Colonialism Is a Dirty Word: A Legal Mobilization Study of Two Decolonial Protest Campaigns in Sweden

Sweden is not a country that features prominently in investigations on settler-colonialism and decoloniality, yet in recent years Sweden has been the site of two notable decolonial protest campaigns aimed at the Swedish state’s complicity with past and ongoing colonial processes and oppressions. The first and more longstanding campaign has been waged by Sami groups who have challenged the Swedish state through legal mobilisation actions, notably through the use of formal institutional mechanisms, to secure claims and amend the colonial dispossession of land and natural resources in Sápmi. The second and more recent campaign has been waged by heterogenous civil society actors, including notably student activists, against the perceived complicity of Swedish state institutions in the ongoing settler-colonial destruction of Gaza. This study addresses these two decolonial protest campaigns in conjunction, recognising both as staging conscious acts to influence law and policy and effect socio-political change through distinct legal tools in their respective repertoires of contention. In so doing, the study draws on legal mobilisation and decolonial theory to conceptualise both campaigns as instantiations of contentious politics with competing and complementary modalities of liberation. The study advances a constitutive conceptualisation of legal mobilisation as involving legal norms, discourse, and symbols as part of a broader invocation of law on behalf of political demands.