Security Imaginaries of an Unarmed People : The Development of Iceland’s National Security Policy

Iceland is a founding member of the world''s most powerful military alliance but yet has never had a military. For most of its existence as an independent republic, it outsourced its defense entirely to the United States. Then, in 2006, the US military left Iceland. What happened next is the subject of Security Imaginaries of an Unarmed People: The Development of Iceland’s National Security Policy. Drawing on parliamentary debates, focus group interviews, and three national surveys spanning 2016 to 2023, Silja Bára Ómarsdóttir traces Iceland''s slow, contested, and often surprising journey toward defining its own national security. The analysis sheds light on a gap between a political elite increasingly focused on military threats and a public whose security concerns remain stubbornly rooted in the everyday: the economy, the environment, the next volcanic eruption.
Through the concept of the security imaginary, shared but often unarticulated beliefs that shape a society’s understanding of danger and protection. Security Imaginaries of an Unarmed People offers insight into how a small, unarmed state navigates an era of profound global uncertainty. Iceland''s story is very particular, but its lessons are universal: about the distance between policy and people, about resilience without weapons, and about what security means.