Sweden’s race to the bottom: advancing a racial security state

Abstract

This article provides a close reading of the Swedish prime minister’s speech to the nation in September 2023 during a spiral of deadly shootings. From a criminological perspective it engages with the relation between policing a crisis and the crafting of a state project. Sweden’s punitive turn stands in sharp contrast to the previous ‘Nordic model’ which was regarded as exceptionally humane. What, asks the author, are the main ideological features of the current Swedish government’s security state project? Theoretically, the article draws from critical contributions on racism and security. The analysis shows that the discourse of the Swedish head of government targets racialised populations, within and without the borders of the nation. The policing of the current crisis should be conceptualised as a race to the bottom − in a dual sense. Firstly, it is a reconfiguration of Sweden’s race relations. Second, it is a drift along a militarisation continuum.

Introduction

The level of deadly gun violence in Sweden is among the worst in Europe. From Sweden having relatively low levels of homicide, since 2013 the problem has been on the rise. According to official thinking, lethal shootings have been concentrated in criminal areas and racialised working-class neighbourhoods. ¹ In this regard, September 2023 was extraordinary, with eleven people killed in shootings across the country.

Hence the decision of the conservative Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson to give a speech to the nation. ² In this relatively uncommon practice – it has occurred six times over the last twenty years ³ – the head of government listed several proposals that the ruling majority had in the pipeline. Among these were the doubling of the penalty for certain crimes, visitation zones, sentences with extended parole ineligibility, deportations of non-criminals for preventive purposes, and a discussion of the ways that the armed forces could assist the police.

Most of these proposals had been presented before as part of the Tidö Agreement, ⁴ a non-legal document produced a month after the national elections in 2022. It detailed the path negotiated by the parliamentary ruling coalition consisting of the three traditional right-wing parties – the Moderates, the Christian Democrats and the Liberals – with the support of the Sweden Democrats. According to the Swedish Prison and Probation Service, if all the proposals of the Tidö Agreement were implemented, Sweden’s capacity to hold inmates would need to be tripled, from 9,000 to 27,000. ⁵ This would make the Swedish prison population per capita among the highest in Europe, exceeded only by Turkey. Influential criminologists have highlighted this fact, arguing for the need to reconsider the path embarked upon. ⁶

Human rights groups have also been vocal. Amnesty International Sweden declared that the policies in the Tidö Agreement risked ‘eroding confidence in the rule of law’, and that it would ‘condition civil rights, depending on your place of residence and ethnicity’. ⁷ A similar view was expressed by Civil Rights Defenders, who stressed that the Tidö Agreement ‘undermined’ democracy and that ‘several’ of the measures ‘clearly contradict the norms of human rights Sweden is bound by’. ⁸ Save the Children emphasised that it was ‘particularly concerned’ about the distinctions made in the Tidö Agreement between children in Sweden, depending on where they were born or resided, and their immigration status. ⁹

The Swedish Police Union also raised concerns. Commenting on the need for visitation zones, a reform intended to make it legal to stop and search people including children without suspicion in demarcated urban areas, the Police Union stated that it is not ‘desirable’ given that the police already ‘feel that they have the opportunities to search people when necessary’. Accordingly, visitation zones risked being ‘counterproductive’, with a ‘negative impact’ on the relationship-building work of officers. ¹⁰

The aim of this article is to critically assess, from a criminological perspective, the authoritarian turn that Sweden has embarked upon, by empirically examining the Swedish prime minister’s speech to the nation. Theoretically, the article draws from critical contributions on racism, highlighting its intimate link to security issues. The research question guiding the article is: what are the main ideological features of the current Swedish government’s security state project? In the following section, an overview of how the Swedish welfare state has been reshaped in recent decades in relation to different areas of policy is presented to contextualise the analysis.

From being a ‘shining light’. . .

In an important contribution to the debate, John Pratt argues that Sweden together with its neighbouring Nordic countries is the ‘shining light of Western liberalism in the post-war era of optimism’, distinguished by trust, tolerance and peace. ¹¹ The egalitarianism of the Nordic model explained the penal exceptionalism manifested in low rates of imprisonment and humane prison conditions. Whether this is a correct representation or more a case of successful regional branding is a disputed question within criminological circles. ¹² For example, analysing the Nordic systems from the perspective of ethnic minorities, migrants and foreign nationals, it has been argued that the regional penal model should rather be characterised as Janus-faced, with benevolent violence directed towards those deemed unwanted. ¹³

From welfare to workfare

Whichever interpretation is espoused, it is obvious that we are at a different conjuncture. The pillars of the social democratic welfare state model were challenged in the 1980s. In the 1990s, a change led by both Social Democratic and Centre-Right governments took place. It was a gradual makeover whereby Sweden step by step was reshaped in accordance with neoliberal ideals, moving away from a protective welfare state to a disciplinary workfare state. This meant that welfare entitlement was not mainly regulated by need, but whether inhabitants were at the service of the labour market, privileging values such as flexibility and competitiveness rather than social cohesion. ¹⁴ Sweden joined the European Union (EU), Keynesian policies of government spending were replaced by austerity measures, welfare services were privatised, and the overall fiscal goal of full employment was abandoned, replaced by the aim to combat inflation. ¹⁵

Measured by the Gini coefficient, incomes in Sweden have not been as unevenly distributed since 1975, according to Statistics Sweden. ¹⁶ Currently, every fifth person in Sweden lives in a household that cannot pay a major unexpected expense. ¹⁷ An important element in this respect is that the Swedish class structure is deeply racialised. In 2020, 23 per cent of the children in families with a ‘foreign background’ had a low income, compared with 4 per cent of the children from families with a Swedish background. ¹⁸ Sweden has become one of the countries in the EU with the widest difference between domestic and foreign-born in terms of material and social poverty, with poverty being almost seven times more common among the latter. ¹⁹

From included subordination to subordinated exclusion

These numbers need to be contextualised. Populations with a foreign background migrated to Sweden at different times. Until the 1970s, labour migration from neighbouring Nordic countries and southern and eastern Europe was common. Thereafter refugee and family reunification migration dominated, a consequence of relatively liberal policies within the European context. About two million of the current population in Sweden were born abroad, constituting 20 per cent of the population. In addition, approximately 700,000 have a ‘foreign background’, a category that includes people born in Sweden to foreign-born parents.

Sweden’s relation to its racialised population has been described as paradoxical. ²⁰ The liberal multiculturalism that prevailed post-second world war reinforced notions of culturally different Others, legitimising relations of exclusion while simultaneously offering a wide range of rights to racialised citizens, as well as a place in the imagined community. The notion of ‘included subordination’ captures this position within the progressive welfare state project. But this was then emphatically abandoned in 2015 when the Social Democratic government made its ‘rapid and dramatic U-turn’. ²¹ Abruptly, Sweden’s refugee policy became amongst the most restrictive in Europe. But already after the urban riots of youth living in racialised working-class neighbourhoods in 2008–2009, scholars had started to observe the end of Swedish exceptionalism, highlighting elevated levels of economic, social and political marginalisation of migrants and their descendants. ²² In this regard, the concept of ‘subordinated exclusion’ was developed to capture the precarious role and place of the racialised working class in the new Sweden. ²³

Social policies subordinated to security policies

The field of crime control has followed a similar path to other areas of state policy. Here, a policy break also occurred in the transition from the 1980s to the 1990s, with Sweden moving away from its – at least in some areas – more moderate penal model. Critical here is the politicisation of criminal policy and the emergence of a ‘crime victim’ discourse that shifted societal focus away from the rehabilitation of prisoners. ²⁴ Since then, Sweden has witnessed an expansion of its penal code, irrespective of which political bloc has been in power. ²⁵

The launching of the War on Terror in September 2001 was a milestone globally. But, at the local political level, the brutal suppression three months before 9/11 of protesters in Gothenburg during the European Union summit also had a major influence, rearranging power relations by limiting the space for radical agendas. ²⁶

The result is that a new security mentality has been shaped whereby social policies are increasingly subordinated to security policies. ²⁷ A central component is that immigration becomes seen as a threat. This trend has steadily increased based on the discursive conflation of immigrants with crime, ²⁸ and the establishment of a policy chain where criminal justice, immigration control and integration are intertwined. ²⁹ Another significant issue is the spatialisation of the problem to racialised working-class neighbourhoods. In the mid-2010s, the police started listing ‘vulnerable areas’ and introduced in their reports the language of ‘parallel structures’, a flexible signifier that allows the linking of Islamic terrorism with immigration, organised crime, street-level delinquency and general sentiments of social disorder. ³⁰ Scholars have argued that the state established a warfare rhetoric, placing repression at its centre, where the military-style occupation of Swedish racialised working-class neighbourhoods (förorter) took the shape of intensified surveillance and the expansion of a police presence. ³¹

In sum, the 2023 problem with deadly gun violence appeared within the context of an increasingly repressive political climate. Nonetheless, it is important to stress that there is clear evidence that residents of racialised working-class neighbourhoods suffer not only from being over-policed ³² but also from being under-protected. ³³

Establishing a security state

So how can this authoritarian turn be grasped? There is a growing body of literature on the emergence of the security state. Its initial contours were deciphered by Stuart Hall and colleagues, who showed that Britain drifted into a state of exceptionalism, a law-and-order society, in the 1970s. ³⁴ In retrospect, the analysis of authoritarian populism proved far-sighted when governments across the West mobilised against crime, while restructuring their welfare societies based on market-friendly neoliberal ideals. ³⁵ Even though penal development has been uneven across the West, and in some ways contradictory, this analytical backdrop provides context for assessing more recent changes.

Liz Fekete sees the War on Terror as the symbolic birth of a new, global security era in which novel draconian measures are developed by western states, eroding democratic principles and multicultural policies previously highly valued. ³⁶ Under the banner of security, imperial wars are launched with millions killed and displaced. At home, anti-terrorist legislation is introduced, targeting Muslim communities as the enemies within. ³⁷ It is in this context that western states mutate into deportation regimes, turning citizenship status into a tool for criminal law. ³⁸

Scholars have linked the emergence of the security state to different drivers, one being the blurring between war and peace. According to Stephen Graham, a consequence of the security agenda that evolved in the aftermath of 9/11 was that the warfare conducted by the military in foreign countries, and crime and migration control at the hands of the national police, were intertwined, ³⁹ a consequence of a process described as the ‘imperial boomerang’. ⁴⁰ In western cities, the war-oriented security ideology implied that groups formerly seen as being at risk of social harms (refugees, minorities, the poor) were viewed as potential security threats, and by extension they became seen as latent enemies. This security rationality has then legitimised the mass surveillance of citizens, and the increased concern relating to pre-crime risk management through technological innovations aimed to be pre-emptive. ⁴¹ It has also legitimised the militarisation of policing, which has made racialised groups particularly vulnerable to military-like state control and violence. ⁴²

It should be noted that the military/police dichotomy is an oversimplification and it is impossible to draw a distinct boundary between wars waged abroad by the military and the peace maintained at home by the police. ⁴³ However, if state-sanctioned violence is understood as a continuum that stretches from fairly consensual and civilian-based policing to military techniques of war, the militarisation of crime control comes with certain martial values and beliefs that bend the rules of politics. In this regard, it is important to emphasise the impact that the militarisation of society has on race relations. ⁴⁴

This is related to a second driver in the establishment of the security state. The security state must be considered a racial project, an ideological work intertwined with a praxis aiming to ‘reorganize and redistribute resources along particular racial lines’. ⁴⁵ By re-imagining the security problem, boundaries of belonging are redrawn, altering how we think about ‘us’ and ‘them’, and by extension whose human rights need to be accounted for or can be violated. When grappling with the latter and its relation to real or perceived security threats, scholars offer different interpretations. While some stress that western states’ reaction to security problems is the consequence of powerful offenders, others accentuate the problematic ways that security threats are constructed by state agencies. ⁴⁶ Either way, there is a need to differentiate between ‘governing crime’ and ‘governing through crime’. While the first is about policies developed to combat social harms, the second is linked to the politics of staging sovereignty by legitimising the exercise of power. ⁴⁷

A third key element paving the way for the security state has been the transformation of the state under neoliberalism. With the rollback of welfarism – what has been conceptualised as the protective ‘left hand’ of the state – security has become the dominant selling point of governments, a service delivered through the repressive ‘right hand’. Because the neoliberal security logic has a systematic tendency to practise laissez-faire towards those at the top while being fiercely interventionistic towards the racialised working classes, those at the bottom culminate in being dispossessed materially and dishonoured symbolically in the current conjecture. ⁴⁸ Central here is that the neoliberal security state deports and imprisons poor people from the global South, while simultaneously institutionalising precarious living and working conditions for vast groups existing in the borderlands of legality and formality. ⁴⁹ This aspect has made scholars draw the conclusion that the endgame of the contemporary security state is to manage surplus populations – groups among the working classes who make up a disposable reserve army. ⁵⁰

Relevance of empirical material and methodology

That then is the context in which this article provides a close reading of the transcript of the Swedish prime minister’s six minutes and fifty-eight seconds-long speech which was broadcast live to the nation in September 2023. The basic proposition is that the speech offers an opportunity for the formal reaction from the head of government to the spiralling gun violence which condenses the dominant understanding of the current societal crisis, of who is (not) to blame, as well as the way forward.

Empirically, the analysis of the speech to the nation departs from the English version published by the government. In some cases, the Swedish wording is clarified, a strategy developed because there are linguistic discrepancies between the original and officially translated texts. Methodologically, Stuart Hall and colleagues’ study Policing the Crisis is a key source of inspiration. In their work, they provide a framework for conjunctural analysis, highlighting the pressing need to explore moments when the balance of forces between coercion and consent is being altered, and society tilts towards its authoritarian pole. This reference requires a reflexive clarification. The trend of elevated levels of gun violence in Sweden is understood as extremely serious. The current moment cannot therefore be reduced to a state of moral panic. However, this does not mean that ‘the scale of measures taken to contain crime’ should be understood as being in ‘rough balance’ to the problem, ⁵¹ as pinpointed in the introduction and discussed in the coming analysis.

As indicated, the article draws from conjunctural analysis, which critically examines empirical material as a means to engage with the general, asking what wider meanings there might be of the current condition. ⁵² The aspiration is to understand how ‘aspects of the complex whole are articulated with each other and how these articulations produce the current conjuncture’. ⁵³ In addition, the study is inspired by critical discourse approaches. What is said as well as underlying ideological assumptions and silences are discussed. In this regard, it is salient to highlight that the analysis moves from descriptions of the empirical material to interpretations, and then to theoretically informed understandings. ⁵⁴

Governing through race and crime

Prime Minister Kristersson’s speech to the nation begins by describing several of the recent deadly acts of violence that precede his appearance:

Yesterday evening – a perfectly normal evening – a 25-year-old woman went to bed and never woke up . . . A week ago, a 70-year-old blind man went to a pub in Sandviken to meet his friends. He never came home . . . And my thoughts go out to the young man in Uppsala who was murdered in a stairwell early one morning two weeks ago, on his way to work in home-help service . . . My thoughts also go out to the three children – aged 13, 14 and 14 – found executed in woods outside Stockholm.

Evidently, Kristersson situates the speech in relation to several individual tragedies. He emphasises how the innocent – children, a woman going to bed, a blind elderly person and a working man – have been affected by the violence. This ideal victim discourse can be interpreted as the prime minister’s ideological point of departure, intended to allow for the mobilisation from above of sentiments from below. ⁵⁵ The prime minister’s message is that anyone, anywhere, can become a target. However, Kristersson’s message is also that not all are at the same risk:

The worst affected are those living in socially disadvantaged areas. Honest people, parents doing the right thing but living in dread that their children will be lured in by gangs promising money, watches and cars. Business owners being robbed on a daily basis but not daring to report it. Everyone who wants to tell the police about the gangs’ reign of terror but does not dare to – out of fear for their own lives and those of their children. All of them – all of you – should know that I am on your side. We are on the same side.

Sweden’s main political authority expresses an understanding that in the current state of exception, ‘honest people’ choose not to cooperate with the police because they do not ‘dare’. The message from Kristersson is that the state has failed to provide security. In contrast to periods when trust in and cooperation with the state was an ideological pillar of the welfare model, ‘fear’ following the criminals’ ‘reign of terror’ prevails in Sweden. This line of thought draws on a spatialised understanding of the problem. It is ‘socially disadvantaged areas’ that are the ‘worst affected’. The emphasis asserts a geographic hierarchy of grief that can be read as a form of recognition of the unequal burdens that residents are forced to bear in society where racialised working-class neighbourhoods are under-protected.

Whom is the head of government addressing? Two conflicting interpretations are possible. It can either be understood as Kristersson speaking to residents of these areas: the message is directed to a ‘you’ assured by the ‘I’ who conditions the possibility of a ‘we’ standing ‘on the same side’. A reading is that the ideology expressed builds on the liberal and multicultural heritage of the welfare state, where racialised working-class citizens are discursively included in the nation, albeit on conditioned premises. If so, Kristersson’s discourse can be understood as a speech act that creates internal divisions, separating the well-integrated residents from their neighbours.

However, it is also possible to argue that the Swedish head of government is talking about residents in racialised working-class neighbourhoods. After all, he interpellated this group as a ‘them’. If so, Kristersson’s speech reinforces relations of subordinate exclusion, where racialised working-class residents are excluded from the imagined community as well as from basic rights, in this case security. ⁵⁶ As such, the speech to the nation can be read in relation to understandings that the endgame of current security states in the West is to manage and pacify – rather than, for example, eradicate – populations considered surplus. This latter interpretation is strengthened by the head of government’s framing of the root causes of the violence and insecurity in Sweden:

Irresponsible immigration policy and failed integration have brought us to this point. Exclusion [utanförskap] and parallel societies feed the criminal gangs, providing space for them to ruthlessly recruit children and train future killers.

It is suggested that the prime minister’s discourse should be understood as the ideological work that legitimises the advancement of a racial security state project. The governing through crime begins with the assumption that the problem has been Sweden’s ‘immigration’ and ‘integration’ policies. An understanding is that while inhabitants of racialised working-class neighbourhoods are honoured or at least recognised discursively because of the disproportional insecurity they must live with, at the level of policy they are symbolically dishonoured for the current situation. ⁵⁷ Apparently, there is a tension in Kristersson’s speech when he moves from the ideal victim discourse to the political framing of the situation, distributing shame and blame.

It should be noted that, within a context where the former social democratic government had revised its immigration and integration policies, there remains limited party-political opposition to the views expressed by the conservative prime minister. A conclusion is that his speech illustrates a dominant tendency at the present conjuncture to racialise crime by interweaving issues of immigration and immigrants with insecurity. The consequence is the forging of a nexus between race and crime, where place functions as a glue that allows binding the policy elements of the discourse together. To talk about ‘irresponsible’ and ‘failed’ immigration and integration is to talk about the criminal Other, a figure that comes from afar and lives among us. Kristersson emphasises that the training of ‘future killers’ happens in a certain ‘space’. By linking ‘exclusion’ to ‘parallel societies’ and racialised working-class neighbourhoods, the head of government draws two lines. The first is between the world and Sweden, and the second is within Sweden, creating suspect communities as the enemy within. It is against this background that new space-specific policing tools are developed: ‘We will introduce stop and search zones [visitationszoner] to enable police to confiscate firearms and explosives from criminals . . .’

This proposal intends to make it legal for the police to search people without the need for suspicion in certain urban areas, specifically those racialised working-class neighbourhoods identified by the police as unruly. The measure has limited support among scholars and police representatives and has been criticised by legal experts, as highlighted above. Even so it is put forward by Kristersson. Against the backdrop of the literature on the security state, the question to be formulated is not why there is a low threshold to propose crime control measures that rely on the logic of collective punishment, that challenge human rights standards and that do not take into account the knowledge of practitioners or academics. The question to be asked is: why not? The security state relies on dividing the population, symbolically as well as juridically. In a context where the social fabric is fragmented along the axis of race and class, it is politically feasible, even desirable, to subject those viewed as threats by the nation-state to intrusive and dehumanising state-sanctioned violence. ⁵⁸

Race to the bottom

That Kristersson is advancing a racial security state project is illustrated, among other things, by the fact that his first concrete reform message is related to ‘migration policy’. Thereafter he addresses the question of ‘criminal policy’:

The Government is overhauling migration policy. These are tough and difficult decisions. But they are necessary, and we are already seeing results. The Government is overhauling criminal policy. On Sunday, new legislation enters into force allowing preventive surveillance. This means that police will be able to intercept gangs’ communications and stop them before they commit crimes.

Authority is staged as the making of ‘tough and difficult decisions’. It is also represented as effective, ‘already’ providing results. The expressed ambition is a race to the European bottom, or – depending on perspective – to the top in a context where other western states have turned into deportation regimes. Important in this respect is the ‘preventive’ pre-crime criminalisation security ideology and punishment praxis on which measures are crafted. The basic idea is that the security threat to Sweden makes it ‘necessary’ for the state to risk-manage the criminal/immigrants:

We will introduce sentences with extended parole ineligibility [ förvaringsstraff] to ensure that criminals who pose a serious danger to society are never released. And we will expel aliens [utlänningar] who associate with [röra sig i] criminal gangs – even if they have not yet been convicted of any crime.

The punishment techniques of incarceration and deportation are closely knit together in the prime minister’s discourse, signalling that the enemies of the state will be either walled in or walled out. ⁵⁹ Regarding the extended use of prison time, in Sweden it has long been possible to sentence criminals to life imprisonment and indefinite forensic psychiatric care: the former is given mainly to murderers, while the latter affects a wider segment of offenders. With ‘extended parole ineligibility’ Kristersson intimates that the number of people who will ‘never’ be ‘released’ will increase. Sweden will begin to store prisoners, as the Swedish word ‘förvaring’ indicates. This prison fix rests on the notion that rehabilitation is impossible, or at least far too uncertain. When facing powerful offenders, the safety of ‘society’ comes first, legitimising the expansion of the penal code to prevent potential future crimes. The reach of this pre-emptive ideology is illustrated by the fact that the new measures involve deporting ‘aliens’ who have not been ‘convicted’, signalling a widening gap in the liberal rule of law’s principle of presumption of innocence. By emphasising ‘yet’, the prime minister underscores the politics of precaution on which the erosion of human rights lies. Decisive also is that the precise meaning of to ‘associate’ with criminal gangs is not specified. This vagueness is open to different interpretations that risk further limiting the freedom of movement of those rendered deportable or storable, two interlinked manifestations of disposability.

Apparently, the vison advanced for the security state is the institutionalisation of a racially structuring political and judicial system where surplus populations are unequal before the law based on area of residence and legal status. Decisive here is that the authoritarian security project formulated by Kristersson, when focusing on the outsiders within, draws from the benevolent violence that has regulated the ideology of the caretaking welfare state. ⁶⁰

We will eliminate the secrecy between the police, social services and schools so that they can share information with each other, about every at-risk young person. This will mean that children and young people can be identified in time – before they start carrying weapons. We will build young offenders’ institutions [ungdomsfängelser] so that young people are separated from adult offenders. We will ensure that all children learn Swedish, through language screening and catch-up schools in socially disadvantaged areas.

The argument is that it is for the sake of ‘at-risk’ youth that we ‘eliminate the secrecy’ between the state’s protective left hand and its repressive right. The same line of thought is advanced regarding the construction of ‘young offenders’ institutions’. It is notable that the only measure in the speech that can be identified as aimed at promoting people’s life conditions and chances, if the ideology of securitisation is taken out of the equation, is based on the idea that children need to ‘learn Swedish’. Here the prime minister signals that the problem is not universal, but that it is children in ‘socially disadvantaged areas’ who are in the gaze of the state. The privileging of this specific aspect reflects the silences pertaining to other factors that regulate the possibilities for the racialised working class in Sweden, not least the mutation of the welfare state from an organism with egalitarian ambitions to its opposite.

One interpretation is that the lack of social preventive measures in Kristersson’s speech differentiates the current governance political project from previous ones. However, not only has Sweden abandoned the ideals of the traditional welfare state, but also the workfare model. In the speech, there are no signs of an underlying economic rationale, and the disciplining ambitions are limited to the proposal that children of the racialised working class will have to spend their vacations in ‘catch-up schools’. Importantly, this should not be understood as a breach of the economic neoliberal model that has dominated in Sweden over recent decades. Rather, it can be understood as a means to preserve the status quo, or even as a deepening of the beaten path, with widening differences between the wealthy and a predominantly racialised working class.

Moving along a militarisation continuum

A point of departure in Kristersson’s speech is a war prism through which the deadly gun violence in Sweden is understood: ‘Swedish legislation is not designed for gang wars and child soldiers. But we are now changing that.’

The prism’s discursive character is in line with the militarisation of policing thesis. In Sweden, scholars have applied it to highlight how representations of unruly racialised working-class neighbourhoods have paved the way for intensified surveillance and the expansion of police powers. ⁶¹ However, what is communicated by Kristersson goes beyond what modern Sweden has ever heard before from a head of government in the fight against crime. Towards the end of the speech, the prime minister brings new dimensions to a metaphorical ‘table’.

All options are on the table: within the scope of both existing legislation and legislation that must be rapidly amended. I have summoned the National Police Commissioner and the Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces to meet with me tomorrow to see how the Swedish Armed Forces might assist the Swedish Police Authority in the efforts to stop criminal gangs. I hope that all of the parties in the Riksdag will now come together to support the forceful and pattern-breaking measures that are needed.

By underscoring that ‘all options’ are considered, it is signalled that the government will go as far as necessary in the punitive race to the bottom. A main argument here is the need to pay close attention simultaneously to the discursive and material nature of the Swedish head of government’s war-oriented ideology. Kristersson asks the opposition to ‘come together’ and support the radical measures proposed, ‘rapidly’ accepting to transform the legal system. The ‘hope’ for national unity, and the simultaneous breach of the slow bureaucratic tradition of Swedish governance, can be understood as relying on a core martial value. Militaristic societies operate based on the logic of war, and during epochs of war the normal rules of democracy do not apply because of the acute threat from danger that demands that the nation comes together, rallying behind its leader.

The proposed ‘forceful and pattern-breaking measures’ can, however, be understood differently. On the one hand, it can be viewed as Kristersson communicating that the military will be used against the national population in ways unthinkable during the modern era of policing. ⁶² On the other hand, the prime minister has only ‘summoned’ the National Police Commissioner and the Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces to ‘see’ how the latter can ‘help’ the former. As such, it can be interpreted that the police and the military are conjoining in a manner that is in no way atypical for representatives of the state’s legitimate monopoly on violence in the West. In either case, the message from the prime minister is that the balance between the police and the military is being reordered, and that Sweden is moving along a militarisation continuum. ⁶³ A conclusion is that the Swedish head of government’s warfare rhetoric places state-sanctioned repression at the centre of the security state, adding in a passage of the speech that private security guards will also have an extended mandate: ‘From 1 January, security guards will have new powers to assist the police.’

The outsourcing of the state’s monopoly on legitimate violence can be understood as part of the neoliberal transformation of Sweden where market forces have come to occupy an increasingly prominent role. However, in Kristersson’s vision the private guards ‘assist’ the public police. As such, the underlying idea is that of a strong state where the private security industry’s role is reduced to that of helper. That this order continues to lay the foundation for a favourable political economy for the security industry is beyond doubt:

We will learn from other countries. Last week, I met the Mayor of New York City to see what they do. Camera surveillance. Facial recognition. Weapon detectors. Sweden must also try these methods.

Accordingly, Sweden is a country with an ambition to ‘learn from other countries’. This ostensibly humble attitude is a reminder that Sweden is no longer a shining light that inspires other countries. The aspiration is to become that again. Then Sweden ‘must’ ‘try’ its way forward. The reference to the United States situates Sweden not only in relation to a penal regime imagined as at the forefront, but also to a global world order. Thereby, it reflects the imperative to explore how the national aspect of the Swedish security project is linked to international and transnational relations of political, economic and military power.

Conclusion

The empirical analysis of the Swedish prime minister’s speech to the nation shows that the current government is discursively advancing a racial security state project that is pushing society towards a more authoritarian future. The exceptional is normalised by the advancement of a broad range of new laws, control techniques and punishment measures. The pace and quantity make it difficult to get a clear overview of the consequences for individuals and society. However, it should be expected that the reforms when implemented will reinforce racial relations of dominance and subordination, reshaping the conditions of democracy.

Three main arguments have been made in this article. The first is about the prime minister governing through a race-and-crime nexus. This nexus is forged by the category of race collapsing to that of crime. The racialising operation of knitting together questions of immigration and immigrants redraws the boundaries between here and there, us and them. Specifically, the discourse and the policies advanced rely on the proposition that the world and its problems have moved into racialised working-class neighbourhoods, a line of thought possible in contexts such as the Swedish, where society is increasingly segregated along the axis of race and class.

The second main argument of the article is that the penal development should be conceptualised as a race to the bottom. What is envisioned by the head of government is a system where racialised groups of citizens and non-citizens are rendered storable and deportable. The expressed goal is to be tougher than the rest of Europe. The potential enemies of the state will be locked in or locked out. Suspect communities will be exposed to a vast range of new pre-crime control, surveillance and punishment techniques.

At the level of discourse, the race to the bottom draws from a war-oriented security ideology that will stop at nothing, legitimising Sweden to move down a militaristic continuum, the third main argument. Indeed, it is a qualitative shift when Kristersson asks the military to engage in the traditional work of the police. This militarisation of policing rebalances the relations of power within the repressive apparatus of the state and comes with the normalisation of martial values. However, the prime minister’s address to the nation is a political genre of communication, and in the analysis, it is underlined that one needs to be careful not to exaggerate the consequences: it is to be expected that the Swedish head of government has conversations with those in charge of the state’s monopoly on violence.

A call to caution though, before making far-reaching conclusions as to the eventual impact of the measures discussed by the prime minister, concerning, for example, youth prisons and visitation zones. What is the difference between the young offenders’ institutions proposed by Kristersson, beyond that he frames them as prisons for the youth, and current institutions regulated by the National Board of Institutional Care? Regarding the visitation zones, the fact that the Police Union has argued that this measure risks being counterproductive and is unnecessary should be understood within a context where racialised working-class neighbourhoods are already over-policed. In addition, when the rapidly formulated governmental expert review of the proposal was presented at the beginning of January 2024 the name of the measure was changed from ‘visitation zones’ to ‘safety zones’. The reformed proposal has made the Police Union cautiously positive, ⁶⁴ while Civil Rights Defenders reaffirmed their critical position. ⁶⁵ Apparently, some of the criticism had been considered, indicating that the outcome of Sweden’s penal turn is still open and the result of struggle. As such, the question that remains to be evaluated is what the real consequences are for those who are subjected to state-sanctioned violence, beyond the symbolic concerns that need to be accounted for.

Is the speech to the nation an indication of the birth of a new type of security state? Is it a gradual makeover or, rather, a continuation of an authoritarian governance model that slowly but steadily has been advancing in Sweden since the 1980s? There is a need to explore whether the policing of the current crisis marks the end of an era and the beginning of a new conjuncture. Certainly, Sweden is witnessing a shift towards more than ‘normal’ control. Nevertheless, this does not necessarily signal that we are entering a period of historic rupture. As shown in this article, the current government is in no way challenging the neoliberal path that Sweden has embarked upon; rather, the opposite. Kristersson is also following the example of previous policymakers, expanding the penal code, while adopting harsher measures in the fields of immigration and integration.

Nevertheless, there are also indications that the security state project pushed forward by the Swedish head of government reflects profound change. At the time of writing, Sweden has finally become a fully-fledged member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). This development renders it important to conclude here by underscoring the need to explore the broader implications of Sweden’s militaristic turn, at this historic moment when western global dominance is challenged.