All-of-society security strategies in the Nordics: New forms of responsibility and trust
While any crisis makes planning a challenge, globalisation and the interconnectedness of various systems and supply chains also means that a singular crisis can have more severe and overlapping ramifications, indicating an era of polycrisis (Keinänen et al., 2025). Furthermore, hybrid threats—which involve disinformation, manipulation, and “coordinated actions designed to create confusion and dilemmas across sectorial lines of responsibility”—undermine democracy and trust (Sandbakken & Karlsson, 2024, p. 165; Borch & Heier, 2024). Recent scholarship also raises the idea of creeping crises whose effects are felt over time (Boin et al., 2021). Thus, the threat landscape of today lies distinct from that of former times in that defence and security strategies must consider not only acute crises but everyday security threats.
The transition from tackling specific crisis moments to maintaining a general state of crisis preparedness challenges notions of exceptionalism and raises difficult questions around responsibility, governance, and strategic planning (Carlsson & Engström, 2025; Liebetrau, 2021; Hyvönen & Juntunen, 2021; Larsson, 2021; Berling & Petersen, 2021). Thus, all Nordic countries have organised some version of total defence as a security approach. Total defence is “a way to prepare and organise for potential threats and crisis that are essentially understood as transboundary in nature” and involves a combination of actors (Berndtsson, 2024, p. 152). Beyond armed forces, total defence expresses the joint efforts made through civil defence, by which the civilian population participates in security efforts, often through acts of preparedness (i.e., civil preparedness). Nordic security strategies and risk assessments refer to war or armed conflict as one form of many potential crisis situations, and the idea of state and private actors cooperating to prepare for and respond to the most dramatic of external threats has also been applied to the logics of societal security in a broad sense. Thus, crisis situations bleed into the everyday, and individuals and communities play a large role in preparing for and safeguarding their own life and health.
In this totalising security landscape, new questions emerge regarding the responsibility held and shared by different actors. It also challenges how communities cooperate, communicate, organise themselves, or work together in everyday and acute situations. The idea of preparedness in recent years has led to an emphasis on self-preparedness and how the individual bears responsibility to ensure his or her own safety (see, e.g., Larsson, 2021). Whether this is the case for all crises, and how this responsibility is allocated to individuals, taken up by grassroots organisations and institutions, or claimed by state actors remains a complex issue which lies at the heart of psychological resilience in practice (Hyvönen & Juntunen, 2021). On the one hand, granting more responsibility to the individual can empower him or her and make use of the existing community linkages at the local level. On the other hand, a shift towards greater individual responsibility means that those who, for various reasons, cannot ensure their own safety or are already marginalised from various communities may be at risk of increased vulnerability in crisis situations. The idea of sharing responsibility before, during, and after a crisis is present across the Nordic countries, both in policy and in the literature, but it remains uncertain how these responsibilities might be divided amongst actors who either already have a mandate to act in times of crisis or who take up new responsibilities in an ad hoc way.
The idea of trust has often been mentioned as a significant and unique element of Nordic societies (Berling & Petersen, 2021; Selle & Wollebæk, 2015; Larsson & Rhinhard, 2021). Developing trust central to psychological resilience, and how it is developed during everyday situations may influence which communities, institutions, or state services people turn to for guidance and provision during acute crisis situations. It is this notion of psychological resilience that the Building Resilience policy game sought to explore.