Aleksandra Ålund

The end of Swedish exceptionalism? Citizenship, neoliberalism and the politics of exclusion

Sweden, where some 20 per cent of the population is either foreign born or second generation, has long been known internationally as the model of a tolerant, egalitarian, multicultural welfare state, which extended substantial citizenship, welfare and labour rights to all within its borders, including immigrants. However, under the twin pressures of neoliberalism and the EU’s commitment to ‘managed migration’, this Swedish exceptionalism has been, and continues to be, substantially eroded. The shortcomings of the earlier multicultural settlement of the 1960s and 1970s, a growing extremist populism, the growth of an unprotected, semi-clandestine sector of the labour market, combined with high levels of youth unemployment and urban segregation, have led to unprecedented rioting and violence in Swedish cities. The voices of minority ethnic youth, many of them Muslim, should be heeded as rejecting the exclusivism of current political trends.

Paradoxes of Multiculturalism : Essays on Swedish society

Sweden is reputed to have the most avant-garde welfare and immigration policies in Europe. But behind this image lies a more complex reality. Recent changes are turning an explicit commitment to mu ...

Reading the Stockholm riots - a moment for social justice?

This article examines the 2013 riots in Stockholm in the context of other urban rebellions across disadvantaged metropolitan neighbourhoods in the North-Atlantic region over the past three decades of neoliberal transformation. The authors discuss the consequences of securitisation and police repression, institutional racism, the corrosion of citizenship and the structuring of inequality in Swedish cities. Beyond the violence of the recent riots, contemporary Sweden reveals the emergence of an autonomous, non-violent and organisationally embedded movement for social justice among young people contesting urban degradation and reclaiming the nation in terms of an inclusive citizenship, social welfare and democracy. The article asks whether the Stockholm uprising could possibly be read as a sobering moment of self-examination in Swedish politics that could open space up for new political voices.

Will they still be dancing? : integration and ethnic transformation among Yugoslav immigrants in Scandinavia

Indulged with sociological self-centeredness we have reduced vampires to mechanisms of social cohesion. Hence,we have questioned a culture, seeing vampires as what they are, the dead ones haunting ...

Ethnic Entrepreneurs and Other Migrants in the Wake of Globalization

This article offers a reflection on migration in the era of globalisation, and on its expression in contexts of tourism and self-employment. Ethnic entrepreneurship is increasing in Sweden. The mot ...

Ethnicity, multiculturalism and the problem of culture

This article discusses the complex meaning of ethnicity and identity in the multicultural society of today with reference to Swedish society. Sweden, a pronouncedly multiethnic society, is today un ...

Modern Youth and Transethnic Identities

Abstract New cosmopolitan local communities, in Stockholms multi‐ethnic suburbs as in other European cities, harbour the preconditions for the transgression of narrow social and cultural borders. Here, in a dynamic interplay and articulation of tradition and modernity, the antagonisms and struggles of the past are connected with the present dilemmas and ordeals of the immigrant experience, producing new amalgamated forms of cultural expression and political alternatives.

Making or unmaking a movement? Challenges for civic activism in the global governance of migration

ABSTRACT This article discusses dilemmas of global civic activism from a neo-Gramscian perspective as both subordinated and a potential challenge to hegemonic neoliberal order. With the investigational focus on the Peoples Global Action on Migration, Development and Human Rights (PGA) event, the space for civic activism relating to the intergovernmental Global Forum on Migration and Development (GFMD) and its associated Civil Society Days and Common Space is analysed. The article asks how the future of PGA activism may be influenced by its formalized representation within the GFMD. It posits that the PGA has landed at a crossroad between becoming a global activist counterhegemonic movement to a dominant neoliberal migration policy and being captured in a tokenist subordinated inclusion within a truncated ‘invited space’ for interchange. This ambiguous position jeopardizes its impact on global migration governance, discussed with reference to theories of transversal politics and issues of counterhegemonic alliance-building.

Book, bread and monument. Continuity and change through ethnic memory and beyond

Abstract The paper examines the meaning of ethnic memory as it finds expression in the life stories and identity formation of three young Swedish women of immigrant background. Their identity is formed within afield of tension between what is and what has been. Using the examples of different metaphors attached to the symbolic space of tradition, they seek to link time and space and thus fragments of migrants’ splintered life. In relating the past to the present and its antagonisms to those of the present, all three girls demonstrate an ability to re‐interpret and to translate tradition into present experience. This, the author maintains, can be understood as a creative capacity out of which a new kind qf self‐orientation is born, and a new sense of home and belonging, come into being. In this way ‘modern ethnic consciousness ‘ takes form as a reflexive linkages across space and time. A new order is created out of the disorder of dissolved continuity.

Reimagineering the Nation

The causes of and solutions to juvenile delinquency and social unrest amongthe youth in so-called Swedish multi-ethnic urban areas are frequently represented inpublic-institutional discourse as rel ...