The settler army does not need Indigenous peoples: Daniel Stridh, Peter Johansson, ‘Conscription and Colonialism: Tracing the Origins of the Sámi Exemption in the 1885 Swedish Conscription Act’, Scandinavian Journal of History, 2026 | settler colonial studies blog

The settler army does not need Indigenous peoples: Daniel Stridh, Peter Johansson, ‘Conscription and Colonialism: Tracing the Origins of the Sámi Exemption in the 1885 Swedish Conscription Act’, Scandinavian Journal of History, 2026

11May26

Abstract: In 1885, Sweden introduced a new Conscription Act that explicitly exempted nomadic Sámi from compulsory military training. This article investigates the governmental rationalities and discursive constructions underpinning this exemption, situating it within broader processes of nation-state formation, racialization, and settler colonialism in nineteenth-century Sweden. Drawing on official documents and archival material from 1872–1901, the study demonstrates how conscription functioned not only as a military reform but also as a nation-building mechanism that redefined the relationship between state, territory, and population. While settler populations in the north were incorporated into the nation and bestowed with civic rights and obligations, nomadic Sámi were positioned as fundamentally incompatible with the imagined Swedish nation and modern citizenship. The exemption codified racialized distinctions in law and administration, narrowed the definition of Sámi identity, and contributed to the exclusion of nonnomadic Sámi from legal recognition. As such, conscription reinforced colonial hierarchies and materialized the symbolic boundaries of Swedish nationhood.

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