FORSVARSHOGSKOLAN

Their core work

Swedish Defence University (Försvarshögskolan) is Sweden's specialized higher education institution for defence, security, crisis management, and military science. They educate military officers and civilian defence professionals, and conduct academic research in security studies, leadership theory, and defence policy. Their limited EU project footprint points toward social science and humanities contributions — specifically the societal and historical dimensions of security-relevant technologies such as nuclear energy. They bring a defence and national security perspective to interdisciplinary research questions that most universities cannot credibly address.

What they specialise in

How they've shifted over time

Both H2020 projects ran in the same period (2015–2019), so no meaningful temporal shift can be detected from this data alone. No keyword data was extracted from either project, which further limits any trend analysis. What can be said is that SEDU's EU engagement during this window was exploratory and narrow — touching nuclear energy history and economic adaptation — rather than representing a deep programmatic research direction.

With only two projects clustered in 2015 and no visible H2020 activity after that, SEDU appears to be a peripheral EU research participant; any future collaboration would likely remain in the social sciences and security policy space rather than technical research.

How they like to work

SEDU has never led an H2020 project — they participated once and served as a third party once. Despite this minimal footprint, they engaged with 31 unique partners across 16 countries, meaning they joined large, multi-institutional consortia rather than small bilateral teams. This pattern suggests they are brought in as specialist contributors for their unique institutional identity rather than as driving research forces.

Despite only two projects, SEDU reached 31 unique partners across 16 countries — a unusually broad network for such limited participation, reflecting the large consortium structures typical of MSCA and RIA projects they joined. No geographic concentration is apparent from the available data.

What sets them apart

As Sweden's only university entirely dedicated to defence and security, SEDU offers a perspective that general research universities cannot replicate — namely, military science, national security policy, and civil-military relations as academic disciplines. For EU projects touching on dual-use technologies, energy security, societal risk, or crisis resilience, they represent a rare bridge between defence expertise and academic social science. Their value in a consortium is positional: they legitimize the security dimension of a research question in a way no standard HEI can.

Highlights from their portfolio

• HoNESt
  Their only directly funded H2020 project — a large RIA examining the history of nuclear energy and society — reflects SEDU's capacity to contribute security and risk-perception expertise to historically contested technology debates.
• AdaptEconII
  Participation as a third party in an economic adaptation project suggests SEDU can contribute defence-economics and institutional resilience thinking to broader socioeconomic research consortia.