In contrast to the vast majority of Western countries, Sweden left large segments of the society open instead of imposing a lockdown to combat the spread of the coronavirus. As a result, the Swedish COVID‐19 measures, largely devised by its expert agency on health, garnered widespread international attention. Despite the global interest in the corona strategy of the Public Health Agency of Sweden (PHAS), there are currently no systematic studies on their COVID‐19 policy. The present investigation focuses on the controversies that have characterized PHAS' work with reference to risk assessments, facemasks, voluntarism, testing, and the protection of the elderly during the pandemic. Overall, this inquiry demonstrates that PHAS' risk assessments were initially overly optimistic and their facemask recommendations in conflict with large segments of the scientific community for an extensive period. Yet, their voluntary measures worked moderately well. In their testing, PHAS did not manage to deliver on their promises in time, whereas several measures implemented to protect the elderly were deemed inadequate and late.

Content analysis has once again come to the forefront of discussions regarding methods in International Relations (IR). The first wave of content analysis in IR lasted from the 1940s to the 1960s and was marked by a commitment to quantitative and manual analyses. The second wave of content analysis appeared at the start of the third millennium and continues to pervade the discipline. As with the first wave, it proceeds in a predominantly quantitative manner but emphasizes computer-assisted analysis rather than manual analysis. Critics and advocates of the method alike have, highlighted numerous shortcomings with these approaches. In order to address these limitations, the present investigation argues for a fully integrated content analysis that has the potential to ameliorate the identified weaknesses that have hitherto plagued the method. It accomplishes this task by combining all facets of the method: quantitative, qualitative, manual, and computer-assisted content analyses within a single research project.

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The, classical realist writings of E.H. Carr and constructivist publications of Alexander Wendt are extraordinarily influential. While they have provoked a great number of reactions within the discipline of International Relations, the ethical dimensions of their works have rarely been studied at length. This article seeks to remedy this lack of examination by engaging in an in-depth scrutiny of the moral concerns of these two mainstream International Relations scholars. On investigation, it is revealed that Carr demonstrates a strong commitment to the ethical principle of fairness and Wendt a moral concern for the prevention of the use of organized violence. These concerns are shared by Rawlsians and cosmopolitans in International Relations, and these findings may thereby encourage closer engagement between these diverse communities that rarely speak to one another and strengthen disciplinary research on morals.

This article scrutinizes the assumption that friends support each other in times of war. Picking up the notion that solidarity, or ‘other-help’, is a key feature of friendship between states, the article explores how states behave when a friend is attacked by an overwhelming enemy. It directs attention to the trade-off between solidarity and self-help that governments face in such a situation and makes the novel argument that the decision about whether and how to support the friend is significantly influenced by assessments of the distribution of material capabilities and the relationship the state has with the aggressor. This proposition is supported empirically in an examination of Sweden’s response to its Nordic friends’ need for help during the Second World War – to Finland during the 1939–1940 ‘Winter War’ with the Soviet Union, and to Norway following the invasion of Germany from 1940 to 1945.