Logo: to the web site of Uppsala University

While historical studies of fascism in Sweden typically start in the interwar period, this article traces the political-ideological roots in the nationalist era leading up to the Great War. It depicts the genesis of Swedish radical nationalism, a political ideology centred on tying an imagined people to a bordered territory. In the early twentieth century, radical nationalism in Sweden articulated that the people were diluted by cultural decadence and uncontrolled migration while the territory was threatened by geopolitical aggression from Russia. This radicalisation of national defence was driven by a gendered logic of masculinist protection, reinforced by an emergency temporality oriented towards national rebirth. Whereas national conservatism cultivated the memory of paradise lost, radical nationalism became the politics of resurrection: Swedishness restored and Sweden reborn. This ideational assemblage of defence and rebirth was articulated in a series of books, articles, and journals published by three men – Rudolf Kjellén, Adrian Molin, and Teodor Holmberg – who have become ideological sages for the nationalist movement today; radical-nationalist think tanks are republishing Kjellén’s and Molin’s political manifestos while the Sweden Democrats publicly acknowledges its debt to Holmberg’s political thought. In that sense, the genesis of Swedish radical nationalism serves as an ideological resource when demanding the reinforcement of the exclusionary mechanisms of the modern nation-state.

While historical studies of fascism in Sweden typically start in the interwar period, this article traces the political-ideological roots in the nationalist era leading up to the Great War. It depicts the genesis of Swedish radical nationalism, a political ideology centred on tying an imagined people to a bordered territory. In the early twentieth century, radical nationalism in Sweden articulated that the people were diluted by cultural decadence and uncontrolled migration while the territory was threatened by geopolitical aggression from Russia. This radicalisation of national defence was driven by a gendered logic of masculinist protection, reinforced by an emergency temporality oriented towards national rebirth. Whereas national conservatism cultivated the memory of paradise lost, radical nationalism became the politics of resurrection: Swedishness restored and Sweden reborn. This ideational assemblage of defence and rebirth was articulated in a series of books, articles, and journals published by three men-Rudolf Kjellen, Adrian Molin, and Teodor Holmberg-who have become ideological sages for the nationalist movement today; radical-nationalist think tanks are republishing Kjellen's and Molin's political manifestos while the Sweden Democrats publicly acknowledges its debt to Holmberg's political thought. In that sense, the genesis of Swedish radical nationalism serves as an ideological resource when demanding the reinforcement of the exclusionary mechanisms of the modern nation-state.

Radical nationalism is a political ideology centred on tying animagined people to a bordered territory. It grows from nationalism’sroot system into a diversity of political manifestations aimedat sealing the people-territory bond. By theorizing radical nationalism,this article outlines a political-ideological approach that opensnew pathways for studying the so-called far right. The article drawson Michael Freeden’s conceptual-morphological theory and delineateshow nationalism’s thin-centred conceptual core – people andterritory – can thicken into a full-bodied political ideology: fromfootball and flags to systemic discrimination, deportations, andmass violence. In response to the empirical observation that radicalnationalism nurtures historical and contemporary actors across theleft-right spectrum, the article offers a political-ideological lens fortranshistorical analyses of various political manifestations thatsprout and flourish from the exclusionary roots of the modernnation-state.

Whereas the sociology of food has drawn attention to differences between corporate and alternative foodways, the political imaginations underpinning the latter are often overlooked. This article distinguishes between different political imaginations of the community kitchen, a set of practices characterised by collective preparation and redistribution of food. The analysis builds on ethnographic and archive material in Sweden to outline how the folkkök (people’s kitchen) was once an institutional practice to address urban food insecurity, soon outsourced as altruistic soup kitchens, and then regenerated a century later by the anarchist movement. By distinguishing between altruistic and anarchistic imaginations in this analysis, the article adds another layer to the critical sociological study of alternative foodways. 

Transnational cooperation between radical nationalists has especially been the case in Sweden, Denmark, Norway, and Finland, where fascism has not only developed through interdependent processes but also through interactions between and beyond national boundaries, and where “racial relationship” has been a core argument. With chapters ranging from the inception of fascism in the interwar years up to the present day, this book offers the first fragments of an entangled history of Nordic fascism. It illuminates how The North occupies a special place in the fascist imagination, articulating ideas about the Nordic people resisting the supposed cultural degeneration, replacement, or annihilation of the white race. The authors map ideological exchange between fascist organisations in the Nordic countries and outline past and present attempts at pan-Nordic state building. 

Crisis is a conceptual tool for synchronizing different experiences of time. It is operative in notions of the Financial Crisis, the Crisis of Democracy, the Climate Crisis—and the Corona Crisis. This article explores that synchronization through an empirical inquiry into the different timescapes of the Corona Crisis. It builds empirically on 200 interviews with residents in Norra Botkyrka, which is located at the fringes of Sweden’s capital Stockholm. The thematic analysis shows how the respondents’ different time frames, time orders, tempos, and timings become synchronized through the crisis concept, but also how they invoke active and passive desynchronization. This temporal diversity points out the interplay between social differences and the various ways people are (de)synchronizing with the Corona Crisis. 

This chapter introduces the rationale for mapping the nature of Nordic fascism. It clarifies the theoretical, methodological, and conceptual starting points that inform the book chapters and binds them together. Nordic fascism is here construed as a revolutionary branch of radical nationalism that encompasses a plethora of historical and contemporary manifestations in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Finland. The introduction chapter outlines how Nordic fascists typically share a mythical belief in the exceptional Nordicness and The North as an idealised past and a desired future. It offers a unique historical overview of fascism in the Nordic countries, a development unfolding not only with varied pace and intensity across localities but also through entanglements that transcend national boundaries. Entangled history is presented as a joint effort by the chapter contributors to capture how political ideas and actions develop across the Nordic countries. The chapters of this book are all based on original research and present new findings – fragments – of an entangled history of Nordic fascism.

Social movement scholarship has increasingly shown how continuous mobilization depends on collective memory construction. This article sets out to study this formative activity in a changing media landscape. It asks how activists navigate the temporal nexus of collective memory mediation. The empirical focus is on Brazil’s Landless Rural Workers’ Movement (MST), a well-established organization that since the early 1980s has communicated its collective memories on several media platforms. This article also demonstrates, through a corpus analysis of MST’s internal newspaper, Jornal Sem Terra (1984–2014), and its Facebook page (2014–2019), how collective memories of rural violence serve various functions in these different media. The empirical study verifies the formative implication of rural violence for Brazil’s landless movement, but also unveils notable differences between the newspaper and Facebook in this regard. Whereas Jornal Sem Terra employed a horizontal collective memory construction through contemporary documentation of ongoing and upcoming events, the Facebook posts primarily engaged in the vertical extraction of already established memories. In other words, the print media produced a narrative around collective memories of rural violence, and these memories were re-produced through digital media platforms. These empirical findings implicate that renewed methodologies are needed in future studies of social movements.

This scoping review article concerns COVID-19 social impacts on youth between 15 and 24 years old. The article charts 108 scientific journal articles, published between 1 March 2020 and 1 November 2021, encompassing 27 different countries but primarily concerning the USA (30%) and Canada (12%). The reviewed studies tell the overall hardship of being young in pandemic times; they report collective experiences of isolation, constraint, loss of formative life moments, and reverberation of structural inequalities. But they also show that the pandemic is not just passively consumed by the youth of today; young people are likewise at the forefront of collective mitigation strategies and community support organizing. Based on these scoping review findings, the article concludes that further agency-oriented research on youth responses is vital for a deeper understanding of what it can mean to be young in pandemic times.

perspectives everyday Previous research has demonstrated that many children experience racism in the Swedish school system, a public institution that formally aims to combat all forms of discrimination. The question posed in this article is how racism can endure despite the school system's anti-racist agenda. Everyday racism is examined from children's perspectives, based upon eight focus groups with primary school pupils and a group of 11-year-old co-researchers who contributed to the interview planning and data analysis. The focus group discussions show that while everyday racism is typically concealed, invisible to teachers and other adults, racial microaggressions are nevertheless often detected by children themselves. The analysis reveals that children have the intention to speak up against everyday racism, but lack the necessary support and protection from adults. The article concludes that to fight racism in the Swedish school environment, adults must learn how everyday racism operates and in that learning process actively consult children for their perspectives.