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At the beginning of November 2022, the Swedish Transport Workers’ Union (hereafter referred to as Transport) lost a legal battle as the Swedish court decided that it is illegal to exclude politically active Sweden Democrats from union membership (Frisk, 2022). A representative of the Sweden Democrats (SD) appears happy and content on the TV screen and claims that no one is to be excluded because of political affiliation. The union’s role is to represent workers, continues the SD representative (SVT, 2022). Transport’s argument for exclusion was based on the SD not accepting its fundamental values concerning the equal value of all people. Transport also argued that freedom of association gives unions, as well as other civil society organisations, the right to choose who can be members. The legal battle also highlights one of the many forms of resistance that LO and its unions have employed through more than thirty years of organised racist successes, which is to confront a party that is perceived by many as a threat to democracy. Transport’s attempt to prevent the presence of SD activists in the union reflects the continuous, sometimes successful and occasionally courageous work that trade union activists, some women and/or racialised people have done and do to maintain and develop a socially critical ideology and practice for social justice, in which issues of feminism and more recently anti-racism have to some extent become visible.

This conflict illustrates an aspect of the dilemma faced by Swedish trade unions today, with more than 20 percent of the population voting for the ethno-racist party the SD in 2022. Regarding LO members, 27 percent voted for the SD in 2022, an increase from 24 percent in 2018 (the corresponding figure for those who identified as workers and voted for the SD was 29 percent in 2022 and 24 percent in 2018).¹ The SD, which despite normalisation, as most clearly expressed in the Tidö Agreement,² from its Nazi and racist roots, sometimes ideologically and politically exhibits an explicitly racist (and, according to some, proto-fascist) worldview. In it, migrants are to blame for virtually all of Sweden’s problems, with support from a “culturally Marxist” establishment (Thorén, 2015, p. 33, citing Jonsson, 2015). At the same time, the SD’s parliamentary voting record and cooperation with traditional right-wing parties show how the party has in practice increasingly abandoned its care-racist welfare policies, maintained its ethno-racism (the construction of racism through a combination of ethnicisation and racialisation) and embraced (though not fully) more and more neoliberal economic policies (Mulinari & Neergaard, 2022).

This chapter has two central aims. First, we argue for the relevance of racial capitalism in the studies of the Swedish model in general and trade unions (TUs) specifically. Second, in doing so, we argue that racial capitalism could be captured in three different but connected dimensions: within the national state, human mobility and the border of the national state, and North–South trade of commodities and foreign direct investment. We explore these three dimensions through exemplifications from Swedish TU movement discourses, capturing both blue- and white-collar TU s and TU confederations (TUC s). One way of expanding the analyses of racism in the Swedish context, is by exploring how labour intersect with Sweden without the confinements of methodological nationalism (Anderson, 2019; Sager, 2016). In this chapter, we approach one aspect of this: the discourses of TU s and TUC s through the lens of racial capitalism. While this perspective is attracting considerable interest these days (Ali & Whitham, 2021; Bhattacharyya, 2018; Gilmore, 2021; Robinson, 2000; Taiwo et al., 2021; Vickers, 2021), it is almost invisible both in the analyses of TU discourse and, more specifically, of Swedish labour market relations. To some extent, this latter absence is linked to the idea of Swedish exceptionalism (McEachrane, 2014; Palmberg, 2009; Schierup et al., 2022), which, among other points, argues that Sweden has been outside both colonialism and imperialism and that race and racism are external to labour market relations. The Swedish model of industrial relations has been highly influenced by the ideas of Swedish exceptionalism and has generally been analysed as autonomous and isolated from global relations of power (Johansson, 2008; Mulinari & Neergaard, 2022; Sjölander, 2005; see also chapters 1 and 11 in this volume).

A concept increasingly used in analysing the intersection between class, race, and gender is racial capitalism. While rooted in Marxist debates in and about South Africa’s apartheid regime (Levenson & Paret, 2023), it is Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (1983) that, through critical dialogue with several social justice movements, has become the general reference point today.

We bring racial capitalism to bear on the archetype of welfare capitalism – the Swedish model, referred to as the ‘Nordic Model’. We do this with the aim of qualifying and challenging some institutionalised understandings of welfare capitalism represented by Sweden and, to a lesser extent, Finland – two welfare states with small populations in the northern peripheries of the Global North.

This edited volume explores the relevance of the concept of racial capitalism in analysing ‘Nordic exceptionalism’ (Keskinen et al., 2009; Loftsdóttir & Jensen, 2012) in general and, more specifically, for an analysis of the Swedish model (Ålund et al., 2017; Ålund & Schierup, 1991). In the last decade, there has been an upsurge in research, spurred by the republication of Robinson’s (1983) book in 2000 and 2020. Much of this work, however, has had a strong Anglo-US inflection. Few studies have focused on continental Europe or the Nordic region. In this edited volume, the focus is on theoretically inspired and empirically grounded analyses of Sweden in the Nordic context, exploring the Swedish capitalist welfare model from a perspective that places processes of racialisation and racial regimes at centre stage.

The anthology brings racial capitalism to bear on the archetype of welfare capitalism – the Swedish model, referred to as the ‘Nordic Model’. We do this with the aim of qualifying and challenging some institutionalised understandings of welfare capitalism represented by Sweden and, to a lesser extent, Finland. Few studies have focused on continental Europe or the Nordic region. In this edited volume, the focus is on theoretically inspired and empirically grounded analyses of Sweden in the Nordic context, exploring the Swedish capitalist welfare model from a perspective that places processes of racialisation and racial regimes at centre stage.

In the recently published open access volume “A New Wave of Anti-Racism in Europe? Racialized Minorities at the Centre” edited by Ilke Adam, Jean Beaman & Mariska Jung, Diana Mulinari and Anders Neergaard contribute a chapter reflecting on the continuities in counter-hegemonic struggles for racial justice in Sweden . They focus  on the continuity of different forms of silencing subaltern anti-racist struggles. Mulinari and Neergaard point to the presence of racialized minorities as not belonging to the Swedish nation in three critical events of Swedish anti-racism, and highlight how their presence and anti-racist frames were silenced in media and scholarly research or by mainstream anti-racist organizations in all three instances. They moreover illustrate the important highlighting of powerful forces “the magic”, seemingly beyond rationality, that supported, inspired and protected them in their engagement in the anti-racist struggles. The authors use the concepts of “ghosts”, by Avery Gordon (2008), referring to the ancestors in the anti-racist struggles to illustrate and better understand this form of continuity in anti-racist activism.

This study aims to examine how post Covid-19 condition as a diagnosis is viewed and interpreted by Swedish stakeholders, showing how these understandings carry a range of epistemological tensions. The study also seeks to understand the implications of these epistemological tensions for treatment and care organisation.

The study draws upon qualitative interviews with 36 experts and key individuals in Sweden have been conducted. The experts agree that post Covid-19 condition is a complex syndrome and that persons who suffer are in need of care. However, several tensions in post Covid-19 condition as a diagnosis can be discerned. Most experts agreed on the gender and racial disparity where white women with Swedish background were a majority of post Covid-19 sufferers, while migrant patients and the elderly are largely absent. In relation to social categories, the question if children can have post Covid-19 condition is here a highly contested question. There is also disagreement on the aetiology of post Covid-19 condition, with some experts viewing it as a new, unique condition requiring specialised treatment, while others see it as similar to other post-viral conditions, treatable in primary care.

This article examines how the U.S. ‘inclusion-and-difference paradigm’ translates to the Swedish context. According to Steven Epstein (2007), this paradigm combines health equity arguments for racialised minorities and women with a biological understanding of racial and gender differences in medicine. Drawing on interviews with experts, policymakers, and clinicians involved in international clinical trials in Sweden, we argue that critical elements of the U.S. paradigm – notably the ‘categorical alignment’ of race-and-ethnicity taxonomies between the social worlds of medicine, government bureaucracy, and political discourse – are absent in Sweden and, more generally, Europe. Consequently, there is no coherent framework for interpreting the existing ‘niche standardisation’ of certain medicines based on race and ethnicity, such as racialised treatment recommendations. In conclusion, we discuss possible future scenarios and highlight a recent collaboration between the pharmaceutical industry and EU institutions. Despite the challenging context, this collaboration aims to establish a European standard for race and ethnicity data in clinical trials. However, we argue that such attempts warrant caution: with racism being so widespread in contemporary Europe, emphasising racial differences in medicine may unintentionally reinscribe harmful notions of race.

The fall of 2022, with the election success of a coalition of right wing and ethnoracist parties marks the transition from a racialized to a racist state in Sweden. We analyse the discourses of three welfare projects in Swedish racial capitalism, Keynesian, Neoliberal and ethnoracist, in relation to safety/security.

Methodologically, we use CDA analysing elite institutional texts (party documents, government, and media texts), supplemented with references to previous research, thereby linking and comparing historical and modern discourses.

Departing from Althusser’s distinction between repressive and ideological state apparatuses, we demonstrate how a re-interpellation of welfare has shifted focus to repression, targeting the racialized other. The discursive combination and word associations used, while avoiding the category of “race,” create a vernacular of racism without race.

Recognizing the structure of Sweden’s racial capitalism as fluid and complex, the migrant “other” has become the shorthand for racialization in popular and academic vernacular, while the Muslim other becomes the nucleus of threat. It foregrounds the racialized “others” as an ethno-biological category and shifts the discourse and policy toward securitization, signifying a discourse that purports the impossibility of social inclusion.

In the last decades, the term digital sovereignty, together with technological sovereignty and strategic autonomy, has become common vocabulary within the EU. While originating in discussions about global computation and the erosion of national sovereignty, the discourses underpinning the use of digital sovereignty resonate with earlier colonial notions of ‘rescuing Europe’ and the ‘balance of powers’ recurring throughout the history of European integration. The discussions about EU digital sovereignty and its infrastructuring remind us of the EU’s colonial past by re-inserting so-called European values into the expansion of digital infrastructures in Europe and beyond. While the literature studying the emergence of European digital sovereignty showcases how the use of the term underlines and confirms a geopolitical turn within the EU, it has not yet discussed its historical colonial connections. This article demonstrates, first, that the sociotechnical imaginaries attached to the infrastructuring of the EU’s digital sovereignty re-actualise an earlier nexus between the European integration project and colonial extractive infrastructures predating the creation of the EU. Second, with the case of the Global Gateway, this article shows how this nexus gains new life through the infrastructuring of digital sovereignty, again unfolding in the Global South.

This article explores how race and processes of racialization – as social, cultural and historical constructs – manifest within the global football industry, focusing on Ghanaian migrant players in Sweden. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, it examines how racialization is practiced, negotiated and reproduced through the experiences of Ghanaian footballers, the discourses of those working with them and portrayals in the media. In contrast to official narratives of diversity and equality, the article shows how saviorism, everyday racism, racialized athletic notions, commodification, and racist abuse persist on and off the pitch. These narratives are circulated by Swedish actors, Ghanaian representatives and sometimes the players themselves, who view racism as normal. They respond by ignoring it, laughing it off or focusing on the game – strategies that reveal an awareness of being observed – while acknowledging its harm. Protest is rarely an option when careers and livelihoods are at stake. Indeed, subordination is both a precondition and a shaping force of their international careers.

Lindberg, E. (2025). Race on and off the field: Ghanaian footballers in Sweden. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2025.2524026