South Side

There has been a much-publicised increase in deadly gun violence linked to organised crime across Sweden in recent years.

At the intersection between Nytorgsbacken and Gasverksgatan in Helsingborg stands a four-metre-tall orange lamp. It is an enlarged replica of the iconic 1968 Bumling design, conceived by Swedish artist Anders Pherson, and city authorities have placed it at this particular intersection to signal their commitment to fighting crime and improving safety in this particular neighbourhood. Some 200 metres to the right, crossing the street, bullet holes are visible in the sidewall of a structure that looks something like a long steel garden shed. The holes have been there for at least ten years, my friend tells me, embedded in the wall of a building that forms part of a schoolyard.

It is late afternoon, the schoolyard is empty, and at first, I don’t see what I’m looking for—How large are the traces of bullets? Are they perfect circles? My friend and I are in Söder (roughly translated to South Side), one of Sweden’s so-called Vulnerable Areas, which the Swedish Police Authority defines as “geographically delimited spaces with low socio-economic status and where criminals have an impact on the local community”.

There has been a much-publicised increase in deadly gun violence linked to organised crime across Sweden in recent years, with shootings more than doubling since 2013. A disturbing detail is that teenagers and young adults are doing the killing. There are countless documentaries and books packed with testimonies from active and former gang members, usually describing how young people are recruited and why individuals are pushed into a life of crime. If they are up to scratch, these narratives also explore the structural factors behind the violence. It is a familiar story: the dismantling of social safety nets and government institutions in neighbourhoods now defined as vulnerable leads to higher economic insecurity, which increases crime. Then there is the spiral of alienation and segregation from the rest of society associated with an area becoming more dangerous.

These are not new insights, yet they feel somehow distant. Perhaps it is naive to think that conditions like these are reserved for news broadcasts reporting from the South Side of Chicago or Parisian suburbs. Maybe it is Swedish arrogance, as a new acquaintance posited over coffee a few weeks ago. Regardless, I feel a lingering sense of unease walking around Söder. Not because I feel unsafe but because stories told to me about the roughness of certain criminals and how police commonly conduct searches in public spaces do not fit with my conception of Sweden.

Again, that people in the privileged majority are oblivious to what’s happening in vulnerable communities is not novel. Ta-Nehisi Coates refers to such people as Dreamers, Louisa Yousfi calls them Sleepwalkers, and my friend describes us as living in the Fun World. So stark is the divide between the Fun and the Real that Sweden’s Minister for Employment and Integration wore a bulletproof vest when visiting Rinkeby, a Stockholm suburb, in February.

But make no mistake: this is not simply a problem of integration, whatever that means, as some political parties want to suggest. The decades-long, systematic liquidation of Sweden’s welfare state has combined with contingent events such as the 2015 European migrant “crisis” to create a convenient narrative. Immigrants have become “the others” in Sweden, a group of people who are what real Swedes are not—violent, abrasive, loud. In all the commotion of public debate, we forget the crucial role immigrants play in upholding the ideological foundations of the current order.

In 1973, American political economist James O’Connor published The Fiscal Crisis of the State, in which he observed the inherent contradiction between the modern state’s two main responsibilities. On the one hand, a state needs to remain legitimate in the eyes of its people, which, in a liberal democracy, requires a certain level of welfare expenditure. On the other hand, a state draws its power from the taxation of surplus production, meaning it needs a constantly growing economy. To achieve such growth under capitalism, however, taxes on businesses and the wealthy cannot be raised sufficiently to finance the public expenditure long-term. The result of this paradox, argues O’Connor, would be a fiscal crisis of the state, leading to both the stagnation of capital accumulation and a loss of legitimacy.

Here we are. Raising taxes today is impossible; global finance reigns supreme, and people are trained to oppose higher taxes at all costs. Government borrowing is an option. But as demonstrated by the United Kingdom, relying on borrowing leaves a state vulnerable to the whims of the market and decreases fiscal capacity in the long term if not used for productive investments.

Sweden, by contrast, has opted for a more discursive approach. Instead of borrowing, succeeding governments since the 1990s have lamented the impoverished nature of the state, saying it is incapable of providing basic welfare for its citizens. To be clear, this is an ideological choice, highlighted not least by the continued insistence on directing all attention to the effects rather than causes of the neoliberal programme.

Enter “the other”, the immigrant. All the state’s attention and might is focused on stopping his rampage through the streets, punishing him for killing his fellow brutes or, God forbid, a Swede. Today, in 2025, attention might be warranted. Yet, there is no serious government effort to address the structural roots of the crime increase, which are, as we know, the roll-back of welfare in Sweden in general and the removal of institutions such as job boards and social services from areas now deemed vulnerable. There is no refusal to accept this causal chain. It is known.

It is also needed. To keep its legitimacy in the eyes of the citizenry, the Swedish state needs a credible explanation as to why inequality is rising and why the social contract underpinning the alleged Swedish arrogance has dissolved. What is happening in Söder and similar neighbourhoods is not only a societal collapse. It is also a retooling, a new way for the system to reproduce itself.

A few pages prior to referring to the privileged majority as Sleepwalkers, Louisa Yousufi, a French journalist, expounds on the ending of Chester Himes’ The End of a Primitive, set in the 1950s. In the book’s final act, the protagonist, Jesse Robinson, a black writer from Los Angeles, kills his white mistress, Kriss Cummings. After his crime, before turning himself over to the police, Jesse shaves and examines himself in front of a mirror. According to Yousufi, he comes to the following conclusion:

Jesse becomes tragically aware of his destiny not as a primitive or as a black man but as a human being becoming himself – a primitive evolving into a human. In this closed system, the human being is the civilized white man . . . So, when he slaughters his mistress, Jesse Robinson is not confirming his inner nature, nor the identity forged by all his frustrations as a rejected black man. What he is confirming is his comprehensive integration into the system. ‘Black son of a bitch has got to have some means of joining the human race.’

In other words, the societal expectation of a black man during this time in American history—still?—was to be violent, to murder white women. Without such stereotypes, the foundations of Jim Crow and systemic racism, with all its material and psychological consequences, would be harder to justify and sustain. That similar narratives are now entrenched in Swedish society is sad, frankly.

That the four-metre-tall orange lamp is valued at 1 million SEK ($102,000) is of great annoyance to the people I talked to. “Could taxpayer money not be spent on something more productive?” my friend says. It probably could. Although 1 million is not a large amount of money for the government, “it sends the wrong message”, someone else explains. The last 40 minutes before I leave is spent playing FIFA. I am soundly defeated—the red card at the end of the first half did not help. My friend’s little brother is going out; “With who?”. He mentions a name and leaves. My ride arrives. I’m going home, back to the Fun World.

// Adrian