Politically motivated crimes against immigrants in Sweden: When, where and how?

The purpose of this project is to explain when, where and how legal expressions of discontent with migration escalate into criminal actions against migrants, policymakers and migrant accommodation facilities.

The empirical basis for the project is a dataset of violent and nonviolent protest across and between three consecutive waves of migration into Sweden: the 2008–2009 wave of migration from Iraq, the 2012–2016 wave of migration from Syria, and the current wave of migration from Ukraine.

Wedding structural and process-oriented modes of explanation, the project studies the impact of discursive opportunities at the national level, socioeconomic grievances (e.g. unemployment) and patterns of political mobilization (e.g. support for far-right parties) at the local level, and interaction between protesters, counter-protesters, and the municipality within each episode of protest.

The project explores the when and where of escalation through a qualitative comparative analysis of national and local conditions for violence over time.

To explain how nonviolent protest escalates within each combination of contextual factors, the project conducts process tracing to identify pathways to violence in a smaller number of cases, drawing on, inter alia, newspaper reporting and court records.

The project contributes with an unprecedented comparison of anti-migrant violence across consecutive waves of migration.