Monica Kello is a Lecturer in War Studies (Cyber Security) and Director of the Cyber Security Research Group at King’s College London. She is also a Trustee of Virtual Routes. Monica’s work examines international cyber conflict. She holds a PhD in Cyber Security from the University of Oxford.

Inés Llamas Delgado is an MSc Candidate in Global Governance and Diplomacy at the University of Oxford (Kellogg College) and a Fellow at the Ax:son Johnson Institute for Statecraft and Diplomacy. She graduated in History and International Relations from King’s College London, where she worked as a Research Assistant and co-founded the KCL Journal of International Security. Her research focuses on cyber conflict and strategy, emerging technologies, and international security, with particular interests in cybersecurity, AI, and quantum technologies.

This article examines how Sweden uses psychological defence as a form of contingency campaigning: continuous, proactive efforts to set favourable conditions in its own information environment and reduce opportunities for adversary exploitation. Existing work on cyber persistence theory has shown how states campaign to shape the conditions of competition in cyberspace (Fischerkeller, Goldman, and Harknett, 2026), but has paid less attention to how similar logics operate across the wider information environment. Sweden offers a distinctive case because it has recently rebuilt total defence and re-institutionalised psychological defence in response to a deteriorating security environment, especially Russian doctrine and practice around information confrontation.

The article brings conceptual order to a dispersed set of Swedish activities, including the establishment of the Psychological Defence Agency, public education campaigns, election protection, strategic communication, resilience planning, cooperation with platforms, and efforts to maintain trusted information flows during crisis and war. Rather than treating these as discrete counter-disinformation measures, the article analyses them as part of proactive and persistent contingency campaigning to make Sweden a less permissive target for coercion, manipulation, and disruption. The article contributes to International Relations scholarship by extending cyber campaigning beyond narrowly technical operations and by showing how psychological defence can function as anticipatory resilience. It also contributes empirically by explaining Sweden’s approach as persistent and proactive campaigning to preserve societal will, public trust, and informational continuity before crisis conditions fully emerge.

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