Projects
Carbon Transnationalism: Conflict and Cooperation Around Coal in Interwar Europe (funded by the Swedish Research Council, 2023-2026). With Aliaksandr Piahanau, Marta Musso, Iva Lučić and Yunwei Song.
This project explores a set of historical processes that we collectively refer to as “carbon transnationalism”. This notion serves to highlight that fossil fuels were extracted, processed and burnt in transnational exploitative systems, involving complex cross-border relations, and that fossil fuels, in the process, fundamentally changed the political, economic, social and cultural relations between and within countries. Our empirical focus is on coal.
Taking the traumatic coal shortages in Europe during World War I as a point of departure, we zoom in on the period that followed – the Interwar era. This period marks the peak of coal’s dominance in the European energy system and it became the most vivid one in terms of European coal transnationalism.
We explore how a diverse set of actors engaged in Interwar European coal transnationalism against the backdrop of war-time memories, radical economic ups and downs, rapid technological change, geopolitical instability, the rise of authoritarian regimes, protectionism, dreams of autarky and visionary pan-Europeanism.
While aiming for a comprehensive understanding of carbon transnationalism in Europe as a whole, the project zooms in on four particularly interesting European regions, each characterized by a high degree of coal import dependence: Northern Europe (especially Sweden and Denmark), Central Europe (Austria and Hungary), Southern Europe (Italy and France) and Southeastern Europe (Yugoslavia). In addition, in a separate study, we explore how carbon transnationalism manifested itself in East Asia during the same period, where the colonial dimension of the phenomenon of “carbon transnationalism” comes to the fore in a particularly striking way.
The Rise and Fall of Nuclear Energy in Sweden (funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, 2024-2027).
In the postwar decades Sweden invested heavily in nuclear research. In the 1970s and 1980s the country rose to become one of the world’s most “nuclearized” nations. Between 1972 and 1985, Swedish electricity companies took into operation 12 large nuclear reactors, which at their height produced half of all Swedish electricity. Between 1999 and 2020, however, six of the reactors were closed permanently. The remaining six are also slowly approaching the end of their lives.
This “rise and fall” of Swedish nuclear energy remains poorly understood. The proposed project aims to counter this. It will result in a monograph that scrutinizes the making and the unmaking of the Swedish nuclear age – against the backdrop of high hopes in present-day Swedish politics for a national “nuclear renaissance” that might combat climate change and skyrocketing electricity prices.
The project starts from the hypothesis that, if we want to explain the “rise and fall” of Swedish nuclear energy, it is not sufficient to analyse the public debate and the political tug-of-war for and against nuclear energy, which has been the main focus in most earlier research. Instead, the project will analyse how these social-political trends co-evolved with the internal dynamics of the Swedish nuclear industry and, in particular, with developments “on the ground” at each of Sweden’s four large nuclear power plant sites.
