Achievements amidst asymmetries: power dynamics in Swedish civil-military collaboration - an exploratory conceptualization

This article examines how power dynamics are shaped and managed in day-to-day civil-military collaboration in Swedish total defence. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with key civilian and military actors involved in total defence planning, the article investigates the interplay of power asymmetries, the collaboration’s institutional and relational conditions and how collaborating actors perceive and manage asymmetries in practice. Using thematic analysis, we demonstrate that civil-military collaboration is characterized by imbalances in authority, resources and discursive legitimacy. The paper further sheds light on micro-level practices of power enactment and details how collaborating actors negotiate and manage power asymmetries. The main finding suggests that when the relatively more powerful actors engage in power moderating practices, which we conceptualize as Strategic Power Moderation (SPM), collaborations can perform productively despite asymmetrical relations. The results offer a nuanced understanding of how collaborations fare under conditions of power asymmetry and have implications for both research and practice.