Meaning-making coping under the threat of war: a qualitative study of people in Sweden

The question of how individuals make meaning of, and cope with, the threat of war remains underexplored, particularly in highly secular societies and in contexts of anticipated rather than directly experienced conflict.

This article reports findings from a qualitative study of meaning-making coping among people in Sweden, a country that has not experienced war within its borders for more than two hundred years but that now faces heightened geopolitical tension. The study forms part of the international research program Meaning-Making Coping with Crisis. Using a purposive sample of 41 adults in Stockholm and Gotland, data were collected through an online open-ended questionnaire and analysed thematically, informed by Pargament's RCOPE framework and a socio-cultural model distinguishing faith-based from secular existential coping.

The findings show that both religious or spiritual and secular existential meaning-making strategies are present, but that secular strategies are markedly more prominent, while religious coping is peripheral and, where present, often confined to private practices such as prayer or to the church as a communal rather than devotional space. The secular existential strategies identified include relational, nature-based, cosmic, meditative, and artistic forms of meaning-making. A potentially novel form of secular existential coping, meaning-making through the absence of meaning, is also identified, in which psychological relief is achieved through the acceptance of human limitation and the relinquishing of ultimate meaning rather than its reconstruction.

Taken together, the results indicate that responses to the threat of war are multidimensional, reflecting an interplay of several meaning systems alongside emotional and cognitive processes, and that they are shaped by cultural, relational, and existential context rather than by religious belief alone. The study underscores the cultural, relational, and existential dimensions of coping with war-related threat and the need to extend established meaning-making and religious coping models to highly secular settings.