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HomeFront

About

Image of white papers against a blue sky, behind a black barbed wire.
Picture: Aiju Salminen

Finland has undergone rapid militarization following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and the country’s accession to NATO in 2023. The budget allocated to national defense nearly doubled between 2020 and 2024, while government funding for peace organizations was discontinued. According to the 2024 Defence Report, Finland is preparing for prolonged and large-scale warfare both through its own national resources and as part of NATO.

The HomeFront project examines how accelerated militarization and crisis preparedness are reflected in everyday life in Finland. We produce interdisciplinary and multi-method research on the militarization of everyday life, focusing on the interaction between home, gender, and care.

Goals

  1. To produce new knowledge and research data on the militarization of everyday life in Finland.
  2. To conduct comparative analyses of the research topic in collaboration with Nordic partners.
  3. To advance feminist approaches to peace studies, security studies, and international relations by highlighting the importance of women’s (unpaid) work in processes of militarization.
  4. To create networking opportunities for feminist researchers in peace and security studies working in Finland and to strengthen Nordic cooperation in the field.
  5. To promote public discussion on the militarization of everyday life in Finland.

Research questions

In the HomeFront project, we ask:

  • How does the home and its representations enable and legitimize militarization in Finland?
  • How are gendered care work and militarism intertwined?
  • How does militarism and militarization manifest in everyday interactions?
  • What alternatives does feminist utopian thinking offer for the demilitarization of everyday life?

Workpackages

We produce new knowledge and analysis on how Finnish society has changed in the 2020s through four work packages:

The Everyday Effects of NATO Membership in Mikkeli

In this work package, we examine the practical impacts of Finland’s NATO membership in Mikkeli, where a NATO subordinate command was established in autumn 2025. Our aim is to understand how local residents experience the presence of the NATO base and what effects it has on everyday life in the region.

Gendered Care Work in Soldiers’ homes

We investigate the voluntary work carried out by women in soldiers’ homes and explore how gendered care work functions as part of a military organization. The Finnish Soldiers’ Home Association, a network of 36 local associations, is Finland’s oldest voluntary national defense organization. Despite its long history, there has been very little research in social sciences on soldiers’ homes and the work carried out within them.

Home in Finnish War Museums

We examine how museums and other cultural heritage sites dealing with war history and national defense construct understandings of home and its significance within Finland’s military history. We are particularly interested in how themes of loss, belonging, and security related to home are represented in museums, and how these intersect with the militarization of everyday life. We also investigate the boundaries that museums draw: who is portrayed as belonging to the national home and who is excluded from it.

Feminist Utopias as Challenges to Militarization

In this work package, we explore the alternatives that feminist utopian studies offer for reimagining home as a space of care, privacy, security, and peace. A central method of this work package is the active imagining of peaceful futures.

Funding

This project is funded by the Research Council of Finland.