UC Santa Barbara

This dissertation explores the racialized politics of crime control in Sweden and the impact of the policing practices they justify on Afro-Swedish communities. Drawing on two years of ethnographic fieldwork alongside Afro-Swedish activists, organizers, and engaged community members, I examine how Black life is policed in Sweden. Employing a qualitative mixed-methods approach, I ask three related questions: 1) how people of African descent are targeted by Swedish politics of crime control? 2) how racialized policing practices manifest in the lives of Black people in Sweden? and 3) how Afro-Swedes organize against punitive policing and other forms of racialized subordination? I illustrate how Black spaces are policed, surveilled, and contained through increasingly repressive, militarized, and privatized policing practices targeting Sweden’s urban peripheries, how Black bodies are disciplined for transgressing racial boundaries, and how Nordic exceptionalism is weaponized to repress Black activism and community organizing. I also highlight how Afro-Swedes mobilize against their subjugation through everyday activism, community organizing, and the carving out of politically and socially insubordinate spaces for the nurturing of dignity, creative expression, and belonging. As such, the mobilizations under the banner of the Black Lives Matter movement must be understood within the larger context of Afro-Swedish organizing, as well as the decades-long social, economic, and political developments that have culminated in the aggressive over-policing of communities of color. Furthermore, I argue that Black life is hyper-policed in Sweden not because of the failures of the welfare state, but because the welfare state relies on a racial welfare order wherein the well-being of some depends on the subjugation of others.