Weaponizing Exceptionalism: Policing Race, Place, and the Borders of the Nordic Welfare State

• In Event: 30267 - Policing and Military Sociology

Abstract

In November 2022, the Swedish people voted into office the most far-right government in the nation’s history. Fueled by a moral panic around gang violence in the urban peripheries, campaign slogans from across the political spectrum invoked law-and-order rhetoric promising harsher punishments, more prisons, and an expansion of police resources and powers. If the government’s policy agenda is instituted, Sweden’s incarceration rate will increase six-fold by 2033, going from one of Europe’s lowest incarceration rates to second highest. Yet what may appear as a dramatic shift on the global stage resulting from the swing towards far-right authoritarianism has been unfolding for the past decade at the initiative of center-left coalition governments advancing (neo)liberal reforms.
Grounded in three years of ethnographic fieldwork in Stockholm working alongside Afro-Swedish activists and drawing on a combination of participant observation, interviews, and critical discourse analysis, this paper is situated within a broader book project examining the racialized politics of crime control in Sweden and how the policing practices it justifies target and impact Black communities, turning specifically to outline its theoretical framework. I argues that the punitive turn in Swedish politics has been facilitated by discourses connecting Black, Muslim, and immigrant communities to what politicians refer to as “system-threatening crime”. Key to the success of these efforts is what I describes as weaponizing exceptionalism, the ways in which Nordic Exceptionalism - as a discursive regime, as an ideology, and as a sociopolitical ethos – is weaponized against racialized working-class communities to justify unprecedentedly punitive shifts in law, social policy, and policing while attempting to maintain the image of Sweden as a “global moral superpower”. Consequently, the subordination of Black life in Sweden occurs not despite, but rather through the logics, institutions, and practices of the welfare state, raising questions about abolition as a global imperative.

Author

• Jasmine Kelekay, Howard University