The Swedish Racial Welfare Regime in Transition

Abstract

A weakness in research on welfare regimes is that solidarity and deservingness has often been analysed unidimensional in relation to a capitalist class-structured society. Feminist and postcolonial scholars have argued that welfare regimes need to be situated and analysed in an intersectional setting. In this chapter, focussing on Sweden, a central contention is that in analysing welfare provisions, migration and racial regimes are constitutive in structuring citizenship and nation. Sweden is undergoing a transformation of the welfare regime from a social-democratic, towards a neoliberal regime. At the same time, the Swedish welfare regime is increasingly infused with neo-racism, making it important to locate welfare in relation to the concepts of welfare and racial regimes, but also gender regime. After an introduction, followed by sections outlining the theoretical perspective and a contextualisation of the racial character of the Swedish society, the main part of the chapter explores three competing welfare regimes, with different class, gender, and racial configurations. The chapter ends with a short section exploring the embryonic struggles in the making of a fourth welfare project.