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Paper short abstract

This article analyses how residual governance makes toxic harm governable through uncertainty, delay, and containment. It argues that the Swedish Kallinge ruling unsettles this logic by recognising PFAS in blood as injury, making persistent presence itself actionable harm.

Paper long abstract

This article examines how the Swedish state has become both a polluter and a regulator of PFAS, a group of highly persistent chemicals widely used in modern chemo-industrial production. Focusing on three contamination cases linked to military sites where firefighting foam polluted soil, groundwater, aquatic life, and human bodies, the article explores how PFAS contamination is rendered knowable, governable, and compensable across legal and scientific settings. It identifies the Swedish Supreme Court’s 2023 decision in the Kallinge case, which recognised the presence of PFAS in human blood as a compensable injury, as a biolegal turning point in residual governance. The ruling shifts the evidentiary ground of environmental responsibility: harm is no longer tied only to visible illness, but also to the enduring presence of toxic substances in the body. By recognising presence itself as injury, the judgment unsettles a mode of governance based on containment, delay, and deferred accountability. In doing so, it shows how courts can become sites for contesting the temporal and embodied consequences of chemo-industrial residues.