| Summary: | In the last twenty years, cooperation on security issues in the Nordic countries has gone from non-existent, to a range of close-knit security and military collaborations. With the 2011 signing of a declaration of solidarity, Nordic security cooperation is moving into a new era. My aim with this study is to explain the particularly apparent emergence of a network for Nordic security cooperation in the last five years. Drawing inspiration from Graham Allison, I carry out a case study, in which the Nordic security cooperation is reviewed using two different theoretical perspectives: Barnett and Levy’s theories on alliance building, and Bellamy’s framework for analyzing security communities. The results are then placed in a context, by being applied to the Stoltenberg report for a concluding discussion. My findings reveal that despite the existence of a Nordic security community and security challenges presented by a new security, the rhetoric surrounding the Nordic cooperation is surprisingly tinted by military strategies, economic, and geopolitical threats, and the alliance building theory based on domestic political and economic factors is better suited to explain the discourse surrounding the Nordic cooperation, rather than a constructivist approach based on a common identity and shared values.
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