Deportation and authoritarian transformation in the Swedish racial welfare state

The article analyzes Sweden’s deportation regime and its historical and contemporary role in racial welfare state formation and in expanding repressive state powers. Conceptually building on insights from critical border studies and critical racism studies, the article draws on extant literature on the historical evolvement of Sweden’s deportation policies and analyzes contemporary deportation patterns and practices using preparatory documents, policies and statistics on deportation. Doing so allows for an analysis of the different political functions fulfilled by deportation, which include defining the racial boundaries of citizenship, meeting the needs of the labor market and developing a stratified system of rights, social provisions and political freedoms. The article argues that deportation politics and practices, in functioning as central tools for forging a system of differential rights, are both underpinned by and partake in producing a racial social order, and as such, fuel the authoritarian transformation of the Swedish welfare state.