From Sin-stock to Social Good : A Discourse-Theoretical Study of Defence Investments in Sweden, 2022-2026

Sammanfattning

This thesis examines how the defence sector has been rearticulated within sustainable finance discourse in Sweden following Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Prior to 2022, a normative practice of the Swedish sustainable finance market was to exclude defence companies from sustainability-labelled funds. Drawing on a Logics approach of post structural discourse-theory, the thesis examines how the reframing of defence as sustainable was produced, sustained, and contested between 2022 and 2026. The empirical material comprises of regulatory texts, policy documents, marketing material of defence-dedicated funds, and opinion journalism in industry media. The findings of this thesis demonstrate that the pre-2022 practice to exclude defence companies was destabilized by the geopolitical disruptions, contested by distinguishing defence from the broader group of 'sin-stock' and framed in relation to democracy, peace, security and ultimately sustainability. The fantasmatic logics explain how the discourse sustained its affective grip through the concept of fantasy, with a horrific dimension (European democratic collapse under foreign aggression) and a beatific dimension (peace and resilience secured through the liberation of capital from sustainability-related exclusions) and depended on the marginalization of unresolved contradictions and concerns. The thesis argues that the post-2022 rearticulation was the outcome of a hegemonic struggle over the meaning of sustainable finance itself. The analysis shows that the shift was largely driven by a narrative of European democracy under existential threat, a narrative that also gave the new arrangement an emotional and moral pull to subordinate ethical concerns about weapons and the defence sector. More broadly, the findings also demonstrate that the meaning of sustainable finance involved political contestation over who has the authority to define it. Technocratic framings such as those by the European Commision, actively narrow what counts as legitimate debate and simultaneously marginalize civil-society from the definitional terrain. Therefore, the thesis highlights the need to ask both what is claimed about sustainable finance, as well as who gets to define it in the first place.