Weaponizing Exceptionalism: Racialized Politics of Criminalization in the Nordic Welfare State

In 2022, the Swedish people voted in the most far-right government in the nation’s history. Fueled by a moral panic around gang violence in the working-class urban peripheries, campaigns across the political spectrum promised record investments in the criminal-legal system, including an expansion of police power and an emphasis on harsher punishments and increased reliance on incarceration. According to a prognosis by the Swedish department of corrections, if the government’s policy agenda is executed according to plan, Sweden’s incarceration rate will increase six-fold by 2033, going from one of Europe’s lowest incarceration rates to second highest, trailing only Turkey.

Yet what may appear as a dramatic shift on the global stage, resulting from the swing towards far-right authoritarianism, has in actuality been unfolding for the past two decades and initiated by Social Democrat-led left-leaning coalition governments. A closer look at the decade preceding the 2022 elections reveals a set of precursors to the current moment, the significance of which this paper examines. Alongside the rapid neoliberalization of the Swedish welfare state, the punitive turn in Swedish politics of crime control has been facilitated by moral panics discursively connecting Black, Muslim and immigrant communities to what right-wing pundits call “system-threatening” crime.

Key to the success of these efforts is what I describe as “weaponizing exceptionalism,” the ways in which Swedish Exceptionalism - as a discursive regime, as an ideology, and as a sociopolitical ethos - is weaponized against Black, Indigenous, and other racialized communities. I illustrate how, in Sweden, moral panics connecting Black, Muslim and immigrant communities to crime are deployed to construct a “state of exception” to justify unprecedentedly punitive shifts in law, social policy, and policing while maintaining the facade of Sweden as a bastion of socially progressive policy.