Högerradikala AfD blev näst största parti i tyska valet. Men vad talar för och emot partiets fortsatta popularitet. Det undrar Anders Hellström, docent i statsvetenskap.

Borders are not just lines on a map. They are social, political, and symbolic practices that shape how we live, move, and belong. Whether materialized as fences and checkpoints or enacted through technologies, discourses, and everyday encounters, borders are constantly made and remade. This special section explores how borders emerge through processes of inclusion and exclusion, control, and identity-making, and how they are also resisted, negotiated, and subverted. Drawing on rich empirical material and critical theoretical tools, the contributions of the special section of this issue of CIMR collectively push the field of border and migration studies toward a deeper understanding of bordering as a multifaceted and dynamic phenomenon.

Termen svenskfientlighet har anammats av regeringen, som nu inkluderar det i handlingsplanen mot rasism. Men även om svenskfientlighet existerar så är det inte rasism, skriver forskaren Anders Hellström – rasism är kopplat till en strukturell ojämlikhet på makroplan. 

This introductory essay locates the discussion of superdiversity in the city of Malmö. It provides information on Malmö's structural diversities, their embedding in political discourses, and their distribution in the city's geography. The essay introduces and discusses the concept of superdiversity in relation to the issue's various contributions and to local conditions in Malmö.

The current anthology investigates the extent to which populist radical-right parties are challenging the dominant ideological paradigm of Nordic politics. This chapter examines how four Nordic populist parties use national myths in their political rhetoric to justify their politics. More specifically, it explores how common memories from a golden age – when the nation was still ethnically homogeneous – are constructed and used in the party programmes of the four parties to appeal to presumptive voters. ‘The analysis, informed by discursive research on national rhetoric, shows how the selective use and construction of national myths is a feature which unites Nordic radical-right parties, with the Norwegian Progress Party standing out as the exception’. As such, the Sweden Democrats and the Finns Party utilize national myths in their party programmes most frequently, whereas the Danish People’s Party’s use of national myths resembles that employed by Danish mainstream parties, and the Norwegian Progress Party stands out with no use of national myths in its party programmes. The chapter discusses the main points of convergence and difference between the parties and concludes that the differences reflect the varying backgrounds of these parties and the different historical and social contexts in which they operate.

The COVID-19 pandemic has created an impetus for action for governments and citizens, but these actions can be challenging to understand. As a riposte, we use The Populist Divide as a framework for understanding the patchwork of populist responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. Our approach brings nuance to how crises are framed dependent on the trust levels between actors, thus presenting populist relationships as determined by selective trust allocation and not necessarily one of fixed ideological paradigms. Additionally, we introduce activities as the response to a measure, whether accepting or even protesting, but ultimately consenting to the legitimate powers of the leaders imposing these measures. On the other hand, counterstrategies emerging as challenges to the legitimacy of the leaders themselves.

In this article, I aim to show how populism can be used as an analytical category to make sense of how anti-immigration claims are articulated in far-right political discourse. I will do this by giving examples of and drawing attention to how the anti-immigration claims are articulated via the populist divide, namely anti-elitism and people-centrism, and delve into the issue of which people are mobilised against which elite in articulatory practice. I use narrative analysis to link individual newspaper texts to dominant storylines of the nation (master narratives) in the continuous construction of national identity. The material is based on 169 articles published in the socially conservative online newspaper Samtiden between 2016 and 2022 on national identity. The results from the narrative analysis indicate that far-right populist discourse conveys nostalgia for a golden age and a cohesive and homogenous collective national identity, combining ideals of cultural conformism and socio-economic fairness against the fragmentary political agenda of different elites, spelling out a message that everything was better before.

De flesta politiska partier och flera experter hävdar att vi aldrig ska återvända till 2015 igen. Detta meddelande upprepas, både i media och i politiken. I kapitlet redogörs för dels policyförändringar i samband med mottagningskrisen 2015 och dels också om partiernas hållning och beslut i frågan. Vilka minnen vi håller oss kvar vid färgas av och färgar vad vi väljer att associera med 2015

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 open access book shows how the politics of migration affect community building in the 21st century, drawing on both retrogressive and progressive forms of mobilization. It elaborates theoretically and shows empirically how the two master frames of nostalgia and hope are used in local, national and transnational settings, in and outside conventional forms of doing politics. It expands on polarized societal processes and external events relevant for the transformation of European welfare systems and the reproduction of national identities today. It evidences the importance of gender in the narrative use of the master frames of nostalgia and hope, either as an ideological tool for right-wing populist and extreme right retrogressive mobilization or as an essential element of progressive intersectional politics of hope.