Introduction
Michael McEachrane and Louis Faye
I. Swedish Colonialism
1. Decolonizing Nature in the North: The (Post-)Apocalyptic Environmentalism of the Swedish Sámi 1950–2020
Håkan Thörn
2. A Decolonial Understanding of Sámi Landscapes and Human-Nature Relations in Sweden
Carla Lanyon-Garrido, Susanne Spik, Katarina Spik Skum, May-Britt Öhman, Eva-Charlotta Helsdotter and Maria Tengö
3. What, If Anything, Does Sweden Owe the Caribbean?
Göran Collste
4. Decolonial Blackness and Indigeneity in Sweden: An Email Conversation
Göran Collste, Gunlög Fur, Michael McEachrane, Olivette Otele, Kitimbwa Sabuni, Victor Wilson and May-Britt Öhman
II. The Welfare State
5. Racial Social Democracy and the Swedish Welfare State: Part I
Michael McEachrane
6. Racial Social Democracy and the Swedish Welfare State: Part II
Michael McEachrane
7. The Power of Silence: Variations in the Reproduction of Racial Capitalism Among White Male-dominated Trade Unions in Sweden
Paula Mulinari and Anders Neergaard
8. Decolonizing Swedish Health Care: Challenges and Ways Forward
Sarah Hamed and Beth Maina Ahlberg
9. Coloniality, Whiteness and Systemic Racism in Sweden: An Email Conversation
Minoo Alinia, Sarah Hamed, Domino Kai, Jasmine Kelekay, Michael McEachrane, Maribel Morey, Paula Mulinari and Anders Neergaard
III. Global Entanglements
10. Swedish Capital and the Coloniality of the Global Economy: Industrial Relations at LAMCO in the 1960s
Klas Rönnbäck and Oskar Broberg
11. Progress as Neocolonialism: Why Decoloniality Must Imply a Farewell to Development
Alf Hornborg
12. Decoloniality and Structural Racism in Swedish Development Assistance
Maria Eriksson Baaz and Paula Mählck
13. Toward a Green Transition: A Post- and Decolonial Analysis of the Green State of Sweden
Seema Arora-Jonsson and Arvid Stiernström
14. (De)Colonial Sweden in the World: An Email Conversation
Seema Arora-Jonsson, Maria Eriksson Baaz, Stefan Helgesson, Alf Hornborg, Paula Mählck, Michael McEachrane, Klas Rönnbäck and Rahel Weldeab Sebhatu
Biography
Michael McEachrane is a Member and the Rapporteur of the UN Permanent Forum on People of African Descent. He is also a 2024–2025 Racial Justice Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, a 2024 Visiting Fellow at the Harvard Law School Human Rights Program, an External Affiliate of the Sarah Remond Parker Centre for the Study of Racism at University College London and was previously a Visiting Researcher at the Raoul Wallenberg Institute of Human Rights in Sweden 2017–2024. His research is in the areas of Postcolonial/Decolonial Studies, Black European Studies, Critical Race Studies, Human Rights, and the Philosophy of Psychology.
Louis Faye is a cultural entrepreneur, writer and photographer. Born in Berlin and raised in Senegal and Morocco, he is the founding Director of the cultural association Diggante—which during the 1990s and 2000s helped introduce a postcolonial and diasporic consciousness to Sweden through cultural events, tours, and bringing such postcolonial luminaries to Sweden as V.Y. Mudimbe, Gayatri Spivak, Paul Gilroy, and Angela Davis.
"Foregrounding how Sweden has directly and indirectly benefited from colonial subjugation, both as a settler colonial state and as a member of the larger white-European polity, the chapters of Decolonial Sweden gather a compelling and well-researched much-needed account of how the colonial and racial conditions of global capital reach all and every corner of the planet."
Denise Ferreira da Silva, author of Unpayable Debt (2022), New York University, USA
"Decolonial Sweden offers a much-needed reminder that coloniality is both unexceptional and specific, situated; that our scholarship and politics have to engage this tension and that we have to do this collectively, using various registers and languages. This volume is a welcome tool in the struggle against colonial amnesia and disavowal."
Olivia U. Rutazibwa, London School of Economics and Political Science, UK
"An incredibly important and groundbreaking seminal work that fills many gaps left out of Sweden’s colonial history and national imaginary. This book offers sharp, clear-eyed discourse, which should open minds, educate, and stoke much-needed flames of change."
Lọlá Ákínmádé Åkerström, international bestselling author of In Every Mirror She’s Black
