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Aleksi Topias Tanttu is a Master’s student at the Centre for Nordic Studies at Helsinki University. His entry on nordics.info was supervised by Peter Stadius and Matilda af Hällström.
Post-war attempts to formalise Nordic security and defence cooperation in the late 1940s floundered and were overtaken by Norway, Denmark and Iceland becoming founding members of NATO in 1949. Throughout much of the second half of the 20th century, and even to this day, defence and security has been markedly absent from the agenda of Nordic cooperation, despite significant collaboration being undertaken on the ground. In the last 10 years, concrete attempts have been made to formalise cooperation with mixed results. Today, the Nordic countries view security as a broad concept that includes civil security, terror, cyber threats, climate change and the Arctic region.