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Vanessa Barker, Nordic Nationalism and Penal Order: Walling the Welfare State

Document Cited in Related
Vincent
DOI10.1177/1462474520930411
Date01 January 2021
Published date01 January 2021
AuthorLisa L Miller
Subject MatterBook reviews
SG-PUNJ200031 3..23 Book reviews
139
Vanessa Barker, Nordic Nationalism and Penal Order: Walling the Welfare
State, Routledge: London, 2018; 168 pp.: 9780367360436, £29.59 (pbk);
9781138284111, £92 (hbk)
In the United States, criminal justice reformers frequently cast an envious eye
across the North Atlantic to the tranquil Nordic nations. The harsh, isolating,
punitive practices of U.S. criminal justice systems are often contrasted with
those of, say, Sweden and Norway, where inmates learn to milk cows, take cooking
classes or work with wood milling machines. I have made such comparisons in my
own teaching and scholarship.
Vanessa Barker’s Nordic Nationalism and Penal Order: Walling the Welfare
State should lead all of us to think more carefully about such comparisons.
Barker upends everything we thought we knew, not only about Nordic criminal
justice but, more broadly, about the relationship between social welfare, punish-
ment, and nationalism. Contrary to popular and much scholarly wisdom, Barker
argues that the Swedish social welfare state is intimately tied to a set of coercive
tools that reinforce citizenship and belonging for particular types of people.
Advancing a theory of penal nationalism, Barker challenges the binary welfare/
punishment framework that often juxtaposes U.S. punitive exceptionalism with
Nordic social welfare exceptionalism. In the process, she does more than raise
questions about our assumptions of Nordic generosity and benevolence. She chal-
lenges our thinking about the very nature of the social welfare state, inclusion, and
citizenship in an increasingly global and migratory world.
Barker begins with the puzzling story of Sweden’s open invitation to over
160,000 asylum seekers in the summer of 2015 that ended abruptly less than six
months later. By November 2015, Sweden had shut down its border with
Denmark, citing public authorities’ inability to “cope with the strain” of refugees
flowing into the nation (p. 2). While Barker acknowledges that the public explan-
ations...

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