Introduction

A quick search on search engines such as JSTOR and Google Scholar reveals that researchers continue to have more to say about ‘Sweden and equality’ than about ‘Sweden and inequality’. This indicates the persisting hold that the equation of Sweden with equality has in certain public imaginaries. However, investigating the gendered constructions of racism in Swedish internationalised popular culture – in particular, in this instance, in the works of Henning Mankell (2011; 2013), whose writings serve as a cultural barometer of changing Swedish attitudes to the socioeconomic realities of immigration – challenges this image. That investigation reveals how the construction of Sweden as the most gender-equal nation in Europe – if not in the world – has for some considerable time been called into question, not least by the effects of globalisation and their impacts on Sweden. This chapter will draw on the theoretical elaborations of Arjun Appadurai's work on the Fear of small numbers (2006; 2009) to suggest that the fears Appadurai diagnoses as central to neoliberal regimes are operant in Sweden, where their articulation throws light on the inequalities that govern that country. I will argue in this chapter that changes to the Swedish welfare system and the weakening of the Swedish nation-state as an effect of certain globalising forces, in particular the movements of people, capital and information, have led – inter alia in popular culture – to the construction of Sweden as embattled territory with strongly delineated gendered contours.

Migration, welfare changes and racialised violence

Mankell's Faceless killers, the first volume in his Wallander series, came out in 1991, at a time when Sweden was experiencing a significant increase in immigration numbers (Table 4.1). Indeed, ‘by the mid-1990s, over 10 per cent of all Swedish inhabitants [9.1 million] were foreign-born, and 13 per cent were either foreign-born or Swedishborn with two foreign-born parents’ (Eger 2010, p 205). This means, as Eger suggests, that Sweden turned into a multi-cultural society in a very brief period of time.

The surge in immigrant numbers that Sweden experienced went together with significant shifts in Swedish immigration policies.