Logo: to the web site of Uppsala University

Markus Lundström och Tomas Lundströms artikel analyserar vad författarna benämner som ”radikal nationalism” i Sverige mellan 1915–2015. Utifrån tidigare forskning sammanställs en historisk översikt över de aktörer vars politiska projekt tar sin utgångspunkt i nationalismens själva rot: att knyta en nedärvd folkgemenskap till en specifik plats. Till skillnad från tidigare konceptualiseringar av denna politiska miljö utgår ”radikal nationalism” från aktörernas egen idévärld, och genom att betona aktörernas gemensamma ideologiska drag framträder en bild av ett historiskt föränderligt flätverk där olika aktörer skapas och splittras, interagerar, förgrenas och återuppstår. Författarna identifierar tre olika idéströmningar som präglar miljön och som under hundra år av radikal nationalism korsat varandras färdriktning. Medan den rasorienterade ochsocialkonservativa nationalismen historiskt sett stått i konflikt med varandra, tycks den identitära idéströmningen på senare tid ha skapat nya kontaktytor aktörerna emellan. Artikelns historisering av svensk radikal nationalism föreslår, med andra ord, en analysram för att studera dessa aktörer, och för att begripliggöra nationalistisk radikalisering i Sverige.

This article introduces the method of podcast ethnography. The method encompasses three general stages: to explore a podcast from a particular social field, to engage with it through careful, ethnographic reflexivity and to examine the podcast by developing typologies and themes expedient for analysis. Podcast ethnography is beneficial due to its spatial and temporal flexibility; observing a podcast universe can be performed on the move and in parallel with other tasks. This advantage enables a much-needed breathing space for researchers inquiring vehement milieus, such as white radical nationalism. The article uses an example from this precise milieu in Sweden – the podcast Motgift [Antidote] – to illustrate and flesh out the potentials and challenges of applying the method’s three stages. In so doing, the article argues for inclusion of podcast ethnography into the extended family of ethnographic methods.

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.

Evangelicalism’s role in shaping democracy and the modern welfare state of Sweden has been emphasized in scholarly literature, but few studies have analyzed ongoing developments within this movement. This article explores intersections of political thought and Evangelical Christianity in Sweden, focusing on the revivalist newspaper Världen idag. Through a thematic analysis of 379 editorials from 2022, the study introduces the concept of Evangelical Supremacy, a political-ideological development of Evangelicalism that emphasizes a) Christian unity in political outlook, b) a revivalism that extends from the individual to the nation, and c) an alternative elitism that calls for the replacement of the elites of society with persons of Christian values. By combining qualitative thematic analysis with corpus linguistic techniques, this research discloses how a prominent Swedish Christian revivalist actor frequently employs concepts associated with the political ideology of radical nationalism.

This dissertation outlines continuity and change in Swedish radical nationalism – a political ideology predominantly focused on connecting an imagined people with a distinct territory. The study focuses on how religion has been understood within the landscape of Swedish radical nationalism between 1988 and 2020. The landscape is termed radical-nationalist since its central articulation is nationalism. It is radical because of its actors’ urge to return nationalism to its roots, without compromising with other political ideologies, and because it is seen as a radical solution to the problems of national degeneration. The Swedish radical-nationalist landscape consists of ideological formations that are culture-oriented, race-oriented, and identity-oriented. These formations animate the actors moving across the landscape. Three such actors are analyzed in the dissertation, each having its own history and distinct position in relation to the ideological formations: the political party Sweden Democrats, the national socialist organization Nordic Resistance Movement, and the online influencer The Golden One. The study builds on a theoretical shift, usually labeled critical religion theory, which departs from religion as an analytical category to instead focus on the various definitions of, and ideas about, religion among the actors themselves. Religion is analyzed as a political concept within Swedish radical nationalism. The terminology of political concepts is borrowed from the theory of ideological morphology, where such concepts are located on an axis between center and periphery of a political ideology, from core concepts via adjacent concepts to peripheral concepts. In Swedish radical nationalism, the concept of religion is a demarcation against them, external enemies as well as internal traitors. Religion functions as an essential exclusionary mechanism aimed at imagined Others who are assumed to, in varying degrees, be superstitious, conspiratorial, fanatical, or divisive. However, the concept of religion also construes us, an imagined people, through ideas of a shared collective unconscious and a Volksgeist that via paganism and Christianity travels from a distant, and often forgotten, past. In conclusion, religion is recurrently one of the adjacent concepts that temporarily stabilizes the core of Swedish radical nationalism: people and territory. Like other concepts that are adjacent to the core – such as culture, race, and identity – the concept of religion stipulates who belongs to the people and the territory, and who should be excluded, disadvantaged, or eliminated.

This article sketches fascism’s ideological morphology under a post-fascist condition.It builds empirically on three years of ethnographic studies of the radical-nationalist podcast Motgift [Antidote], disclosing that (i) fascist multivocality characterizes and feeds the rhizomic structure of Swedish radical nationalism; (ii) fascist narration locates protagonists and antagonists in driving a plot of ‘genocide against the white race’; and (iii) fascist temporality reinforces ideas of a lost past and degenerated present – prompting a struggle for cultural rebirth and racial revival. The multivocality, narration, and temporality of Motgift illuminate the radical-nationalist politics at work under a post-fascist condition: the state of ideological reconfiguration pondering fascism’s historical downfall.