Repression as Punitive Racialized Social Control: Examining the Case of Black and Muslim Activism in Sweden

• In Event: Disrupting the Status Quo of Political Repression

Abstract

Drawing on a combination of ethnographic fieldnotes, interviews, and discourse analysis, this paper examines the repression of Black political, democratic, and cultural participation in Sweden. While Sweden is often lauded as a model social democracy and a global “moral superpower,” the past decade has marked a drastic shift in the possibilities of political organizing, civic engagement, and social criticism. This shift has been accelerated by the rise of the far-right Sweden Democrats, with the current right-wing coalition government elected in 2022 advancing an aggressive ethnonationalist agenda of assimilation, incarceration, and deportation. Since 2022, the repressive climate has only heightened, leading to a rapidly shrinking arena for civic engagement and the criminalization of new forms of activism, including the targeting of climate activists, Kurdish activists, and activists organizing in solidarity with Palestine. Although Black activists in Sweden organize and mobilize in a variety of constellations, these repressive efforts have largely targeted activists across three realms; those resisting islamophobia and the civil and human rights violations committed in the name of the War on Terror; those resisting the territorial stigmatization and policing of the urban peripheries, and those advancing anti-racist and anti-imperialist critiques of the state. Grounded in the experiences of Afro-Swedish activists involved in anti-racist, neighborhood-based, and Muslim organizing, I analyze the spectrum of repressive tools deployed to suppress Black and Muslim activism. I argue that Swedish exceptionalism is weaponized to facilitate this repression, whereby Black, Muslim, and ‘second generation immigrant' subjects are reconfigured as threats to the Swedish (racial) state project.

Author

• Jasmine Kelekay, Howard University