Racial profiling in the racial welfare state: Examining the order of policing in the Nordic region
| Author | Leandro Schclarek Mulinari,Suvi Keskinen |
| Published date | 01 August 2022 |
| Date | 01 August 2022 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/1362480620914914 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1362480620914914
Theoretical Criminology
© The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/1362480620914914
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Racial profiling in the racial
welfare state: Examining
the order of policing in the
Nordic region
Leandro Schclarek Mulinari
Stockholm University, Sweden
Suvi Keskinen
University of Helsinki, Finland
Abstract
This article builds on two interview studies on racial profiling conducted in Finland
and Sweden. It examines policing practices in order to elaborate on the understanding
of what we define as the ‘racial welfare state’. The analysis draws attention to the
ways that bordering practices reproduce racial orders, within and beyond the nation-
state. The embeddedness of the Nordic region in the western sphere, with its colonial
legacies, is highlighted through the empirical material that focuses on the consequences
of internal and external migration controls, as well as more general police stop-and-
search practices. The study underlines the need to investigate racial profiling as a
practice that enforces an imagined community based not on whiteness in general, but
on Nordic whiteness in particular as the norm against which the bodies of ‘others’ are
measured.
Keywords
Nordic welfare model, racial profiling, racial state, whiteness
Corresponding author:
Leandro Schclarek Mulinari, Department of Criminology, Stockholm University, Frescativägen, Stockholm,
114 19, Sweden.
Email: leandro.schclarek.mulinari@criminology.su.se
914914TCR0010.1177/1362480620914914Theoretical CriminologySchclarek Mulinari and Keskinen
research-article2020
Article
2022, Vol. 26(3) 377–395
Introduction
The first wave of research on racial profiling was concentrated on encounters with law
enforcement while driving. The developing research field has since examined racial pro-
filing from a range of perspectives, such as the War on Drugs, the War on Terror, border
and migration controls, as well as policies that target stigmatized urban areas and their
populations (for recent contributions, see Gaston, 2019; Parmar, 2020; Welch, 2019).
These studies have convincingly shown that racial bias regulates police work in different
national and regional contexts.
In this study, we fill a gap by examining the Nordic welfare state context, and ask:
what social order is reproduced through practices of racial profiling? Despite the
acknowledged need for context-specific studies, racial profiling has scarcely been docu-
mented, or analytically explored, by Nordic researchers. This is a shortcoming because,
first, the prevalent notions of Nordic exceptionalism give the impression that the region
is characterized by less repressive policies; and second, policing in the countries of the
region has specific characteristics that deserve detailed attention (Barker, 2018).
The overall aim of the article is to untangle the power relations of which racial profil-
ing is an expression through an understanding of what we call the ‘racial welfare state’.
We develop the idea of the ‘racial state’ (Goldberg, 2002) to fit into and take into account
the particular traits of the Nordic racial formation (Omi and Winant, 2014). Our point of
departure is that race has been a core organizing principle throughout history, pivotal in
shaping practices of inclusion and exclusion, even in countries that have perceived them-
selves as outsiders to colonialism (Jensen and Loftsdóttir, 2012; Keskinen et al., 2009).
More specifically, we emphasize the entanglement of race in the idea and institutions of
the nation-state, embedded in distinct colonial relations and histories (Balibar, 1991;
Komlosy et al., 2016).
The concept of the racial welfare state also refers to the intertwinement of racialized
social control and ordering that operates through policing and welfare state institutions.
We build on scholarship that argues for the key role of the police in enforcing the current
social order (Fassin, 2013), but seek to highlight their interconnectedness to welfare
institutions and ideologies (Høigård, 2011), as well as the effects of the neoliberalization
trends in recent decades (Amar, 2010). In the effort to highlight the transnational ele-
ments of the racial welfare state, we also draw on recent theorizing on the criminalization
of migration (Bosworth et al., 2018) and underline the role of the ‘crimmigration control
system’ (Bowling and Westenra, 2018).
Empirically, this analysis expands on our previous, more descriptive oriented research,
which is based on interviews with the police and people with experiences of racial profil-
ing in Sweden and Finland. We have shown that to be singled out from the crowd by the
police—especially for visible minorities such as Roma and youth racialized as non-
white—is a common, everyday experience (Keskinen et al., 2018; Schclarek Mulinari,
2019a). In this study, we advance a more theoretical discussion, arguing that to emanate
from material generated in two different countries enables an increased possibility of
generalization of the interpretations.
The article is organized as follows: first, we address the role of racial profiling in the
Nordic context. Second, we elaborate a theoretical approach to the racial welfare state
378 Theoretical Criminology 26(3)
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