed, then at least been challenged and transformed by the longevity and permeative nature of the pandemic.
RESECTOR (Reinterpreting Sector Responsibility in Nordic Crisis Management after COVID-19) sets out to investigate what happened to the sector responsibility principle in Denmark, Norway and Sweden during COVID-19. In response to the most comprehensive crisis in societal security since the Second World War, the sector responsibility principle’s underlying philosophy of decentralized crisis management to various degrees gave way to strong political leadership, centralized decision-making and strategic, top-down direction-setting. Ad hoc transformations of the sector responsibility principle during the COVID-19 crisis calls for systematic analyses of the principle’s implications, of how it was reinterpreted during the crisis, of the long-term consequences for Nordic crisis management, and of the very way in which Nordic societies organize and navigate the relationship between different societal sectors in the future.
During COVID-19, a grand, society-scale experiment thus unfolded in real time in the Norway, Sweden and Denmark: How would the sector responsibility principle fare in the face of the largest societal crisis since WWII? Would it live up to its promise of local agility and sectorial expertise? As the commission reports concluded, the comprehensive and long-lasting COVID-19 crisis revealed severe coordination gaps and cross-sector weaknesses of the sector responsibility approach. Requiring swift and coordinated action across virtually all sectors of society for an extended duration, the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated the limits to decentralized crisis management. In the midst of the crisis, this produced new and improvised ways of coping with cross-sectorial coordination in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. And now, after the challenges of COVID-19 are less urgent, national emergency management authorities in those same countries have begun the difficult and important work of systematically re-thinking the basic philosophies of crisis management.
With a project consortium consisting of a balanced mix of junior and senior researchers from Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, RESECTOR aims to develop new knowledge that will contributes to the ability of Nordic societies to manage future cross-sectorial societal crises more effectively. Due to the topic’s inherent complexity and boundary-crossing nature, the project is cross-disciplinary in nature, including perspectives from sociology, anthropology, history, and political science, and relies on a number of different approaches and methodologies. Together, the project group unpacks the intricate connections and complex empirical problems found in the sector responsibility principle’s ability to cope with the COVID-19 crisis from a variety of complementary lines of attack.
Apart from providing scholarly insights into emergency planning and crisis management, RESECTOR will provide lessons directly applicable to decision makers and practitioners based on novel insights into the strengths and weaknesses of the sector responsibility principle in the Nordics. The project takes advantage of the “natural experiment” aspects of intra-Nordic differences in managing the crisis, considering how the different responses activated, affected, and challenged the sector responsibility principle. Building on the assumption that sector responsibility principle remains relevant for the Nordic countries; the project seeks to identify “best practices” of overcoming the inherent tensions between centralized, cross-sector crisis management and sector-specific crisis management in ways that meet the future needs for centralized direction-setting and individual sector responsibility simultaneously. The project thus maps the lessons identified and facilitate a debate on the prospective course of action in the Nordic crisis management post-COVID-19.
To ensure a strong connection to decision-makers and practitioners, RESECTOR engages with key stakeholders from Norwegian, Swedish and Danish emergency management authorities through workshops, seminars and courses. The findings of the project also feeds directly into teaching and training programs on societal security at the involved consortium institutions. As a whole, the research project aims to guide Nordic decision makers as they implement the lessons from COVID-19 in future emergency planning at the broad societal level. RESCTOR also contributes to the development of crisis management capabilities in the Nordic countries, thereby not only contributing important academic knowledge, but also helping to strengthen the knowledge base for practice and for research-informed policy.
Social exclusion, polarisation and security in the Nordic welfare state
Project leader: Helena Blomberg-Kroll, University of Helsinki
Project duration: 2021-2023
Participating countries: Denmark, Finland, Sweden
Funding from NordForsk: 10 million NOK
Polarisation, hate crimes and violent extremism are commonly mentioned as central security challenges in contemporary Nordic societies. In order to maintain and strengthen the welfare state and democracy, the SEPOS project develops a broader, policy-relevant conceptualization of societal security, built on the notion of human security that covers aspects such as social cohesion, trust and drivers for marginalization. Instead of naming new issues as security challenges, the project highlights and intervenes in the unequal distribution of security, particularly among marginalized and racialised groups, studying how the divergence in the lived experience of safety, and the securitizing practices contributes to polarization and social exclusion.
Islamophobic and white nationalist groups have emerged in all Nordic countries; introducing new types of security threats, particularly in the aftermath of the violent attacks in Oslo and Utoya (2011), Copenhagen (2015), in Turku and in Stockholm (2017). Extreme movements are mobilising new members and supporters, transnational ties are manifested by participation in foreign conflicts (pro-Russians in Crimea; jihadists in Syria and Iraq). This has triggered forms of transnational exchanges and mobilization among extremist groups such as the Nordic Resistance Movement, incentivising them to generate hybridly mediatised coverage for extremist advocacy. SEPOS responds to the need of conducting in-depth empirical research on the manifestations of these security issues, being aware of the interactions between these phenomena: social exclusion, polarisation and extremisms.
The SEPOS project has three main objectives: a) to deepen our understanding on the challenges of human security in Nordic societies, b) to produce policy relevant, empirical knowledge on how different extremist movements, anti-democratic mobilisations in media and discriminatory patterns of policing influence experience of safety and trust in public institutions of racialized minorities in Nordic countries, and c) to channel research-based understanding on policy practices and policy measures pertinent to societal security to stakeholders. Marginalisation and social inequality, the role of internet and social media in the dissemination of radical ideologies and the importance of policies and preventative measures being formulated by policymakers, stakeholders and researchers are core issues considered throughout the project.
Empirically the comparative design of SEPOS contributes with insights in differences and similarities between the three Nordic countries in policies and in experiences of societal discourses of radicalization within politics and authorities on national and local level. Sweden and Denmark have until 2010s been considered to operationalize opposing strategies for implementing policy on migration, with Finland adopting policies influenced by both paradigms. While the Nordic countries have experienced trajectories of more rigorous control coinciding since the 2015 “refugee crisis”, practices and measures of governance to advance encompassing security vis-à-vis terrorism, extremism and global migration at large are far from harmonized between local and national authorities. Against the background of divergent “national models” of implementing security-pertinent policy and practices, it is particularly fruitful to conduct a comparative study through a consortium based on each of the Nordic EU countries, thereby allowing the SEPOS project to combine the best of both most similar systems and most different systems research designs.
The SEPOS has taken two broad strands of development and research foci to highlight differences and similarities: 1) a focus based on the study of the effects of racialization, social exclusion and polarization, in particular towards minorities, also considering practices and activities put up over time to tackle these issues at national, local and community level to enhance democratic participation, inclusion, empowerment and trust building; 2) the study of the political, societal and media/communication (transnational) developments of the populist and the far-right environs in times of multiple crises, including the relationship to dynamics of exclusion, inequality and de-democratization.
An example within the first framework of reference is the study of the Neighbourhood Mothers/ Bydelsmødrene (BDM) in Denmark. The BDM are women with migrant background (although not exclusively) organized in active groups with chapters in all Danish main cities. The BDM strive to foster societal inclusion, and participation both at the individual and group level. Our interviews with BDM activists and with municipal representatives and street-level practitioners show the endeavor to develop and consolidate democratic and participatory strategies and practices, within a frame that has taken different directions in the various municipalities. Polarization and stigmatization/racialization may impact on these outcomes, particularly when gender is involved. The mapping of the women minority organization also deals with the prevention of radicalization, particularly when radicalization happens in relation to perceived exclusion, lack of trust and personal security. However, our results indict that these issues are of minor concern compared to others.
This research approach involves and facilitates the contact and discussion with several different actors: volunteers, local level practitioners, municipal employees, street-level bureaucrats, besides prompting comparative analyses and discussions with the other Nordic cities and within the forum of the Nordic Safe Cities.
Another finding within the first framework, point at the strong gate keeping processes within the Finnish police towards research on police practices and the views of the police as regards non-discrimination and equity. Preliminary results of a survey to police officers show that a large part of the police are committed to fair organization culture and leadership, but the awareness of racism varies within the police. Among the key foci within the second framework has been the online mobilization of extremist and radical actors. One of the preliminary findings in this regard pertains to the corpus of some 2 million Telegram messages. These messages were exchanged in groups such as Soldiers of Odin and QAnon Suomi and collected during the pandemic in collaboration with the project Extremist Network, Narcotics, and Criminality in Online Darknet Environments (ENNCODE). The preliminary analysis of this corpus suggests that about 5% of the messages call other group members to participate in a range of offline action, from boycotts and demonstrations to street patrolling and other forms of direct action. While further analysis is needed in order to both validate and qualitatively assess the findings, it would appear that the violent potential of these groups is not accentuated by calls to violent action in fast messaging apps.
