Objective and subjective temporality in processes of anti-immigrant political violence

Research on political violence has increasingly turned towards processual approaches, acknowledging the dynamics over time that lead up to violent actions, and subsequent consequences of violence. The temporality of such processual analyses has largely been the temporality of the objectively observable interactional sequences. However, political violence also occurs within the temporality of the subjective lifeworlds of involved actors and the broader collectivities in which they are embedded. One example of this is anti-immigrant violence, which previous research has shown can be motivated and legitimated by narratives on different temporal scales, from conceptions of the broader developments of society from an idealized past to a threatening future of moral decline and erasure of national culture, to stories of triggering events that give rise to a perceived imperative to act. This paper develops an integrated theoretical framework for how such objective and subjective temporalities intersect. On the one hand, objectively observable interaction sequences in which violence is instigated draw on subjective temporalities of its participants, while on the other hand subjective temporalities are not static from an outside observer’s point of view but develop and diffuse in interactive processes. This is used as a starting point for an analysis of contemporary cases of anti-immigrant violence in Sweden, as well as online groups and networks in which such violence is propagated. The data used in the analyses are police investigation reports from a selection of anti-immigrant violence attacks as well as open and closed online discussion groups in which violence is coordinated and promoted. Differentiating among both objective and subjective temporal registers of anti-immigrant violence allows us to elucidate the relationship between different explanatory factors.