Contested Belonging in an Election Year: The Case of Refugees Living in Sweden

Abstract

ABSTRACT In the context of humanitarian migration to Western societies, social cohesion and belonging are often discursively expressed in terms of an imagined cohesive in-group and a markedly different and potentially threatening other whose values conflict with that of the democratic nation-state. This article investigates how belonging is constructed in discourse in the 2022 election year in Sweden, and how discursive constructions of belonging impact on the lived experiences of refugees in the country. The article draws on data from political discourses prior to the election as well as interviews with refugees in the four weeks immediately following. It argues that refugees are authored as distant from the Swedish culture and as threats to Swedish democratic values, and that this authoring, while contested by refugees themselves, can have significant impact on their lived experiences. Further, the portrayal of democratic values as uniquely Swedish and the portrayal of immigrants as a threat can mean that interpretations of such values as gender equality and freedom of religion become inflexible.