Inequalities

Intersectional perspectives on Inequalities in Sweden: An exploration of the ‘Swedish Model’

Guest Editors:

Diana Mulinari (Lund University)

Anders Neergaard (Linköping University)

Sweden is often represented internationally as a model of equality, social democracy, gender progressiveness and humanitarianism. Yet this image has always coexisted with deep and unevenly distributed inequalities. In recent decades, these inequalities have become increasingly visible through neoliberalism, antifeminism and ethnoracism in the forms of wealth disparity, growing class polarization, racialized labour market segmentation, gendered and sexualized violence, welfare retrenchment, intensified border regimes, Islamophobia, anti-Black racism, anti-Roma discrimination, and the precarization of migrant lives. This special issue invites critical social science contributions that examine how inequalities in Sweden are produced, legitimized, contested and lived across intersecting relations of class, race, gender, sexuality and migration.

Recent feminist political economy scholarship argues that financialisation has beyond the class dimension also deepened gender and racial inequalities by transferring economic risk from states and corporations onto households, where women/racialised populations disproportionately absorb the burdens of debt, care work, and social reproduction. A number of studies illuminate that women increasingly rely on credit, microfinance, and informal debt to sustain households amid welfare retrenchment. Scholarship has identified how race, class, migration status, and gender shape unequal exposure to debt and financial precarity.

Rather than treating inequality as a deviation from the Swedish welfare model, this issue asks how inequality is embedded within the historical and contemporary formation of Swedish society itself. We are interested in work that interrogates the relationship between welfare, nationalism, coloniality, neoliberalism, racial capitalism, patriarchy, heteronormativity and bordering practices. How have ideals of equality been used to define the limits of national belonging? How are racialized and migrant populations positioned as problems to be integrated, governed, disciplined or excluded? How do gender and sexuality become mobilized in narratives of Swedish modernity, secularism and progress? How are class relations reorganized through migration, privatization, austerity, housing segregation and labour market restructuring?

We particularly welcome contributions that challenge dominant narratives of Swedish exceptionalism. Critical scholarship has shown that Sweden’s self-image as colour-blind, tolerant and egalitarian can obscure the operation of race and racism. At the same time, gender equality and LGBTQ rights are frequently framed as national achievements, sometimes in ways that stigmatize racialized minorities, Muslim communities and migrants as backward or threatening. This special issue seeks to examine these contradictions without reproducing culturalist explanations. We invite authors to analyse how institutions, policies, public discourse and everyday practices produce unequal conditions of life, while also attending to resistance, solidarity, alternative knowledge and collective struggle.

We welcome theoretical, empirical, methodological and creative interventions from sociology, gender studies, social work, political science, anthropology, geography, criminology, education, media studies, history, critical race studies, migration studies, queer studies, Indigenous studies and related fields. Contributions may be based on ethnography, interviews, archival research, discourse analysis, participatory methods, policy analysis, quantitative approaches, visual methods or other critical methodologies.

The special issue aims to create a space for scholarship that does not merely document inequality but examines its conditions of possibility. We are especially interested in contributions that foreground the voices, experiences and political analyses of those most affected by intersecting forms of domination, and particularly how inequalities are named, resisted and acted upon. At the same time, we encourage authors to move beyond recognition-based frameworks and to consider material redistribution, structural transformation, abolitionist horizons, decolonial futures and forms of collective world-making.

By centring class, race, gender, sexuality and migration, this special issue seeks to rethink Sweden as a site where global and local inequalities meet. Sweden is not outside empire, capitalism, patriarchy or border violence; it is shaped through them. Yet Sweden is also a site of struggle, critique and alternative futures. We invite scholars to contribute to a critical conversation on how inequalities are made, how they are resisted, and what forms of justice might become imaginable beyond the limits of the nation’s egalitarian self-image.

Information for authors

Deadline: contributions must be uploaded by 30 December 2026. 

Length: maximum 50,000 characters (spaces and bibliography included).

Number of contributions: maximum 12.

Editorial guidelines, Peer review: Inequalities

The finalised paper must adhere to the editorial guidelines of Edizioni Ca’ Foscari

Publication of the Special Issue: May 2027.

Complete Open Access publication. 

Publication of the contributions is free of charge.