Weaponizing Exceptionalism: Policing Blackness in the Nordic Welfare State
About the talk:
In November 2022, the Swedish people voted into office the most far-right government
in
the nation’s history. Fueled by a moral panic around gang violence in the urban peripheries,
campaign slogans from across the political spectrum invoked law-and-order rhetoric,
promising harsher punishments, more prisons, and an expansion of police resources
and
powers. According to projections, if the government’s policy agenda is successfully
instituted, Sweden’s incarceration rate will increase six-fold by 2033, going from
one of
Europe’s lowest incarceration rates to second highest, trailing only Turkey. Yet what
may
appear as a dramatic shift on the global stage resulting from the swing towards far-right
authoritarianism has been unfolding for the past decade at the initiative of center-left
coalition governments advancing (neo)liberal reforms.
In this talk, Kelekay discusses her current book project, Weaponizing Exceptionalism,
which
attends to this conjuncture. Drawing on three years of ethnographic fieldwork in Stockholm
working alongside Afro-Swedish activists, it illustrates how the racialized politics
of crime
control in Sweden and the policing practices it justifies impacts Black communities.
It argues
that the punitive turn in Swedish politics has been facilitated by a series of moral
panics
connecting Black, Muslim, and immigrant communities to what politicians refer to as
“system-threatening crime”. Key to the success of these efforts is what she describes
as
weaponizing exceptionalism, the ways in which Nordic Exceptionalism - as a discursive
regime, as an ideology, and as a sociopolitical ethos – is weaponized against racialized
working-class communities to justify unprecedentedly punitive shifts in law, social
policy, and
policing while maintaining the facade of Sweden as the global moral superpower. As
such,
the subjugation of Black life in Sweden occurs not despite, but rather through, the
logics,
institutions, and practices of the welfare state, suggesting the importance of abolition
as a
global imperative.
About the speaker:
Jasmine Kelekay is an interdisciplinary scholar of the global politics of Blackness,
with a
focus on the with her work lying at the intersections of critical criminology, Black
studies, the
sociology of race and racism, and cultural studies. She is currently a Postdoctoral
Scholar in
the Department of African American Studies and African Diaspora Studies at the University
of California, Berkeley. In 2024, Kelekay will begin an appointment as Assistant Professor
in
the Department of Sociology and Criminology at Howard University. Her previous work
has
been published in journals including Annual Review of Sociology, City & Community,
Social
Currents, Open Cultural Studies, and Meridians.
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