The Expanding Carceral Geography of Sweden and Counter-politics of Care

In September 2023 Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson gave a speech to the nation, addressing the latest shootings connected to gang violence in Sweden. With little regard for the grieving affected communities, the prime minister was quick to connect the increase in gang violence to refugee migration, stating that “it is an irresponsible immigration policy that brought us here” (Regeringen 2023). To address the violence, and what he referred to as “parallel societies nourishing criminal gangs,” the prime minister argued, in true Orwellian fashion, for the creation of “security zones,” giving the police increased resources and a mandate to stop and search people, thus expanding the state's role into one of repression and giving mandates to draw on military interventions in socioeconomically deprived, often racialized, suburbs. While this might sound like measures taken in war zones to subjugate civilians to heighten discipline and surveillance, the right-wing coalition government and the far-right, neo-Fascist Sweden Democrats have long proclaimed migration as well as racialized and socioeconomically deprived areas as out of control through the figure of a racial threat. This is not the least seen in how racialized areas were depicted as “no-go” zones in public and political discourse in 2014, together with a political outcry for their military intervention—reflecting what Stephen Graham (2011) terms “the new military urbanism.”

The mobilization of the racial threat was evident when the newly elected right-wing coalition government introduced the so-called Tidö Agreement with the Sweden Democrats in October 2022. Centering and synonymizing migration, integration, and criminality, the proposal calls for an increasingly restrictive asylum policy and flexibility in expelling people based on “bad conduct,” referring to drug use, connections to criminal organizations, or involvement in “environments that threaten fundamental Swedish values” (Regeringen 2023). This accelerated treating of populations as both the target and threat must be understood as part of caring racism, in which the government frames care through the exclusion, containment, and expulsion of the migrant and racialized other (Mulinari and Neergaard 2022). Caring racism, that is, “caring for one's own,” is mobilized not only through notions of protecting the welfare state from the other's presumed disorder but also through the figure of a migrant demanding redistribution from a welfare state they are seen as taking advantage of. Care thus takes on two distinct functions, according to Diana Mulinari and Anders Neergaard (2022): through nurturing a “we” that needs protection from the migrant other—a nurturing that is also formulated as caring for the other by deporting them to their “rightful” home outside the borders of the Swedish nation-state.

Drawing on the conflation of criminal justice and migration control, this essay argues that we need to understand the politics of caring racism and the expanding carceral geography of Sweden through the lens of racial capitalism, allowing us to understand the Tidö Agreement as part of a longer history of state control of the dispossessed and displaced. Bordering and policing must thus be understood as “key mechanisms through which the state controls, coerces, and dispossesses those who are deemed wayward, delinquent, and undeserving” (Danewid 2023: 82). Neferti Xina M. Tadiar (2022) argues that, in the new political economy of life, we must consider capitalist production as consisting of not only the productive activity of life but also its expenditure. Capitalism is thus as much about life-times of value as it is about life-times of waste, intertwining disposability with survival.

Through my years of ethnographic engagements with people seeking asylum under the interim legislation in 2016, I recurrently encountered testimonies depicting how state articulations of these forms of warfare materialized in everyday lives through various forms of containment, abandonment, banishment, and super-exploitation (Philipson Isaac 2024). Here I draw on the experiences shared with me by the interlocutors and social media engagements of social justice movements to tease out the political economy informing state production of and state responses to dispossessed communities, while at the same time paying attention to counter-geographies of care. As such, I center the uneven geographies of racial capitalism and mobility control that wage war on the suburbs and their associated populations, and the corresponding infrastructures of care that challenge the territorialities of racial capitalism.

Tracing the Contours of Carceral Geographies of Sweden

Following Ruth Wilson Gilmore's (2022: 451) contention that “capitalism requires inequality, and racism enshrines it,” I argue that we need to read the current expansion of carceral geographies through a racial capitalism lens. I understand policing and border regimes as productive means of maintaining capitalism's constitutive relations of severe inequality among workers (Bhattacharyya 2023; Robinson 2000). Racial devaluation through the production of social difference is foundational to capitalism, not exceptional to capitalist accumulation and expansion. (Im)mobility regimes have thus played a crucial role in fostering exploitable and expropriable populations, not least in how the criminalization of mobility has formed a necessary basis for producing surplus populations that can be disciplined to the needs of capital (Danewid 2023).

Depicting areas as “problems,” “vulnerable,” and “segregated” has long been utilized as a means to marginalize suburban space, rendering it as neither fully identifiable nor belonging to the national space of Sweden (Molina 2005). In their 2014 report “A National Overview of Criminal Networks with Significant Impact in Local Communities,” the Swedish police identified fifty-five areas as particularly vulnerable to the influence of local criminal networks. While the report briefly describes the areas as sites of socioeconomic marginalization, this quickly gives way to unsubstantiated claims about the presence of “parallel” societies. In the follow-up report from 2015, these spaces are further depicted as being ruled by “criminal energy” and failed citizens (Polismyndigheten 2015: 21; see also Grundström and Molina 2016; Thapar-Björkert, Molina, and Raña Villacura 2019). The police contend that “the presence and concentration of criminal elements within a defined geographical area can be measured in terms of so-called criminal energy,” a metric that is quantifiable, as these areas are deemed to “have more than three times higher criminal energy” than areas excluded from the police register (Polismyndigheten 2015: 21). Even more so, this “criminal energy” carries the inherent risk of spreading to adjacent areas if not properly dealt with by increased police intervention. While energy is invisible and everywhere, impeding the movement of material bodies, criminal energy is mobilized here as a label without any material referent; instead, it is an abstract, borderless, and invasive force in dire need of containment.

These fleeting symbols of an impending threat have long been resisted by urban social justice movements such as Megafonen (The Megaphone), Förenade Förorter (United Suburbs), and Kollektiv Sorg (Collective Grief), which have continuously questioned these political narratives, pointing to how the emphasis on subjective violence renders symbolic and systemic violence invisible (de los Reyes 2016). Where the political discourse focuses on individuals with “criminal energy” and the criminalization of racialized populations to legitimize increased police and military spending, radical justice movements find structural explanations in austerity measures that disproportionately affect already deprived areas, widespread racism, child poverty, and chronic underfunding of schools. Not surprisingly, the trope of migration as the central problem is a recurring populist discourse across racialized suburbs in Europe, where the figure of the “refugee crisis” has been used to shift attention away from the structural conditions of racialized poverty and urban precarity and focus it on the presence of migrants (Bhagat and Soederberg 2019; Danewid 2023). Echoing the developments from a Keynesian workfare to a warfare state in the United States, Sweden's military industry has long sustained the country's welfare state, blurring the distinction between welfare and warfare.

Counter-geographies of Care

Urban social justice movements have long opposed the effects of austerity measures and their disproportionate impact on already economically deprived areas. Resisting the deregulation of the welfare state alongside increasingly repressive measures through a counter-politics of care and community building, the movements shed light on care not only as an emotional state and moral and political imperative but also as a potentially transformative act rooted in abolitionism. Abolitionism stresses that socioeconomic and political transformations are essential remedies for oppressive structures, as opposed to focusing on individual healing (Ticktin 2024). While scholarship has rightly been critical of the renewed interest in care, particularly its imbrication in neoliberal depoliticization and individualization (see, e.g., Vishmidt 2020), it is important to recognize the radical and anti-racist tradition of care in activist and revolutionary movements that redirects the focus from policing and security regimes to institutions of care at the level of the local and the everyday, such as health care, housing, education, and provision of employment opportunities (Ticktin 2024; see also Gilmore 2022; Hayes et al. 2023). In doing so, they challenge the neoliberal retrenchment of the welfare state and its neo-racist abandonment of segments of the population.

The ambivalence of state care theorized in recent scholarship has been prominent in my conversations with people seeking asylum in Sweden in 2015, when the Social Democratic and Green coalition government introduced the interim legislation SFS 2016:752 to restrict access to asylum and render residence permits temporary as the main rule.¹ “You know they do this to exhaust us, right?” Ezra posed this rhetorical question during one of our walks. He referred to his experience of repeatedly being relocated during his asylum process with the Swedish Migration Agency (Migrationsverket). He kept referring to how the dispersal strategies embedded within asylum governance had caused him to become an “isolated island,” disconnecting him from possibilities to reground himself and build networks.

While Ezra's feeling of isolation concerned the hypermobility forced on him by state strategies of dispersal, Rupi—a young hijabi living in one of the socioeconomically deprived areas targeted by the police in their report—felt a similar isolation, but through the logic of confinement, stigmatization, and a politics that displaces the suburb from the larger national geography. These different spatial configurations can be seen as an attempt to either confine people to where they are deemed to belong or prevent them from accessing places where they are seen as not belonging. For Ezra, like several other interlocutors, the sense of being rendered an isolated island reflected the “organized abandonment” (Gilmore 2007) they felt from the state. This was felt in how the daily allowances during their asylum process fell well below the national income support norm, an allowance level that has not been increased since 1994. For Rupi, it was the racism she faced as a young hijabi, and how that racism expanded when attached to the symbolic figure of the suburb she was living in. Their devaluation and racial marginalization are a continuous thread running through the larger web of racial capitalism, legitimizing their continual conditioning, deprivation, and neglect in the welfare state, rendering them disposable through the unequal distribution of human value and life chances.

The organized abandonment and territorial stigmatization of suburbs have been central sites of resistance for the counter-politics of care organized by social justice movements in the last decades. Since 2018 the association Hela Malmö (All of Malmö) has organized spaces where members can participate in breakfast, snacks, and evening meals, creating a social space where people can meet. The breakfast initiative draws inspiration from the Black Panthers in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s, renowned for their multifaceted approach that blended political activism with community support. Their program thus enacted significant structural change while providing essential services like breakfast for children and youth in the Black community (Mery Karlsson and Bäckström Olofsson 2022). Similarly, Hela Malmö’s work draws on the tradition of the Swedish popular movement, which, 150 years ago, pioneered alternative social systems in the fight against hunger, inequality, and injustice (Lunabba 2022).

While politicians vilify the abstract threat of “criminal energy,” organizations like Hela Malmö focus on the politics of hunger as part of a longer history of disposability. The question of hunger weaves like a thread of commonality among those deemed wayward, delinquent, and undeserving by the state—citizens and noncitizens alike. For those navigating the asylum system, the legal and material minimum rights not only render them isolated but also function as a “politics of exhaustion” designed to deter, control, and exclude them through their mental and physical exhaustion (Ansems de Vries and Welander 2016).

Among those I spoke to, sharing the scarce resources to make food a collective enterprise was seen as resisting their subjection to “state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death” (Gilmore 2007: 28), while also working to render their living and political conditions visible through local campaigns. The radical potential of the social justice movements lies in their abilities to connect different struggles to a larger political structure and to the division of (un)grievable lives. They link the peripheries of the city and the peripheries of the nation—that is, the suburbs and rural areas—in their experience of organized abandonment, rendering issues of disposability as structural rather than exceptional.

While the militarization of politics and expanding carceral geographies are nothing new to the Swedish context, we need to understand the political responses to shootings in relation to contemporary configurations of racial capitalism, the restructuring of the welfare state, and the general crisis of care under capitalism. Mobilizing the fleeting threat of the violent other has successfully legitimized increased government spending, regulation, and intervention—be it accelerating their NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) membership, expanding military and police armament, or increasing the conditioning of social and legal rights. The question of “criminal energy” forces us to recognize and consider the opposition between a kind of abstract, nebulous specter of invasion and the vulnerable materiality of bodies that require tangible and tactile practices of social care. The state treats care as the material withdrawal of care from an abstract threat, a looming, destructive energy—an approach that constitutes an ideological mask meant to eradicate the precarious materiality of bodies that both need and continue to practice social care. Locating these developments within a larger political economy allows us to understand the uneven geographies of racial capitalism in Sweden as part of a larger history of state production of disposability and surplus life making (see Tadiar 2022), and how such a political economy paves the way for authoritarian rule in populist and fascist times.

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