Send message to Authors

Paper short abstract

The contribution examines the expansion of carcerality, including criminalization, surveillance, and punitive welfare provisions, enabled through the Swedish police’s (now annual) production and circulation of lists of so-called ’vulnerable areas’.

Paper long abstract

The contribution examines the expansion of carcerality under Sweden’s incumbent government and how criminalization operating across a range of policy fields fuels an authoritarian turn of the Swedish welfare state. Carcerality here includes expanded surveillance and police powers, increased collaboration and data sharing between police and social welfare authorities, expanded grounds for deportation – including for political dissidents – and a historical expansion of the prison system, which will also incarcerate young children. This contribution focuses on how these measures are organized through the Swedish police’s (now annual) production and circulation of lists of so-called ’vulnerable areas’. These lists have come to justify a range of surveillance, control and criminalization measures targeting areas inhabited by racialized and socioeconomically marginalized people. The contribution analyzes these lists as a form of social knowledge production, and examines how listing practices enable and reorganize repressive state interventions, enforced through policing, criminalization as well as through targeted social welfare interventions, and public-private partnerships across urban areas.