More than one generation of Nubians have been living dispersed in various locations in Egypt. Decades after the latest 1964 displacement and the memory of the lost homeland does not seem to fade. Focusing on the memory of Old Nubia among younger generations, this research examines how they (re)construct their ethnic identity away from their ancestral homeland. Through in-depth interviews, the study uncovers the complex process of ethnic identity development among Nubians. The findings emphasize the profound influence of memory and imaginaries of homelands on Nubians' ethnic identity, contributing to a deeper understanding of contemporary Nubian community. Furthermore, the research sheds light on the interplay between displacement, diaspora, and memory, offering valuable insights for studies of ethnic minorities in the Middle East and North Africa. By exploring the intersections of diaspora, memory, and ethnic identity, this study illuminates the resilience and cultural continuity of the Nubian community despite geographical dispersal. 

This article investigates labour market segmentation of EU-13 workers in Sweden. Labour market segmentation is a driver of income differences between natives, EU-15 migrants and EU-13 migrants in many EU member states. There are, however, indications that labour market inequalities as a result of segmentation among EU-13 migrants is less pronounced in Sweden. Previous research, both quantitative and qualitative, has shown surprisingly low levels of labour market segmentation among the employed. The structural differences on the labour market has, instead, been between the employed and unemployed, with a large employment gap between natives and all migrant groups including EU-13 migrants. We address the functional integration in the labour market from a longitudinal perspective, using several quantitative indicators to measure the degree of labour market segmentation. Natives and other migrant groups (EU-15 and refugees) are used as reference groups. Our results shows a low but increasing labour market segmentation among the employed born in EU-13 countries. The dissimilarity between employed natives and EU-13 workers is increasing, especially among men. Men from EU-13 countries is the only category where the occupational position has deteriorated. From having a similar occupational position as EU-15 migrants in 2007, their position in the labour market in 2015 is more similar to the refugee group. This development is driven by a large increase of Polish construction workers on the Swedishlabour market.

Ever since Spain became an immigration country, unaccompanied foreign minors – often referred to by the acronym ‘menas’– have become the subject of media coverage. This study departs from the premise that the media constructs reality. Media representations of migrants must therefore be examined to uncover their impact in the social world. This research analyses representations of unaccompanied foreign minors in the press editorials published between 2018 and 2022. Frame analysis informs the theoretical framework of this thesis and it is applied through the constant comparative technique. This work uncovers seven different frames. Whereas the victim/threat dichotomy is the most prevalent throughout the newspapers, positive representations are also found. While newspapers within the liberalconservative political spectrum frame unaccompanied minors in both positive and negative ways, this is not the case for the far-right and left-wing newspapers. The analysis also finds changes in framing according to decisive political events.

This article explores how Venezuelan refugees have been constructed by the Brazilian media during the ongoing refugee crisis in South America. The fact that South-South migration has so far been understudied and the relevant and fast-escalating displacement of people from Venezuela were the motivations for this study. Twenty-one articles about Venezuelan refugees published between 2016 and 2021 by three mainstream, conservative newspapers were analyzed. The theoretical framework consisted of Fairclough’s three-dimensional model of Critical Discourse Analysis and the theoretical concepts of stereotypes and otherness, from a decolonial perspective. The findings revealed that Venezuelans were mainly associated with negative aspects, comprehending two sub discourses: in the first one, they were constructed as the origin of diseases at the borders and associated with violence and societal tension, and in the second one they were constructed as exploited, underemployed and poorly integrated into the formal labor market. The findings contribute to increasing the understanding of the South-South migration phenomena by detailing the representation of Venezuelan refugees in the Brazilian media and the main discourses related to them.

Over the last couple of decades, Sweden and Denmark have come to symbolize opposite policy positions on immigration and integration; the former liberal, tolerant and multicultural, the latter restrictive, nationalist and assimilationist. The marked difference between two otherwise similar countries has puzzled comparative researchers and area specialists for more than two decades. In this paper, a series of well-known but seldom compared explanations are reviewed to gain a fuller and more multifaceted understanding of why Sweden and Denmark became so different. The explanations are divided into four main approaches with different foci: the electorate, the media, the political parties and national models. The paper ends with a short conclusion, highlighting what each of the explanations contributes to a fuller understanding of the difference, and a short note on the possible convergence of the countries post-2015. 

This working paper critically examines Ayelet Shachar’s (2020) concept of the ‘shifting border’ and the solutions she proposes to tackle this recent phenomenon, pointing out potential gaps, inconsistencies and unintended consequences of letting legal responsibility follow states’ ‘shifting borders’. Instead, the paper argues for the need to deterritorialize the right to asylumin order to prevent states from retracting back from or shifting out their responsibilities for refugees and migrants, and to question and ultimately relax our current state-imposed mobility controls which have come to be largely taken for granted, even among migration and border scholars.

There is a general recognition within the social sciences that extensive mobility challenges how we perceive the notion of home. With this idea as its starting point, this article explores how situations of hardship impact the ways in which mobile professionals negotiate and construct their homes. The actor-network theory (ANT) has been used as the means to explore the interactions between the people who inform this study and the multidimensional characteristics of the hardship setting. Through individual, open-ended interviews, the research draws upon the experiences of five international civil servants from the United Nations (UN) system of organizations who are assigned to hardship duty stations. Applying ANT to the empirical material drew the attention to the identification of five principal entities (or actors) that come into play in the negotiation of homeconstruction, namely the civil servant, [in]security, mobility, ownership and social relations. The influence of the various nonhuman actors on home construction varied according to the individual and their transnational ties and professional status – those with family nuclei tended to situate their homes in terms of territoriality, whereas for others, factors such as privacy, materiality and social interaction weighed more heavily in the act of creating home.

This paper examines the intensified focus on return in Danish asylum policy, the so-called paradigm shift of 2019, and the changed approach to asylum claims made by Syrian nationals from the Damascus region. It does so by analyzing nine asylum cases assessed by the Refugee Appeals Board and material produced by Danish state actors using the discourse analysis of Laclau and Mouffe (1985) and ‘the toolbox of governmentality’ (Walters 2012). The aim of the study was to understand the tactics of legitimization regarding the decision to reject asylum protection to three Syrian nationals as well as mapping the structures that facilitated the decisions. The study concludes that discourses linking ‘refugee status’ to ‘temporariness’ and ‘return’, ‘asylum protection’ to ‘international obligations’, and ‘the refugee’ to an essentialist understanding of the term are fundamental in facilitating the decisions made in the cases. Furthermore, a governmental goal of ensuring the security of society underpins and works to sustain these discourses. The findings contribute to creating detailed knowledge about the Danish asylum system and the logic supporting the increased focus on return.

This is one of the first studies in Sweden testing the notion of racial color-blindness empirically in a Swedish context, by asking a sample of Swedish participants to assign race to images of faces with different phenotypes, rate how ‘Swedish’ the faces are perceived (referred to the degree of ‘Swedishness’) and identify the skin color of the faces (through the NIS skincolor scale). We also use eye-tracking to explore whether participants look differently at faces of different racial groups. The results show that skin-color is a decisive factor in the racial ascription as Black, while skin color is not determinant of the degree of Swedishness. What determines the degree of Swedishness is the racial assignment itself, in other words, how individuals perceive and categorize phenotypes into different racial groups. We conclude that Swedes are not truly racially color-blind and race does indeed matter in Sweden.

Access to language training is often a challenge for persons granted international protection in EU-countries. This article investigates language provision for refugees from a policy and governance perspective. The goal is to explain the local differences in language training provisions in EU countries. We use a most different cases approach including Cosenza in Italy, Glasgow in Scotland, Malmö in Sweden and Nicosia in Cyprus. We find that the combination of state policies and governance do explain differences in local access to language training. The results also strongly indicate that local governments are dependent on support from higher levels of government to secure training opportunities. The state is still the main actor, and its choices of policies and governance instruments are central for understanding differences in language provision for refugees in EU member states. 

The development towards the mainstreaming of extremism in European countries in the areas of immigration and integration has taken place both in policy and in discourse. The harsh policy measures that were implemented after the 2015 refugee crisis have led to a discursive shift; what is normal to say and do in the areas of immigration and integration has changed. Anti-immigration claims are today not merely articulated in the fringes of the political spectrum but more widely accepted and also, at least partly, officially sanctioned. This study investigates the anti-immigration claims, seen as (populist) appeals to the people that centre around a particular mythology of the people and that are, as such, deeply ingrained in national identity construction. The two dimensions of the populist divide are of relevance here: The horizontal dimension refers to articulated differences between "the people", who belong here, and the "non-people" (the other), who do not. The vertical dimension refers to articulated differences between the common people and the established elites. Empirically, the analysis shows how anti-immigration views embedded in processes of national myth making during and after 2015 were articulated in the socially conservative online newspaper Samtiden from 2016 to 2019. The results indicate that far-right populist discourse conveys a nostalgia for a golden age and a cohesive and homogenous collective identity, combining ideals of cultural conformism and socioeconomic fairness.

This thematic paper deals with integration policies concerning persons who aregranted international protection in EU Member States. It acknowledges that there are two general trends in integration policies - a civic turn and a local turn. The civic turn implies more integration requirements for migrants, decided upon by the state, that have an impact on the legal status of migrant newcomers. On the other hand, the local turn implies less national involvement with cities instead handling more of the integration policies, including funding and policy measures.

The paper then describes four different models for the integration of beneficiaries of international protection: a national government-led model, a project based/multilevel governance model, a laissez-faire model, and a NGO-led model.

This article is based on the results of a pilot study which examines and compares how multiracial and multiethnic advertisement is looked at and perceived in Sweden and the US. Research involving eye-tracking is growing in several disciplines but still underexplored in the Social Sciences. Eye trackers enable recording of eye movements both in a natural and isolated/experimental context. Combining eye-tracking data and other types of traditional data such as interviews or surveys has a great potential to analyze and challenge the data bias, such as social desirability needs and race of interviewer effect. Even though we did not find any statistically significant results due to the limited sample size, the results points to interesting trends and tendencies which need to be addressed in further studies. We did not find any statistically significant differences in the preference in monocultural advertisements among Swedish and American students. However higher prior interracial exposure had some significance in a higher preference in multicultural advertisement.

Migration induced by the impacts of climate change is a complex phenomenon that consists of various concepts. It also consists of various perspectives about the cause and the effects of such migration. Regardless of these debates, however, some atoll island nations are under a threat of disappearance due the impacts of climate change, especially the rising sea levels. Migration remains the only option for these island nations. Consequently, there are numerous perspectives on how to address the arising problems due to such migration. By utilizing argumentative discourse analysis, this thesis identifies three dominant discourses that address these consequences of climate change induced migration and explores how the island nation of Kiribati, although seemingly follows the lead of these dominant discourses, manages to shape and transform the discourses for the best interest of the Island Nation.

In the expansive literature on Swedish multiculturalism policy, the Freedom of Choice Goal (FCG) of the Bill, Prop. 1975:26, Guidelines for an Immigrant and Minority Policy is often presented as its founding document. But this belies the fact that the Goal was beset by a controversy about its multicultural scope in the years that followed its adoption in 1975 that was never really settled. This article revisits the question and shows that the Goal indeed represented a multicultural vision. However, it was just the tip of an iceberg formed by socioeconomic integration policies. Earlier and more consistent multicultural policy provisions were present most notably in the state cultural policy. The article draws evidence from multiple sources including comparison with Norway.

The concept of ’humanitarian borderwork’ (Pallister-Wilkins 2017) entered the social sciences the last couple of years, in the wake of the 2015 migration crisis to the EU. With roots in the ’humanitarian border enforcement’ discourse (Williams 2016) that developed in the US post-9/11, the concept suggests that the goals of ‘migrant safety’ (i.e. human security) and ‘border control’ (i.e. state security) are mutually attainable. This ‘humanitarian-security’ (Andersson 2017, De Lauri 2018) or ‘safety/security’ (Williams 2016) nexus casts increased border control as not the cause of, but the remedy to, migrants’ vulnerability and death. ‘Humanitarian borderwork’ further implies a convergence between two seemingly distinct concepts: ‘humanitarianism’ and ‘borderwork’ (Walters 2011). Whereas ‘humanitarianism’ has traditionally been associated with a concern for humanity, human rights, alleviation of suffering, and the principle of ‘do no harm’; ‘borderwork’ has been preoccupied with exclusion, control, security and monitoring/surveillance (Pallister-Wilkins 2015b). And whereas humanitarian action has traditionally been carried out by depoliticized, independent actors (notably NGOs) with the sole purpose of providing humanitarian assistance (Redfield and Bornstein 2011); humanitarianism is now increasingly being delivered by (supranational) state-actors, such as the EU’s Border and Coast Guard Agency (Frontex) – which claims to be just as preoccupied with saving lives as protecting the EU’s external borders. This begs the questions: are ‘humanitarianism’ and ‘borderwork’ compatible concepts? And if so, in the case of the EU, how humanitarian is Frontex’s borderwork? Informed by a literature review of the genealogy of the concepts of ‘humanitarianism’ and ‘humanitarian borderwork’, the paper problematizes the latter and seeks to answer those questions by analyzing and comparing Frontex’s humanitarian discourses and practices to the understanding of humanitarianism within anthropology – a field that has studied it extensively. The paper thus provides part of the literature review and theoretical- and conceptual framework for the dissertation, to be complemented with more empirics at a later stage. Arguing that while Frontex’s ‘humanitarian borderwork’ fails to meet the criteria in the traditional understanding of humanitarianism, it does succeed in situating itself within the ‘new humanitarianism’ (Nascimento 2015) that emerged after the end of the Cold War – where state actors play a larger role, and militarization and securitization of borders increasingly shape humanitarian action.

A global trend has shown an increase in intimate partnerships across nationality, race, ethnicity, and religion, and this is also the case in Sweden. As a result, the children of these unions (i.e. multiethnic and multiracial persons) are undeniably part of contemporary society. This study is one of the first studies in Sweden that solely focuses on the multiracial and multiethnic population. Based on 21 qualitative interviews, this article explores how mixed Swedes identify themselves and how they experience that they are identified by others using Brubaker’s (2016) conceptualization. The analysis shows that, contrary to the flexibility in how mixed Swedes identify themselves, mixed Swedes experience that people in society categorize them in a fixed idea of ‘either-or’ – either Swedish or not Swedish. The idea of being Swedish is strongly connected to the idea of being white; therefore, many mixed Swedes with a non-white phenotype experience that their identification as Swedish is not validated. However, some interviewees reject the idea of Swedish as solely being ‘white’ and are actively redrawing what it means to be Swedish through emphasizing nationality and cultural belonging.

In 2008, Sweden introduced a non-selective labour migration policy without labour market tests and human capital considerations. This article studies the effects of the policy change on the size, composition and labour market outcomes. Using longitudinal register data, we find that the 2008 liberalizations of the Swedish labour migration policy increased the number of labour migrants from non-EU countries. Post-reform labour migrant cohorts have on average lower level of human capital, and the lower level of human capital translates into worse labour market outcomes. One year after migration, post-reform cohorts have a higher skills-mismatch and about 30 percent lower income. Migration controls against abuse introduced in 2011 and 2012 improved the labour market outcomes somewhat.

According to the policy-making literature, external shocks are one of the most important pre-requisites for major policy changes. This article investigates how the refugee crisis affected Swedish political parties’ asylum and family migration policy preferences. The results indicate that the refugee crisis contributed to the breaking up of a long-established policy paradigm of openness and equal rights previously shared by most parties in parliament. A more fragmented party system has emerged where a new paradigm of controlling numbers has also found strong support outside the anti-immigration party the Sweden Democrats.

Nordic countries are among the main destinations for immigrants in the world because of their traditionally generous policies. They are also some of the most integrated and similar countries. Yet, in the 1970s when they became confronted with the “multicultural question”, they made different choices. This article shows that the presence or absence of a sizeable immigration was the main causal factor. It explains why Sweden adopted multiculturalism while Finland and Iceland did not. However, this factor was sufficient and not necessary. The formulation of multicultural policy provisions (MCPs) in Norway despite a small and late labour immigration was the result of diffusion from Sweden. In Denmark, the absence of sizeable immigration combined with the presence of a nationally-oriented policy legacy to further deny such outcome. There was an upward albeit slow convergence towards multiculturalism. Groupings of multiculturalist and assimilationist countries stuck together until the civic turn in the mid-2000s.

Cross-border migration is one of several ways by which people have adapted to both the slow-onset and fast-onset environmental changes of the Anthropocene, the epoch in which human practices have resulted in significant global consequences for the world’s ecosystems. In order to trace inequalities and their politicization we need systematic studies of how migration emerges from complex interplays of social (political, economic, cultural) and environmental processes. So far, two generations of scholarship have characterized the climate change – migration debate. The first generation theorized migration as a mechanistic response to climate change. While the second generation conceptualized climate-related migration as adaptation in relationship and human security by placing agency at the core, the focus on the “resilient migrant” has occluded both the effects of climate change on different categories of people with respect to social inequalities and has not fully dealt with the analogy between the ‘exploitation of humans by humans’ and the ‘exploitation of nature by capitalism’. This analysis traces the evolution of concepts in the debates on climate-related migration and presents selected social mechanisms of (re)production of social inequalities in the climate change-migration nexus.

Integrating theories about discourse with social science theories allows to grasp the dynamic and fluid co-construction of European identities, both top-down and bottom-up. Such interdisciplinary approaches are able to systematically deconstruct the everyday workings of European institutions, or support our understanding of the impact of traditional and social media in their production and reproduction of pro-European or Eurosceptic sentiments and attitudes. In this chapter, I first present some important characteristics of Discourse Studies (DS) and Critical Discourse Studies (CDS), specifically of the Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA). I then, secondly, summarize the most relevant discursive research strands on European integration. Thirdly, I illustrate the interdisciplinary nexus of discourse-oriented European studies with a case study on the mediatization and politicization of the refugee crisis in Austria, from 2015-2016

This paper provides an overview of the socio-demographic characteristics, labour-market participation and occupational mobility of highly educated immigrants1 in Sweden. Based on a statistical analysis of register data, we compare their employment rates, salaries and occupational skill level and mobility to those of immigrants with lower education and with natives. Among the questions addressed in this paper are: What is the socio-demographic profile of highly skilled immigrants to Sweden? Where do they come from and how do they enter the country? Are there differences in highly educated immigrants’ employment rates by citizenship status, migration entry route and place of birth? How do the salaries of highly educated men and women compare between immigrants and natives? What is the education-to-job match for them? How do occupational mobility patterns compare for highly educated immigrants versus those with lower education? Finally, are there differences in occupational skill level for highly educated migrants by entry route? Our results show that, while highly skilled immigrants perform better than those with a lower educational level, they never catch up with their native counterparts.

Using a semiotic-interpretive approach to the concept of political acculturation this paper explores the processes of political cultural reconstruction of 60 members of the Mexican community in New Zealand. Based on four years of ethnographic research it argues that the post-migratory reconstruction of the political arena follows common cognitive and emotional lines. These are illustrated in a four-stage process of cultural mediation through which individuals ascribe meaning to symbolic representations of politics experienced in two political settings. The paper depicts political acculturative phenomena as endless processes of negotiation resulting in constantly evolving hybrid frameworks through which migrants understand and respond to the challenges posited by the polities they inhabit.

The paper analyses, how a low level of cultural distance and a strong social and cultural integration affects second-generation immigrants’ labour market chances. We address this question by means of a survey experiment carried out with human resources professionals in Switzerland. First, we analyse whether job applicants are evaluated more negatively if their parents stem from a country perceived to be culturally more distant from the host country and whether second-generation applicants whose profile conveys a strong attachment to their culture of origin (language) and engaging in social activities within their community, are evaluated more negatively by prospective employers.

Based on two fieldworks in Chicago this working paper discusses the role that an Islamic organization – the Inner-City Muslim Action Network (IMAN)– plays for the invigoration of the deprived neighborhood Chicago Lawn. The working paper describes and analyses IMAN’s claim to so-called ghetto cosmopolitanism, its building on past race-based struggles in the neighborhood, and also how IMAN challenges ideas of correct religious practice within the American Muslim community. The particular context of the working paper is the festival “Takin’ it to the Streets” which is one of IMANs most prolific activities. Via its focus on popular music, graffiti art and talks the festival can be seen as an example of teaching the public – both about a minority religion but also about the potential resources of a deprived inner-city neighborhood.

Even though the number of multiracial and multiethnic Japanese, socially recognized and identified as “haafu (half)” are increasing, their identities and experiences are seldom critically analyzed. How do they identify themselves and how do they feel that they are identified by others? Based on interviews with eighteen individuals who grew up in Japan having one Japanese parent and one non-Japanese parent, this article explores ethnic options and practices of covering and passing among multiracial and multiethnic individuals in Japan. The analysis shows that multiracial and multiethnic individuals possess different kinds of ethnic options and practice passing and covering differently.

This study uses Bhabha’s concept of mimicry to explore how the transnational/-racial adoptee is discursively shaped in Swedish adoption narratives against a pro-adoption, colour-blind backdrop. Through an analysis of three Swedish adoption texts, the study explores the process and implications of the adoptee’s body being translated from complete otherness into (almost) Swedishness. The study suggests that mimicry emerges as a process beginning with the adoptee being desired as a body of difference that can potentially become an almost Swede. The adoptee, with a difference that is visible but disavowed and a sameness that is over-communicated but misrecognised, becomes trapped in a constant negotiation of identity, as they slip between being desired as an authorised version of otherness and being an isolated subject of racism, alienated from belonging to a recognised minority. The adoptee’s mimicry is prone to turn into menace, where they pose a threat to the identity of the white Swede and white Swedishness.

The paper is part of a wider research project which seeks to explore the nexus between statelessness and refugee-ness at global, national and individual level. The relationship between the two legal concepts has not received much attention. This is surprising given that one in ten refugees globally are believed to be stateless. To begin to unpack this relationship, Denmark and Sweden are used as case studies. This article sets out an initial law and policy analysis of the national level frameworks related to identifying statelessness in the Danish and Swedish asylum system, or addressing it following the acceptance of a refugee. This will be discussed in relation to how these contribute to, or address, the situation of indefinite statelessness for stateless refugees. Further to this, the paper seeks to draw out the impacts of the temporary asylum laws in both states with regard to the barriers stateless refugees face in acquiring citizenship. Issues such as cessation of refugee status, the undeportability of some former refugees who are stateless and instances of arbitrary detention are discussed in relation to Denmark and Sweden’s international obligations under the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and the 1954 Convention Relating to the Status of Stateless Persons.

Attitudes towards out-groups have been of academic interest for a long time, and two often-used theoretical frameworks are intergroup contact theory, and group threat theory. This article combines insights from both to investigating attitudes among youth in Sweden using multiple regression analysis. I seek particularly to understand the role that contact has on reducing attitudes, and what role different contact situations, and forms may play. Specifically contact in schools and the local area is investigated after controlling for the effect of personal friendships. The analysis finds that high quality contact does have an effect on attitudes among Swedish youth even after controlling for background variables. Superficial contact has no additional effect in the investigated context. Group threat effects are also found to be important for the groups that are most directly in competition with immigrants in the labor market.

The purpose of this article is (a) to review scholarly literature on entrepreneurship among Somalis in the United Kingdom and (b) through a field survey among Somali entrepreneurs in the UK assess if the prevailing image – derived from (a) – is valid or if some additional observations may alter the picture. Step (b) is accomplished through interviews with 36 Somalia-born entrepreneurs, most of them secondary migrants from other European countries and currently living in Birmingham, Leicester and London, about their lives and businesses. The results indicate that the prevailing image holds true in most respects. However, the view of Somali entrepreneurs as victims of intense competition should be modified. Many shopkeepers selling similar goods cooperate and reap advantages from sharing information and costs. Also, Somali entrepreneurship should be judged not only by its economic but also by its social achievements.

This paper presents developments in the field of refugee resettlement from a European perspective. The paper starts out with a historical overview on refugee resettlement in the European continent since World War I and shows that Europe has historically been more of a source of refugee resettlement than a host. The paper then pays attention to the evolution of resettlement at an EU level and sheds light on factors that have contributed to its (re)prioritization in the past 15 years. Indeed, there is an increased manifestation of resettlement on the EU policy agenda, culminating in the adoption of a Joint EU Resettlement Program in 2012. However, as a policy field it has not been part of the binding harmonization process, and while the number of EU resettlement countries doubled in the past decade, the EU lags still far behind other traditional resettlement countries in terms of actual resettlement places. Finally, after shedding light on debates in the European Parliament on the matter of resettlement, the paper presents a number of essential concerns and challenges regarding the future of resettlement programs in the EU. It concludes by pointing at the difficulties of reaching any significant increase in the number of refugees resettled in the EU.

The aim of this study is to give examples of, explore and discuss how people who belong to the group categorised as “non-white”, with an emphasis on Afroswedes, and depicted as racially different, experience hate crime and everyday harassment. The links of prejudices, stereotypes, colonial notions, everyday racism and violent hate crime is discussed from a Swedish perspective. Theories relating to colonial stereotypes, different kinds of racism, cross-border conflicts, the geography of hate and the consequences of hate crime are used to analyse the material. One key conclusion is that racial categorisations are still important for explaining people’s life possibilities and their vulnerability to hate crime, despite the fact that in present-day Sweden the significance of race is often denied. This denial can lead to hate crime and other forms of racial harassment being neglected by the authorities.

This article introduces the concept of banal populism to emphasize the intrinsic ambiguity of the relationship between democracy and populism in representative politics. The article expands on three approaches to populism, based on ideology, style and logic to suggest a framework for the study of articulations of banal populism in the everyday political communication between the people and the mediated elite, devoid of normative presuppositions. Empirically, the article shows how the rhetorical figure of the reality people [Verklighetens folk] has been used differently by three political parties in Sweden; i. e the right-wing populist party New Democracy (NyD), in parliament between 1991 and 1994, the Christian Democratic Party (KD) which is currently in the government and also by the nationalist-populist party the Sweden Democrats (SD), which gained 20 seats in the parliament by 2010. The article concludes that the struggle of who the people are and what they wish for is a permanent companion nested in the everyday communication of the votes.

Syftet med artikeln är att med hjälp av internt IKEA-material och intervjuer analysera hur begreppen svenskhet och mångfald representeras och används inom IKEA. Svenskheten är en viktig del av IKEA:s image, en del av marknadsföringen som kan kopplas till expansionen i länder utanför Norden. Det har funnits en motsättning inom IKEA mellan en äldre syn på svenskar som naturliga bärare av organisationskulturen, en form av territoriellt konstruerad svenskhet och en nyare, mer mångfaldsinspirerad, inkluderande syn. Denna friktion mellan svenskhet och mångfald behöver dock inte vara en antagonistisk motsättning. Mångfald har blivit en del av den nyare svenskheten, där en gemensam framtid är viktigare än utseende och födelseort.

This paper presents the preliminary findings of my ongoing dissertation project on attitudes towards interracial marriages. The findings are based on an anonymous postal survey conducted in Malmö, and the analysis focuses on 461 white European respondents who have answered the questionnaire. The result shows that the majority of the respondents can imagine dating or marrying interracially, however there are clear preferences of different groups. This paper also exhibits that respondents who have reported interracial friendships, and not general or superficial contacts, are more apt to answering to the question of interracial dating and marriage positively.