Introduction: Sweden’s Governance of Suspicion: Islamophobia and Conditional Belonging

This special issue appears at a decisive moment in Swedish political history.As we finalize this volume, Sweden is entering yet another election year in which Muslims and Islam occupy center stage in political discourse.The patterns are by now familiar: Muslims are cast as security threats, framed as "non-integrable," and subjected to demands for cultural conformity that are presented as prerequisites for democracy.Recently, UN bodies have issued unusually sharp criticism of Sweden for allowing racism and Islamophobia to deepen.The Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) condemns the new "security zones" that the current government instituted as "repugnant and unlawful," warning that they facilitate racial profiling of people with a migrant background and Muslims.This coincides with rising racist hate crimes, of which only about 6 percent lead to convictions.Children describe racism in school as an everyday reality, while UN rapporteurs characterize the overall development as shocking, noting shrinking civic space for minorities and Gaza-genocide protesters alongside a persistent reluctance to recognize these trends as structural. 1 Such criticism is connected to the 2026 election campaign, which opened with Liberal Party leader Simona Mohamson pledging to combat what she calls "Islamist separatism" and insisting that Sweden needs a "blue and yellow Islam," a formulation that signals the national flag to demand that Muslims subordinate religious identity to national belonging.Ebba Busch, leader of the Christian Democrats and Deputy Prime Minister, reiterates her long-held view that Muslims "must adjust to Swedish society," implying that their presence is a problem, presumably as "they" do not fit the social fabric, and such a problem needs to be managed rather than a constituency to be represented.Meanwhile, the far-right party, Sweden Democrats, intensify their long-standing Islamophobic campaigns, continually portraying Islam and Muslims as incompatible with "Swedish values."