Addressing inequality, reifying difference: exploring the nexus between racialisation and migration in Swedish political debate

Existing research on racism often treats categories of difference as analytical starting points rather than as outcomes of historically situated processes of differentiation. In this article, we investigate how such categories are produced in political debate by analysing articulations of the terms “racialised” (rasifierad) and “racialisation” (rasifiering) in Swedish parliamentary debate between 2006 and 2025. The analysis shows that “racialised” is made meaningful through overlapping articulations of ethnicity, phenotype and migration, and that this usage is linked to four accounts of racism: as violence, as structure, as an administrative category and as an ideological construct. In addition, the results show that the nominal form “racialised” is articulated far more widely than the processual form “racialisation”. This presents racialisation as a condition attached to certain bodies rather than as a relational process. We therefore argue that while the language of racialisation makes racism politically visible, it risks reifying the very difference it names. As a result, racism can be addressed without challenging prevailing notions of Swedish exceptionalism.