War-peace dialectic revisited

Abstract The increasingly blurred distinction between war and peace described by Leonard (2021) as an alternation of two interrelated labels, i.e. ‘unpeace’ and ‘unwar’, is crucially relevant to the need to reevaluate the interdependence of the closely related concepts of neutrality, non-alignment and security in political and legal discourses. Sweden is a case in point: having been a ‘nation of peace’ during its long-standing neutrality ( Parker 2017 ), it turned into a ‘militarily non-aligned country’ in the post-neutrality period, and it eventually became a NATO member in 2024, having abandoned its neutrality after Russia’s brutal, illegal and unprovoked war on Ukraine in the quest for security. The aim of…