Post-2015 Refugees Welcome Initiatives in Sweden: Cosmopolitan Underpinnings

Abstract

This chapter contributes to the literature that seeks to understand the social and political developments of Refugees Welcome initiatives beyond the immediacy of 2015 “crisis”. Based on interviews conducted in 2018 with activists who hold leading positions in the national umbrella organisation Refugees Welcome Sweden, the chapter presents the analysis of their perceptions and self-reflections on engagement with refugees and on working for a humane asylum politics. It exemplifies how the moral and political dimensions of cosmopolitanism are intertwined in pointing to the universal aim of equality and at the same time demanding that it is realised locally. While none of our interviewees employed the notion of cosmopolitanism, they outlined a normative order that emerges as a political project towards a reconstruction of society along lines of equality and justice.