What do we know about the long-term consequences of being in military service, as a conscript, and as a deployed soldier? We have invited one of our contributors, Peter Bäckström, to talk about the public perception of veterans, individual and societal consequences of military service, and the challenges of doing research within this field.

The idea of the able-bodied soldier is discussed in this episode of SJMS Talks, with SJMS-contributor Christine Svop and host Daniel Møller Ølgaard. Svop published a study in 2021 about pregnant soldiers in the Danish army, offering several practice-oriented recommendations of gender mainstreaming, as well as discussing how the pregnant body poses a threat to the social identity of the soldier.

The backdrop of this episode is the recent revelations from Süddeutsche Zeiting, NDR an Delfi in Germany about the Russian Social Design Agency, planning to induce a nuclear psychosis in the Western population. One of our contributors, Carina Meyn, has been doing extensive fieldwork among security experts in the US, dealing with nuclear weapons. She joins our host Daniel Møller Ølgaard in the studio.

In this episode, Isabel Bramsen joins the studio with our new host, Daniel Møller Ølgaard – one of the chief editors of SJMS. The two political scientists discuss peace in the Middle East, and the benefits of a micro-sociological perspective on peace and conflict studies. SJMS-contributor Bramsen recently published the book The Micro-Sociology of Peace and Conflict (Cambridge University Press, 2023).

Professor David Betz discusses the future of warfare, emphasizing the importance of fortification tactics over technological advancements. The podcast explores the resurgence of fortification strategies in modern conflicts, Russia's military engineering capabilities, fortifying cities, and the legacy of 17th-century engineer Marshall Sebastian de Prestevo Bonn.

There seems to be something true to the logistics experts saying: “In peace time we talk about war, in war time, we talk about logistics.” One of the most read articles in our journal tries to elaborate on the failing logistics on the Russian side early in the war. Contributors Thomas Ekström and Per Skoglund are in the studio to discuss what is their take on how Russian logistics have evolved throughout the war, and how it might evolve in the future.

Lessons from the war in Ukraine indicate that in future emergencies a kind of cyber militia might be useful to have. But what is a cyber militia? How should it be governed? And what roles can it perform? Contributor Dan Jerker Svantesson is invited to the podcast, to talk about cyber defence post Russian aggression in Ukraine.

Groups such as the Popular Resistance of Ukraine and the Atesh partisan movement of Crimea have taken credit for several attacks on Russian soldiers and military infrastructures. Is there anything new about these forms of popular resistance? And what is the future of unconventional warfare? To answer these questions, we have invited one of the world’s leading voices on irregular warfare and counterinsurgency, David Kilcullen.

Recently in Denmark, a survey showed that every fifth person in the Danish Army had experienced sexual harassment. This is a lot, but it is less than the general population. How come? Has the work with minimizing sexual harassment paid off? Or do people in the defense tend to report less, than others do? In the studio, contributor Iselin Silja Kaspersen joins Jeppe Teglskov Jacobsen on zoom to talk about how institutions such as the military shape and break our identity.

Light infantry are flexible, lightly equipped soldiers who engage in ground combat on foot. What are the dos and don’ts when considering investing in such units? Kristian Lindhardt is in the studio five years after Denmark got its first light infantry, and two years after he published his practice-oriented article on historical uses of light infantry in Vietnam, Rhodesia and Sierra Leone.