A cohesive approach to legal readiness for peacetime crises, high alert events, and war

The main objective of the project is to explore how the legal regulations of emergency preparedness and total defense together can form a cohesive system to support planning for, and management of, peacetime crises, high alert events, and war.

The project is carried out in cooperation with the Faculty of Law at Uppsala University and supports practitioners and lawyers in emergency preparedness and total defence with analyses and high-quality research. In addition, the project contributes to the development of doctrine, which up until now largely has been neglected.

Collaboration between representatives from emergency response and total defence

The project works closely with a reference group of representatives from both the emergency response and total defence communities to ensure continuous testing and dissemination of the research results. It is hoped that the work will contribute to an improved and broader knowledge base, which, in turn, has the potential to improve lawyers’ and policy makers’ confidence as they attempt to balance the need for effective management of crises and wars with individual rights and the protection of the constitution.

Analysis of four different perspectives

The project is framed by four perspectives; the system perspective, the legislative perspective, the business perspective, and the comparative perspective. The systems perspective focuses on norm governance at different levels and explores questions of how the accountability principle changes and operates when proxy legislation and exemptions change the tasks and interrelationships between authorities. The legislative perspective focuses on how constitutional readiness relates to proxy laws and how exemption clauses in different laws may operate in relation to proxy laws. The business perspective explores how livelihood preparedness can be addressed from the legislative perspective. Finally, the comparative perspective provides opportunities to analyse how Swedish law reflects and deals with international law and to what extent Swedish law needs to evolve to reflect the developments in international law in recent decades.

Project objectives

• To publish one to two monographs and/or edited volumes on legal aspects of the project, as well as five-six peer reviewed articles in national and international journals.
• To complete a doctoral thesis (monograph).
• To integrate the research results into teaching, analysis, training and educational material conducted by the Swedish Defence College and Uppsala University in the field, including in collaboration with the Centre for Total Defence and Security of Society (CTSS).
  
• To establish and support networks for researchers and practitioners in the field, including through the reference group described above.
• To deepen cooperation in research and education in the field between Uppsala University and the Swedish Defence University, but also with Nordic and European colleagues with crisis and war as a research area.
•  To actively contribute to the social debate in the field from a legislative perspective.

Current news from the project

How can the laws on crises and wars work better?