It's Not Sweden Anymore: The Far Right's Mobilization of Territorial Stigmatization

The far-right social movement in Sweden is mobilizing against the purported threat to national order posed by the "badlands" of the nation. These are neighborhoods known for their diversity, crime, and poverty which provide the far right with sites to criticize immigration and multiculturalism. Crucially, they also serve as a new kind of space that the far right uses to organize against what it believes to be a crisis of the state's loss of the monopoly on violence and fears of the "replacement" of the ethnic majority. Through interviews with movement activists and ethnographic observations of private and public movement events, I show that the nostalgic "homelands and heartlands" frames, coupled with fears of the "badlands," motivate far-right activists to participate in collective action. I find Sweden's far-right relies on the interaction between nativism and territorial stigmatization to signify these urban spaces with crime, Islam, and minoritization. The piece concludes in advocating for the necessity of understanding the far right as a local phenomenon through the territorial dimensions of nativism.