The 2025 Swedish film Värn (Redoubt), directed by John Skoog, depicts a village in Scania at some point during the Cold War. The main character is based on the historical figure Karl Göran Persson, a land worker in the village of Hörby in the south of Sweden, who died in 1975. Persson’s life was marked by his indirect experience of the wars of the twentieth century. His rural place of residence was not directly affected by war, yet he became known through his peculiar response to the conflicts, particularly the Cold War. Persson spent many years of his life building a kind of fortress to protect himself, his neighbors, and the king, in the southern Swedish countryside, from any war.
Värn portrays a fictionalized Persson in the environment where he lived. The movie starts by introducing viewers to a brochure that was first distributed by the Swedish state in 1943. The brochure is titled “Om kriget kommer,” or “When the War Comes,” and provides the population with instructions on what to do in the case of war arriving in Sweden. Throughout the film, Persson repeats some of these instructions—such as “If you hear the signal, go inside. Close the doors. Close the windows. Close the ventilation,” and “All information to the effect that resistance is to cease is false”—whispering them like a mantra to guide his daily activities.
And a mantra it is. In anticipation of war, Persson knows what he must do. Preparation is the master principle of his life and he executes it with a remarkable level of creativity and zeal. Much of the movie follows his daily work of collecting leftovers and trash from neighbors and fellow villagers as building material, growing and expanding his fortress through intense physical labor and the most inventive yet at times inefficient manual technologies. His construction, which looks much like a bunker, is meant to shelter him and possibly other people from any kind of military attack. It is a two-story building, made from a wooden structure and thick walls of concrete, with several rooms and narrow windows.1 Yet perfecting his fortress seems like an interminable task. The structure is never quite complete, and he must constantly reinvent and repair it.
The brochure from which he takes his cues for getting ready for the war has since been reissued several times. The movie refers to a version of this brochure from 1961 that uses expansive illustrations to make it easy for anyone, independent of their literacy level, to follow the instructions. The latest version is from 2024 and its illustrations have been renewed. On the cover of this current edition, we see an armed female soldier in the center of the image. In the background to the left, a white mother reads a book to one Black and one white child, while to the right we see another soldier in shooting position. Above them, a military plane is depicted in movement, and to their right, a boat rushes by.2
The brochure’s title has now been expanded to “When a Crisis or War Comes,” yet its contents are largely the same—just updated instructions on how to move to shelters as quickly as possible and what to pack in case of emergency.3 The style of the publication suggests a big effort to design an appealing image of inclusivity—potentially overstating the racial diversity of the country and the role of Swedish soldiers when it comes to caring for the population’s needs.
Värn engages in an aesthetic exploration of Persson’s life and work to address the affective condition of living in anticipation of war, without collapsing into mere commentary on the present. The film and its makers have a historical focus and might not be interested in such a zeitgeist-y endeavor at all. Yet, watching a middle-aged man build a makeshift bunker with his own hands for his own protection from unspecified bombs and shootings opens up a vast space to reflect on the affective and aesthetic effects of approaching wars in the current historical moment. Following Persson so closely in his daily labor, the film seems to depict an exercise of national security gone wrong. Whereas the NATO maneuvers of the 1960s and ’70s attempted to involve bigger portions of populations in national preparations for war, we see Persson undertaking such a maneuver all by himself.
The latest edition of the brochure was published roughly at the same time as Sweden joined NATO, which can be read as a response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. While Sweden has never been a pacifist nation, it has a political history of staying out of military alliances and assuming neutrality whenever possible. Its exposed location, with a long coast on the Baltic Sea as well as territory that reaches up to the Arctic, has always meant that military engagement is a national priority.
The newly issued brochure in the context of NATO membership is a symptom of what former German chancellor Olaf Scholz called “the turn of an era” (Zeitenwende). Today, the subway tunnels in Stockholm are full of job advertisements for the military, and recently, the French aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle “visited” the southern Swedish city of Malmö for what was called “naval diplomacy.”4
Persson must have been responding to a similar situation at his time: vague threats, unclear anticipation, movement in the more abstract political sphere, and relative continuity in his immediate surroundings. Yet Persson decided to disrupt the calm of his surroundings and to establish a physical, material relation to what was seemingly approaching. He refused to be numb to the all-encompassing sense of threat. He rejected the passivity and nonresponse of his village community. He refused to succumb to the general numbness towards catastrophe that he must have observed around him. In the film, the actor Denis Lavant acts with fervor to demonstrate Persson’s eager, almost manic determination to create a protective shelter in case of war—a striking contrast to the undisturbed daily rhythms of village life around him.
Persson’s historical situation and his personal response suggest how, then and now, the escalation of imperial violence and genocide might erode the social fabric—a social fabric that was perhaps expected to support these escalations. Persson’s actions are a disturbance in the everyday proceedings of the village. He points to a threat that the villagers prefer not to be in relation with. Only the children seem to be on good terms with the man who “just wants to help,” as a child’s voice-over remarks in the film.
Similar to Persson’s odd interventions into the habitual life of his village, as depicted in Värn, the recent palpable shifts in the global order (however one characterizes them) impact the social-affective realm of post-colonizer societies. There is also a general feeling of threat, yet at the same time a denial of the multiplicity of crises and catastrophes. In responses to the current situation, we also find a clarification of political antagonisms.
Beyond the case of Sweden and the Cold War, what is an adequate ethical response, from within the imperial center, to the experience of imperial decline? There is not only one adequate response, and it is not possible to socially prescribe an affective or moral posture, even if we had one in mind. But pondering it is necessary in order to find ways for the current transition to be less violent—no matter how unlikely a nonviolent outcome might seem at the moment.
Erosion
The capacity of the global imperial order to reproduce itself on the institutional level is eroding. This certainly does not mean that the global order of racial capitalism governing the unequal distribution of resources, self-determination, and justice has been overcome. But there are clear signs of some kind of end of an era, manifested in the lack of a shared language to frame the escalating violence of the genocide in Gaza, the war between Iran and Israel and the US, and the different fascisms rising around the world.
In a recent episode of the podcast The Dig, journalist Ben Mabie describes the dynamics of the current processes of erosion. He contrasts the recent US attack on Iran with the 2003 war against Iraq. For him, both wars should be understood within the context of a broader analysis of US imperialism, though there is one key difference: While in 2003 much effort was directed toward identifying the threat posed by Iraq and arguing that a military attack was the only way to confront it, in Trump’s current attack against Iran, identifying a specific threat and ruling out alternatives to military force does not seem to be a priority. Of course, justifications have been given, and the need to overthrow of the regime is a narrative that is accepted to varying degrees, but claiming that there is no alternative to this form of military intervention does not seem worth the effort. Instead, Pete Hegseth frames the bombing of Iran as a crusade in which the escalation of violence itself is the point. Commentators have pointed out that what is happening in Iran has already been tested in Gaza. In both cases, it seems clear that behind the justifications lies the idea of land grab and control. Whether it’s the Gaza Riviera or the Strait of Hormuz, the end result is the subjugation of land through its destruction.
There is a striking discrepancy between the brutal reality of these wars and the values that claim to regulate it: empathy, human rights, international law. These values unveil their own emptiness. A cynical assessment of the situation—in which the unbridled belligerence of US government officials is preferred over the EU’s rambling about international law—is entirely justified here. In fact, for anyone to believe that they can somehow rhetorically link what is happening to international law is both to overestimate their own abilities and, at the same time, to completely underestimate society’s ability to see what is going on. This abyss between the claim to have values and the reality of current wars has been diagnosed by Abdaljawad Omar as “moral stupidity” and should be seen as symptomatic of a process of erosion.5
Invoking international law at the very moment it is being blatantly disregarded can only serve to highlight that disregard, unless one is willing to risk subjecting institutions—and language itself—to a process of erosion. What is taking place today is not a shift in values from the welfare state to the security state, but an erosion of the very possibility of upholding values at all. This, in turn, is not a simple self-contradiction that can be resolved by returning to an existing canon of values. The abuse of these values permanently damages contexts of meaning. A dynamic of values without reality emerges—there is a failure to name the discrepancy between an order and the reality to which it supposedly refers.
There are many theoretical paths, beyond the ones I am sketching here, for analyzing the fading of values and the disintegration of a global order. In his General Economic History, Max Weber speaks about how virtues are never entirely implemented through rationality—they carry a certain magical content, as virtues, and values, are always embodied by leaders: “In reality everything is based on the magical theory that the virtue of the empress and the merits of the officials, meaning their perfection in literary culture, keep things in order in normal times.”6
This, to Weber, is a premodern phenomenon, but it is interesting to consider this same aspect in contemporary institutions. Virtues are partially passed on through a sovereign who embodies them. And at the same time, embodiment is what makes an institution. It might be that the discrepancy between values and reality becomes apparent through the lack of such an embodiment. Someone needs to demonstrate that they have indeed understood what is at stake by moving and acting in ways that do not blatantly disregard the approaching disaster—conspicuously scraping together a fortress, so to speak. Virtue and merit are only valid when they are attached to bodies. Expanding Weber’s thought to times that might be less “normal,” we might consider Persson as an awkward representative of what it means to take things seriously, even if they seem far away—for often, they are made to seem far away precisely to encourage complacency. His response is less one of panic about the approaching catastrophe than an urge to do something—to find a practice of everyday life that is not oblivious to the possibilities of the near future.
Transition
In his Terms of Disorder, Alberto Toscano grapples with the question of how one historical situation transitions to another. He draws on the history of theories of revolution to think about what happens in between. How do transitions work? What complications emerge in moments when the old has died but the new cannot yet emerge?7 I want to think about this in relation to social unfeeling in moments of political decline, by which I mean habitualized apathy regarding crises unfolding at a distance.8 What becomes palpable when erosion is underway but there is not yet clarity about what must be brought into being?
The overarching question for everyone who has ever lived with or desired the overturn of an order is how to live with uncertainty. In a recent essay, Denise Ferreira da Silva explores the conditions of theorizing in a moment of global political shifts. She wonders what happens to the figure of the critical intellectual, who, just like everyone else, depends on certain conditions to be able to fulfill their role. Traditionally, these conditions require a functioning academy and, in the modern era, legacy media. Given the erosion of these support systems, she asks what combination of intellect and affect supports critical discourse. Da Silva argues, against many common assumptions, that intellect and affect are inseparable. This insight, elaborated in her earlier work on the raciality of post-Enlightenment thought and the unpayable debt of Blackness, allows her to disentangle the following conundrum: Why have the recent years of critical discourse on race, gender, and capitalism not only caused a massive backlash, but failed to have a lasting impact? Why do we seem unable to find any remnants of these debates in today’s political conversation? The reason, da Silva shows, is that what looked like a dismantling of the hegemonic order of Western racial capitalism was in reality only a shift in tone. It was not a transformation of the order itself. Furthermore, the core affect of the discourse that seemed changed was in fact left untouched. This affect not only shows itself in the continuities of racial subjugation, genocide, and total violence unleashed in various places. It also remains where we most seek to get rid of it—in critical thinking. As da Silva writes:
The work that the affective seems to perform in the political domain has to do with particles of discourse, such as how these dichotomies (read as a compound of the form of hierarchical difference) play in our critical thinking. And they do so because our critical thinking is made from the same elementary stuff (of thinking) as these dichotomies are. Whatever political task a figure such as the intellectual might perform these days, it will be of little impact if it does not include a treatment of the latter, which are, of course, its own condition of possibility, to stay in the script.
Da Silva prompts us to loosen the conditions that seem to create our ability for critical thought and yet perpetuate the very structures that keep the political order in place.
A positive spin on this would be to propose the following: The erosion of the current moment is so profound that it might allow for the unthinkable to happen. The unthinkable has so far unfolded in the form of total violence. In a different iteration, it might manifest as the possibility to overcome a violent order that had seemed unchangeable, and to replace it with something “more than perfect.”9 Not only are institutions of all kinds in disarray, but as political discourse has moved into a kind of deadlock, a renewal of categories is called for. It might help to let the moment shake up the concepts of analysis as much as it shakes up what seemed certain.
Toscano insists that moments of transition include tragedy that must be borne. Such is the argument of Vanessa Machado de Oliveira, who proposes practices of “hospicing modernity.”10 How to accept the truly unacceptable losses that are nonetheless an integral part of our times? How to inhabit a world as it reconfigures itself? Toscano examines the history of revolutionary thought to determined how dedicated political actors have made sense of these experiences. One challenge he identifies is to let go of “the desire of linearity that takes the name of modernization.”11 He quotes a debate between Trotsky and Kautsky that revolved around the question of whether transition must follow a plan, making use of prefiguration, or whether the actions and necessities of a transitional period will only—dialectically—become visible in the midst of it.
In a dramatic rendition of this debate, Trotsky states that “one learns to ride on horse-back, only when sitting on the horse.”12 Transition knowledge—knowing how to act once the ground has started to shift—cannot be entirely anticipated. It is a type of knowledge that must take shape in the moment when it is needed, which is why various theoretical traditions have little to offer in this regard. Toscano makes some propositions to compensate for these shortcomings in his Terms of Disorder (subtitled Keywords for an Interregnum)— propositions about what feels charged with urgency in moments of transition. He considers what causes the instability—what shakes the ground of formerly self-evident categories.
At a conference in Berlin in June 2026, Adam Tooze made similar points about uncertainty and transition, albeit in a more alarmist tone. He presented some ideas on the impact of artificial intelligence on the US economy and on the history of humankind, concluding with the question “What time is it?” Strikingly, Tooze brought up horses when discussing the kind of shift humanity is facing given the scale of AI’s impact on labor. He quoted Niall Ferguson comparing the replacement of horse labor by machines in the nineteenth century with the replacement of human labor power by LLMs:
Are we the horses? This was the question posed by the historian Matthew Lowenstein in a 2023 paper. "In a world with Artificial Superintelligence," he wrote "humans will flourish only at the pleasure of more intelligent machines … the replacement of horses by industrial technology took centuries, whereas the replacement of humans after the advent of powerful AI is likely to take less than a decade."13
Tooze goes on to emphasize the “unprecedented” quality of the current transformation. It is worth remarking that there are indeed precedents for such replacements of labor power, not least the replacement of animals by enslaved Africans, some of whom were given the roles of horses.14 In Tooze’s summary of the conference, he repeatedly mentions his disappointment about a lack of alarmed statements—or maybe affects—in response to current developments. He is unsatisfied with the reinforcement of familiar analytical categories that fail to grasp the scale of the changes caused by a world market that is more connected than ever, and the scale of looming planetary destruction.
Many ask how to theoretically grasp current upheavals more adequately. They ask whether alarm is a helpful response. Persson’s affective posture in Värn provides us with an alternative approach to disaster—if we allow him to be more than just another prepper determined entirely by his fears.
Manic Melancholia
With his fortress, Persson responds to a situation that is difficult to read. His choice to build a safety bunker is partly initiated through the Swedish state and its instructions for wartime behavior. But Persson goes far beyond the recommended preparations, appropriating them in a mode of mania, joy, and sadness. In the film, we see a man who is determined to give shape to the catastrophe, to make it graspable, to halt the torture of indeterminacy.
To focus on the violence of the current conjuncture, it might help to consider what Bedour Alagraa calls the “interminable catastrophe,” which started with colonial extraction in the fifteenth century and continues in today’s environmental and genocidal devastation. Alagraa argues that in the realm of the catastrophic, race functions as a marker to distinguish “harbingers of calamity” from those who seemingly repair it. Colonial modernity has always conflated human beings with their surroundings to create a pretense for genocide; often, human beings are made responsible for the catastrophes they are suffering from. Alagraa’s point is that catastrophe is not a merely descriptive concept to map destructive events but a marker of political and historical significance, distributing agency, debt, and life chances along racial lines. Her work allows us to reflect on the uses of catastrophe.
Given the catastrophism, the intellectual collapse, and the inadequate set of concepts we have to frame the present, one might think that catastrophe is something like a core of white subjectivity. The object of disaster and therefore of grief remains hard to determine, while disaster seems so entangled with a late-capitalist way of life that is unable to let go of its exploitative self-reproduction. What seems more plausible than trying to correct a practice of mourning is to embrace the melancholy of identifying with global crises and catastrophes. Persson inhabited a catastrophe that never really touched him. He merged his life with it and refused to look the other way.
Freud famously argued that “in mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself.”15 In one reading of this notion, the empty melancholic ego fails to come to terms with the losses that the dissolution of the modern world implies, and so catastrophe itself becomes its sole possible identity. The constant staging of catastrophes that this modern order feels called to manage with its tools does not improve life; it only allows for things to continue uninterrupted. It recharges this order’s empty self and never lets go. Alagraa: “I argue that catastrophe is a structural condition, and a way of life imposed as a form of political and social domination, beginning with the New World colonial encounter(s).”16
The current excess of geopolitical entitlement and the genocidal violence we witness might be read as symptoms of a self that can only find itself within catastrophe, sometimes by prolonging the crisis for others. The empty self desperately attempts to name what is happening to itself, in order to be able to feel its own substance. Often this unfolds in a way that looks rather manic: like Adam Tooze’s desperate insistence that we should display more panic—his disbelief that nobody else gets it. Or the daily work of Persson, building a fortress in Scania. Both share a manic melancholia.
This is a fitting description for the dominant affective condition in a time of imperial erosions. Melancholia permeates societies. Because it is so uncomfortable, everyone is begging for relief. A diffuse fear of war combines with the claim that something has already been lost (“a peaceful Europe” or “liberal values”). This loss must be rectified, and the only available idea for doing so seems to be to act out aggression and identify an object for it. The only social response seems to be militarization. In this moment, militarization is sold to people as a kind of grief work. The better option might be for each of us to find a way to build a fortress with our own hands. Maybe it will end up being a shelter in which a new world can emerge. Maybe it will be more than perfect.
The reconstruction that was built for the film was exhibited in Malmö after the release of the film. See →.
The official English translation of the current title is “In Case of Crisis or War.”
Robin Häggblom, “Historic First: French Aircraft Carrier ‘Shows the Flag’ in Sweden,” Naval News, February 26, 2026 →.
Abdaljawad Omar, “Gaza and the Problem of Moral Stupidity,” Equator, July 15, 2026 →.
Max Weber, General Economic History, trans. Frank H. Knight (The Free Press, 1950), 338.
Alberto Toscano, Terms of Disorder: Keywords for an Interregnum (Seagull Books, 2023).
Jan Slaby, “Structural Apathy, Affective Injustice, and the Ecological Crisis,” Philosophical Topics 51, no. 1 (Spring 2023).
See →.
Vanessa Machado de Oliveira, Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity’s Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism (North Atlantic Books, 2021).
Toscano, Terms of Disorder, 155.
Quoted in Toscano, Terms of Disorder, 154.
Adam Tooze, “Chartbook 451 What Times Are These? Crying Fire in a Berlin Lecture Theatre,” Chartbook newsletter, June 6, 2026 →.
Thanks to Romy Opperman for pointing this out.
Sigmund Freud, On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement: Papers on Metapsychology and Other Works, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 14 (Hogarth Press, 1957), 246.
Bedour Alagraa, “The Interminable Catastrophe,” Offshoot, March 1, 2021, emphasis in the original →.
