Riots in the welfare state: The contours of a modern-day moral economy

The ring of burning cars around Stockholm: Tacitly political?

The riots in Husby, an ethnically diverse working-class suburb 20 minutes from the city centre of Stockholm, broke out on the evening of 19 May 2013. Protests had been expected, yet many were taken aback by the scale of the May riots. Six days earlier, the police had shot and killed a 69-year-old man in his apartment and wrapped up the incident in a story that local residents, who had been at the scene, exposed as false. The police had shot a man, who posed no immediate danger, and claimed that he was taken to hospital for treatment, when in fact his dead body was being carried out on a stretcher. The incident was treated as an example of injustice and arrogance experienced on a daily basis by local residents. So protests were expected. Over the weekend, local community organizations arranged outdoor activities to prevent people from rioting. But on Sunday night, almost one week after the shooting, several cars were set on fire. The purpose seems to have been to attract the police to the neighbourhood. Many people were out on the streets. The police were attacked with rocks and kicks, and their counter-charge came to include bystanders. Local residents were pushed and beaten, and some police officers expressed racist insults. The situation got out of control and concentrated the anger on the police. The riots would go on for five nights and spread to a number of nearby suburbs, and subsequently to some other Swedish cities.

The burning of cars belonging to local residents and companies, parked in the area, was the core around which the riots unfolded. In the Stockholm area, almost 200 cars were burned during the riots according to insurance companies. During one night alone, the fire brigade made 90 turnouts to 15 different neighbourhoods. In some publicized cases, individual fire fighters were attacked with rocks, and it appears that the rationale was to force them away or call for back-up because the police were the real target. Cars in flames also dominated the media coverage, which reached all parts of the world, with CNN and Al Jazeera reporting from a new ‘war zone’. It generated the impression that the entire ring of impoverished suburbs around Stockholm was burning.

Should we view the ring of burning cars as collective action against perceived injustices and prevailing relationships of power? Many scholars tend to think of the riots as political. Following the Husby riots, Schierup et al. (2014: 4) declared ‘the emergence of new, urban, justice movements’. The British riots in 2011 have been analysed as political, propelled by grievances of which the actors were vaguely conscious, and that were firmly tied to structural inequality (Akram, 2014), but also as non-political, permeated with consumerism and without ideological coordinates (Treadwell et al., 2013). In a French context, Dikeç (2007) has spoken about ‘unarticulated’ urban justice movements. But it is difficult to find an adequate account of the political nature of this kind of riot. Even researchers who defend the political nature of riots use qualifiers, such as ‘unarticulated’ (Dikeç, 2007), ‘unconscious’ (Akram, 2014) and ‘emerging’ (Schierup et al., 2014).

Clearly, the Husby riots were not political in any straightforward sense. Without sustaining organization and without explicit claims, the 2013 riots do not fit the contentious politics model. The model challenges an old-fashioned view of politics as party politics and captures collective action outside the established channels. The focus rests on the grassroots movements that express themselves in public challenges and make claims on decision-makers (Tarrow, 1998; Tilly and Tarrow, 2007). But the conceptual framework cannot grasp the political dimension of the Husby riots. Locally based organizations were no doubt important in deepening the understanding of the background causes among a wider audience. Megafonen (‘The Megaphone’) was one local organization that articulated a rights-based message before and during the riots, and was political in the way presumed by the contentious politics model (Schierup et al., 2014). But no claims were put forward by those who took action in the riots. ‘The message’, if there was one, was communicated through rocks and fire. Many political forces, in the local community and at the national level, made claims on behalf of, or in response to, the riots; yet the rioters themselves never articulated any claims in public. Neither was there a specific organization behind the actions. The riots seem to have relied exclusively on informal networks. The presence of a strong civil society partly formed by the experience of being excluded from key social resources, the limited success of police investigations and the small number of convictions following the riots suggest that rioters had access to resources that enabled confrontations with the police, such as friendship, trust and know-how. But they were not otherwise organized; the riots were not sustained by formal organization.

The Husby riots were thus not political judged by the standards of the contentious politics model, which has been so influential in recent social movement research (Haenfler et al., 2012) and in social history (Brink Pinto et al., 2015). Nor did they in other significant respects belong to the local history of political riots, associated with international solidarity, squatting, antifascism, environmental protection or animal rights. The 2013 riots seem to have more in common with other major outbreaks of social disorder in post-war Stockholm. The inner-city riots in Berzelii park in 1951, Hötorget in 1965 and Kungsträdgården in 1985, to mention three of the more prominent ones, were also not borne by any particular organization, and were not – as far as we know – protests against anything in particular. According to the ensuing inquiries at that time, they were diffuse expressions of protest, mainly carried out by working-class youth. The meaning of the events was wide open to interpretation, and questions were raised about where society as a whole was heading, on the general theme of working-class youth and social change (Nilsson, 2006).

As an alternative to straightforward political interpretations, it has been suggested that the notion of moral economy should be extended beyond its original historical context to the understanding of recent European riots (Harvie and Milburn, 2013; Nyzell, 2014). It may capture the tacit politics of institutionally entrenched conceptions – why they were invoked by local residents to make sense of the riots and why established politicians were susceptible to them. The tension between the political and the non-political was present in EP Thompson’s original essay on the ‘moral economy’ in the English bread riots of the 18th century:

While this moral economy cannot be described as ‘political’ in any advanced sense, nevertheless it cannot be described as unpolitical either, since it supposed definite, and passionately held, notions of the common weal. (Thompson, 1971: 79)

In this respect, there are similarities between the bread riots of the 18th century and the Husby riots two centuries later. The rioters’ conceptions were not elaborated into a specific ideology or sustained by formal organization, but the conceptions themselves were inherently political, because they centred on the distribution of rights and resources in the relationship between rulers and ruled. The same characteristics set the riots apart from explicit political protest. The tacit nature of the conceptions made the riots appear diffuse. The rioters’ conceptions were organically generated by prior institutional arrangements, which made the establishment susceptible to them. To understand the Husby 2013 riots, in particular their fluid, or temporary, legitimacy within the community and the ‘social’ response within the political establishment, we need to come to grips with the tension between the political and the non-political and the role of ‘passionately held’ notions of justice. The aim here is to trace the tacit politics of the moral economy.

Such an undertaking seems to require a number of conceptual qualifications. The concept of a ‘moral economy’ must be disengaged from its original historical context. Whereas the 18th century bread riots constituted a direct intervention in the operation of capitalist markets, the economic component of contemporary riots is diluted, or rather integrated into a more complex understanding of citizenship, which was unavailable in the 18th century. In those days, the increased price of bread was the trigger. But the price rise itself was not the main thing, nor was the hunger that followed. It is important to remember that EP Thompson discussed the price of bread in a direct polemic against economistic analysis. He argued that what led to riots was not the fact that many people had to starve as the result of increased prices but that the authorities were perceived to be betraying their responsibility to keep the price of bread down in times of crisis. Local middlemen such as millers and bakers were allowed to raise their prices drastically without anyone intervening. The authorities failed to honour their part of the tacit agreement. The notion of the establishment’s violation of an entrenched social contract was the active element, and that notion is transferable to the current situation. The difference is that drastically raised prices no longer work as the trigger. Today, it tends to be the face-to-face interaction with the police that provokes riots (Fassin, 2013; Newburn, 2015), and by extension exposes the moral economy.

Further, historians have been criticizing the concept of moral economy for cutting everything from the same cloth and implying future developments towards a more advanced political consciousness (for an overview, see Navickas, 2011). Over the course of one century, the ‘class struggle without class’ (Thompson, 1978) would evolve into a politically conscious and organized working class. But why assume that history will repeat itself? We might want to avoid teleologies of class formation. We should also be cautious not to stress the consensus around conceptions of proper social order within Husby, or any other community. If riots reveal ordinary people’s ‘underlying assumptions about social and economic relations’ (Randall and Charlesworth, 2000: 4) – and for this reason provide a privileged vantage point – these assumptions do not necessarily constitute a coherent world-view. Thus, the concept of a modern-day moral economy has to allow for the entitlements of citizenship, for heterogeneity and for fractured consensus.

Stressing the perceived legitimacy

The central conceptual concern is the perceived legitimacy. A Thompsonian reading of popular riots differentiates claims about legitimacy at three levels: one claim about the individual motivation of active participants, another claim about shared understandings within the community, and a third claim about the partial susceptibility of the political establishment. In his words, rioters acted in ‘the belief that they were defending traditional rights’; in this they were ‘supported by the wider consensus of the community’, and the popular consensus was to some extent ‘endorsed’ by the authorities of the day (Thompson, 1971: 78). In what follows, I investigate the two latter claims – the perceived legitimacy within the community based on an interview study, and the nature of the endorsement based on a study of the parliamentary debate.

The study was initiated during the riots. An ad hoc team of eight researchers in different social science departments at Stockholm University was formed to collect the narratives of local residents in Husby. We wanted to understand the string of events from their point of view, and were inspired by the ‘Readings the Riots’ project, launched after the London riots in 2011 (Lewis et al., 2011). During the summer of 2013, we carried out and transcribed 30 interviews with men and women aged between 16 and 81 years. The interviewees lived or worked in Husby and had been out on the streets during the riots. Most of them were organized in various civil society organizations, ranging from political parties, to tenants’ associations, to religious communities. To gather feedback from local residents, the preliminary findings were later presented at a well-attended public meeting in Husby (De los Reyes et al., 2014).

We employed a grounded approach, with rather general, semi-structured interview questions. The interviews generated first-hand information about the experiences of local residents during the riots. How did they make sense of what had just occurred? The interviews gave crucial insights into the perceptions and the expectations related to citizenship, entitlement, inequality and discrimination that motivate and underlie the Husby riots and similar incidents. In this sense, the interviews, conducted before the meaning of the riots had settled into a familiar story, were part of the process of constructing the meaning of the riots, the local negotiation of what they were and their wider significance. There was no consensus to be found, yet both within parliament and within the local community, one understanding was hegemonic. In terms of Thompson’s three claims of perceived legitimacy, we cannot say anything about the first one (the individual motivation of active participants). As far as we know, none of our interviewees took any active part in acts of violence, which could be seen to limit the analyses. We do not know if the rioters acted in ‘the belief that they were defending traditional rights’, or if they ascribed a different meaning to the events. Empirical research on political protest stresses that those who participate tend to differ in certain respects from those who abstain, for instance in terms motivation and socioeconomic factors (Klandermans, 2004; Norris et al., 2005). According to a Thompsonian approach, on the other hand, individuals who participate in these kinds of riot generally do so out of conceptions of entitlement and of social order, which they share with most other members in the local community. The notion of the moral economy implies no distinction between active participants and passive bystanders in this respect. Those who burned cars and threw rocks at the police would thus have acted on what is commonsensical, the unwritten rules on what you can expect or must respect. Yet that is no more than an assumption.

The stories told were different. Some interviewees spoke at length about the police, whereas others were more concerned with the lack of political participation. Some interviewees disclosed a long historical perspective, going back decades, whereas others started with the police shooting that triggered the events. Some were frustrated on behalf of others, others were talking about themselves. Some saw the riots as a nuisance and praised the police. Yet through the different experiences and the shifting emphasis, we could discern a motley web of notions that form a tale of growing inequality, lack of democracy and racism that involves wider social dynamics and is not geographically restricted to Husby.

The meaning of the riots was also subject to intense political discussion at the national level. The parliamentary debate represented one central institution of sense-making within the political establishment. In conjunction with the interviews, we analysed the plenary discussion in parliament at the time of the riots, in May 2013, with contributions from all political parties. ¹ The publicly available transcripts revealed an ambivalent endorsement of the local moral economy – points of overlap, significant silences and differences in emphasis.

Our most basic finding was the situational, temporary nature of legitimacy. The riots were initially met with a complex mix of understanding, condemnation and justification. Local residents were generally ambiguous.

I understand why they did the riots, you should not sympathize with all the vandalism, people’s cars were burning and you know that kind of stuff. I cannot support that either, but you have to understand why they riot.

The interviewee articulates a widely shared position – ‘you should not sympathize with all the vandalism’ – just to return to the importance of understanding the underlying causes. Understanding is carefully balanced against justifying. Although burning cars is wrong, we all need to understand why it happens, that is the message; the grounds for their actions cannot simply be dismissed or condemned. What happened was logical. The riots were generally seen as a response to changed social conditions, with faceless proponents and opponents, and driven by frustration rather than clear goals. And if what happened was a quasi-necessary consequence of social conditions, we have to make efforts to understand; otherwise, the cycle of violence and frustration will continue.

There were also dissenting voices. Some residents placed their loyalty on the side of the police.

We actually yelled at the police, saying that “you are doing a marvellous job; come on, fight!”.

In the interview material, we can trace the continually ongoing negotiation about the legitimacy of the riots. Those who threw rocks and burned cars were referred to as ‘the young people’. The category of ‘young people’ symbolized frustration and misdirected anger. None of interviewees thought that throwing rocks at the police and other forms of criminal behaviour could be justified in normal circumstances. Yet, when it came to pointing out the underlying causes, highlighting government arrogance and unjust conditions, the ‘young people’ also acted as representatives for the majority of Husby residents. The line between rioters and other residents was permeable.

I saw my friend throwing rocks the first night. I understand her. You just wanted to do it. I thought many times that I should… I was so close to doing it myself. Then I thought that I will not lower myself to the same level as them [the police]. Everybody felt the same anger, the same frustration.

Although the understanding of underlying causes is present all the time, legitimacy is severely restricted in time and place. There are given frames for what is justifiable and not justifiable, but these frames were temporarily out of play, following the lethal shooting of the 69-year-old man. The limits for justifiable actions lost their self-evidence and became subject to negotiation, which seems to have been ongoing for the duration of the riots. The behaviour of the ‘young people’ – setting fire to cars or throwing rocks at the police and other forms of transgression – was weighed against perceived government infractions, and injustice more generally. Established society appeared to have cancelled a tacit agreement, and thus residents were also freed from their obligations. None of the interviewees thought that car burning or attacks on the police could be justified on their own part, but they were understanding when it was undertaken by others. There was a sliding scale between understanding and legitimacy. And positions taken were by no means fixed. Silent approval, or widespread understanding, during the two initial nights shifted into a distancing from, or condemnation of, further violence. This shift of balance occurred during the third night, when a new temporary consensus was established.

It was like this: “Okay, the message has got through. You are dissatisfied with the behaviour of the police, with the police and all the others. You have said what you wanted to say, but now it is over.”

Several interviewees had also been out on the streets the first and the second night but felt overrun by events. During the third night, however, they experienced that the ‘young people’ started listening to their arguments. The widespread understanding of burning cars and attacks on the police began to fade into the background. There was a sense of completion: ‘the message’ had got through. There was a very noticeable shift in terms of community conceptions of legitimacy. The same actions were no longer condoned.

All events – the lethal shooting of the 69 year old, the racist utterances by the police, the car burnings, the international media coverage, the official response, the ongoing attacks on the police, the rumours of imminent Nazi attacks, local residents organizing to end the violence, etc. – were seen, supported and condemned in context. The temporary legitimacy, without which the string of events might never have got past a few burnt-out cars to evolve into consecutive nights of full-scale riots, was an outcome of negotiations and discussions among the residents, which were dictated by tacit assumptions about the social and moral order. It is to these underlying conceptions that we now turn.

The contours of a modern-day moral economy

Locally, the riots were interpreted through a modern-day moral economy, which included shared conceptions of the rights and the obligations of ordinary citizens and basic assumptions about justice and social order. The moral economy was generated by earlier institutional arrangements. In this case, the expectations were rooted in the post-war Swedish welfare state. It was a state that had taken on far-reaching responsibility for the basic needs of each citizen in return for work and compliance. The welfare model, also known as the People’s Home (Folkhemmet), was built around the industrial working class but included all citizens in principle, regardless of social status (Barker, 2013; Esping-Andersen, 1990). The right to paid work, the right to housing, uniformly delivered social services, mass consumption and rule-governed interaction with the authorities were among the far-reaching state responsibilities associated with welfare model.

The post-war Swedish welfare state is vividly remembered by the Husby residents, although not everyone had had direct experience of it. Many are relatively young, or had immigrated in recent years; their personal experiences of work and education in Sweden in the early 1980s must have been limited. Still, the welfare model was part of the collective memory, kept alive through more than a decade of popular mobilizations against cuts in local social services (Lundström, forthcoming). As a specific institutional arrangement in the Fordist phase of capitalism, however, its heyday was long since over (Hort, 2014; Korpi, 2006; Larsson et al., 2012). So, although its promises of regular employment, free access to uniformly delivered social services and mass consumption were no longer fulfilled, or were fulfilled to a lesser extent, the welfare model was still present as a standard. In the interviews, the expectations constituted the frame of reference that attributed meaning and legitimacy to different courses of action during the riots.

The residents were acutely aware that Husby in key respects – such as income, employment, school results and health – was doing significantly worse than most other areas in Stockholm and that the differences used to be less dramatic. Things seemed to be moving in the wrong direction. Thus, on the one hand, there was the perception that resources, influence and employment opportunities were steadily decreasing; on the other hand, there were a number of expectations that had been generated by the welfare state. What Thompson would have referred to as ‘traditional rights’ were not fulfilled and were not forgotten. ‘Frustration’ was perhaps the single most frequently used word to explain the riots. The majority of interviewees had no difficulty understanding the feeling. But it was more difficult to pinpoint the causes, as one interviewee reflects when directly asked about what gave rise to frustration.

I don’t know. But people feel frustrated because they do not get a foothold in society, people are frustrated because they cannot support their family, people are frustrated because they are not being recognized, people are frustrated because … they feel that they do not get an honest chance, there are many things like that.

Like inequality, frustration is relative. It is linked to specific conceptions of entitlement. Frustration is an effect not of poverty, unemployment or unfair treatment per se, but of such experiences combined with expectations of what you expect to be entitled to. There is a pervasive sense of being denied rights taken for granted elsewhere. One interviewee says that residents ‘feel let down by these [public] institutions’. The feeling of being let down should be taken literally, as broken promises.

The moral economy was not explicitly formulated in the interviews. Since the conceptions and expectations are basic and self-evident for those who speak, they often remain implicit. But they are still traceable, in our case above all in the use of geographical references. Geographical metaphors described both the grounds for and the limitations of what it was reasonable to expect. ‘Sweden’ and ‘Kista’, the subway station before Husby, were frequently mentioned. ‘Sweden’ was the point of reference for the justified grounds of expectations, while ‘Kista’ was the point of reference for the clear limitations of the same expectations.

In the interviews, ‘Sweden’ is generally used as an indicator of standards of acceptability. Because ‘Sweden’ symbolizes state responsibilities, what citizenship holds out for each and every person, the reference is made to stress just how unacceptable current conditions are. The following example is typical:

I live in an apartment with my mother. She has to borrow money to pay the rent. And we live in Sweden! She borrows money every month. And you live in Sweden.

The interviewee thinks that it is unacceptable to have to borrow money to pay the rent. But he does not say so explicitly; instead he repeats that ‘you live in Sweden’. The assumption is that, if you live in Sweden, you should be able to afford an ordinary rental apartment. But his mother cannot afford that. Another example concerns the living standard. Private nuisances are said to be one of several ‘things that are not taken seriously’.

There is mildew; there are cockroaches [in the apartment]. That is not okay. … Many people hope that the landlord will take care of the problem.

That someone will deal with clearing the apartments of vermin would be taken for granted elsewhere in the country, the interviewee thinks. But it is not taken for granted in ethnically diverse Husby, and the lack of action is interpreted as a result of ethnic discrimination.

As more than 80 percent of the residents in Husby have a foreign background, mainly from the Middle East, Latin America and northern Africa, ‘Sweden’ carried an extra charge, which was a legacy of the notion of citizenship within the welfare state compounded by personal experiences of racism and discrimination. Many of the residents seemed to think that the welfare model was never intended for them. In one sense that was true, since the responsibilities of the welfare state embraced citizens who were almost exclusively native. The perceived exclusion from an official Swedishness was reinforced in personal encounters with authorities and through media consumption. As a consequence, the moral economy became more complex. The entrenched, self-evident rights had to be actively claimed, since they were perceived to be questioned on ethnic grounds. In Husby, the modern moral economy was extended with a racialized dimension.

For obvious reasons, the racialized dimension was missing in Thompson’s original account. To the peasant population of the 18th century, the traditional rights may have appeared entirely self-evident or unproblematic. But, in the case of Husby, a certain kind of double book-keeping prevails in the moral economy. It was articulated as a double claim to citizenship in the Swedish welfare state. The claim was double because it was taken for granted – like the ‘traditional rights’ of which Thompson speaks – but in the knowledge that citizenship was constantly questioned, and for this reason could not be taken for granted. The customary expectations were not simply passed on from one generation to the next. As one interviewee explains, his expectations of citizenship differ from those of his parents:

I can experience this from my parents. It is something of the “thank you and be grateful” system at work. But that has its limitations. I mean, we join in and work, we join in and go to school, we also contribute. I work part time with young people; I am going to study now. We want to contribute to the country just as much.

The need to be grateful and content with less is associated with the older, immigrant generation, and it is overruled by what the welfare state is seen to hold. At the same time, the interviewee is convinced that his expectations of Swedish citizenship can by no means be taken for granted. The residents of Husby may be placed outside established society for reasons of ethnicity: ‘We were not allowed to be Swedes for the duration of the riots’, the same interviewee explains. To him, the media coverage seemed to convey the message that ‘this is Sweden and you burn cars’, thereby establishing a socio-racial line between disadvantaged suburbs and the rest of the country. In this way, the use of ‘Sweden’ as an indicator of standards of acceptability involves both a passive, cultural adaptation and an active, conscious claim. The traditional rights of the welfare state are on the one hand taken for granted by, and on the other hand appropriated by, an ethnically diverse working class.

The expectations and the sense of entitlement had very clear limitations. No one compares Husby with conditions in the more affluent areas in Stockholm. Instead, the main point of reference is Kista, a working-class suburb, one stop away on the same underground line. Although in many ways it is similar to Husby, the general perception is that Kista is doing significantly better. Schools and health care are seen to be superior, and the neighbouring suburb houses a large shopping mall and has managed to attract major developers of information technology. The latter fact is widely known but was rarely mentioned in the interviews. Instead, the shopping mall stands out as the symbol of the relative wealth of Kista. The shops seem to offer opportunities. One interviewee spoke of the shopping mall as a ‘consumer’s paradise’, where investments are made; ‘and within a stone’s throw, you have Husby, where there is nothing’. He laments that Husby residents did not get work at the Kista shopping mall. Such employment opportunities were seen to be badly needed: ‘we must have jobs for our citizens here, so that they are employed, that they have an income’. He is visionary, yet does not speak about a career or about qualified jobs – merely about ‘income’. The same interviewee goes on to define ‘a good school’ in terms of having a manageable number of students in the classroom, not in terms of promoting individual learning; and ‘good health care’ is said to ‘make us well and healthy so that we can work’. Kista exemplifies all this; it stands for employment, decent schools, health care and consumption, while at the same time exemplifying the limits of expectations on employment, schools, health care and consumption.

Our interviews provide an insight into what happens when growing inequality, perceived lack of democracy or everyday racism are mediated through the customary conceptions of justice and social order, which were generated by the post-war Swedish welfare state. Many interviewees share an experience of not having their rights as citizens being respected to the full extent. As one succinctly put it:

There are citizens and there are citizens, and evidently I am a second-rate citizen, the quasi-citizen. I was beginning to understand who I am.

The experience of second-rate citizenship is condensed and confirmed in the encounter with the police. Stories abound of how people – mostly young, mostly male – are being stopped and searched by the police, for instance on suspicion of drug possession. From a police perspective, these are non-intrusive controls, sometimes merely asking for an ID card. But in context, or in the context of structural inequality and racism, such police controls take on a different meaning. Even relatively innocent controls are experienced as harassment:

The police stop you every day; every day because you drive a certain kind of car, every day because you are walking with a group of five or six people, just chatting … They put you up against the wall in the local centre. Right in the centre where your parents pass by, you know, such things and it is such things that you are fed up with, I believe.

Being searched by the police confirms the social devaluation, and exposure in front of family and friends is humiliating, a sort of public ritual. In this way, by doing what they have always done, tracing drugs and minor offences, in a changed social setting, the police come to symbolize not only social authority in general but also what is wrong with it. As the official representatives of the state, their use of force is a visible example of an otherwise less tangible structural racism, and their inability to offer protection translates into a further example of the arrogance displayed by the political establishment. This means that what exposes the moral economy has changed in relation to the 18th century, when direct interaction with middlemen such as millers triggered riots. The ‘bread riots’ of the 21st century started in the face-to-face interaction with the police. It is the same kind of violation of the normative order. It is a recurring notion of a political elite that violates an entrenched social contract – by letting it happen – but the actors who embody the violation have changed, from millers and bakers to police officers on patrol. Whereas the scandalous prices charged by local merchants on the market were seen to violate the fundamental economic order that guaranteed ordinary people bread and other necessities of life, excessive control by the police constitutes a violation of the core of citizenship and the basic responsibilities of the state. The moral economy is now exposed on the streets rather than in the market.

Nostalgia and the cynicism of the political establishment

The welfare deal is part of the institutional memory of the state that once formulated it. For this reason, state officials and leading politicians are likely to be receptive to the moral economy of the working-class population in Husby. Although policy documents and organizational models may change from one year to another, institutions and to some extent personnel possess an inertia of their own. This section documents the ways in which the underlying causes and concerns were understood in parliament at the time of the riots. As one might expect, given a Thompsonian reading of the legitimacy of popular riots, the political establishment did endorse some of the concerns and conceptions of the local community. Hence, the primary question is the nature of the endorsement, or the partial overlap with the local moral economy.

In parliament, the riots were primarily linked to socio-structural problems, such as high unemployment and poverty. This social interpretation was shared by the entire centre-left opposition, and spelled out most clearly by Jonas Sjöstedt, the leader of the Left Party:

Is there a connection between youth unemployment, poverty, lack of prospects for the future, the dismantling of youth centres and a society which is becoming more and more divided? … Can the Prime Minister see any connection between the growing class inequality and what is now unfortunately happening in parts of Stockholm?

The social reading of the riots stood against a moral-cultural framework. The right-wing Populist Party provided the other pole in the parliamentary debate. Speaking about the riots, its leader, Jimmie Åkesson, said that:

These problems emanate from what is at bottom an irresponsible immigration policy combined with a wholly permissive integration policy. It has created a new underclass in Sweden, which lives segregated from Swedish society and which does not identify itself with the Swedish majority society.

The bottom line was that non-European immigrants were unable to adapt for cultural reasons, and the riots were the price Sweden was forced to pay for the failure on the part of the political establishment to realize this basic fact. Apart from the Sweden Democrats, no political party used immigration and culture as an explanatory principle. Overall, ethnicity was a non-issue in the parliamentary debate. The silence extended to discriminatory practices as possible causes or underlying grievances. The silence on the police, in particular, is notable.

The ruling right-wing coalition was generally hesitant in relation to existing explanatory frames, squeezed as they were between the moral-cultural position of the right-wing populists and the socio-structural critique of the centre-left opposition. On the one hand, government politicians were reluctant to portray the riots as an expression of foreign culture. On the other hand, they were happy to discuss all sorts of social problems in underprivileged suburbs but were unwilling to accept a causal correlation between any of them and the unrest. As Johan Linander of the Centre Party, and Vice-Chairman of the Parliamentary Committee on Justice, said:

One makes it much too easy if one believes, or perhaps wants to believe, that social exclusion in the peripheries of the city is the reason why rocks are being thrown. … Living conditions are overcrowded, and the housing estates are not renovated as they should be. Integration is generally speaking bad. Individuals with immigrant backgrounds are discriminated against in society. But this is no reason and no excuse to burn cars or to throw rocks.

A social reading threatened to relativize the moral responsibility of individuals. Yet, indirectly, right-wing politicians basically accepted the social reading of the riots. To question the relative causal weight of social exclusion, school results, living conditions and ethnic discrimination is also a way to confirm the importance of structural conditions compared with the cultural context.

If structural explanations were endorsed, with qualifications, by members of parliament, at least in terms of emphasis, there was uncontested consensus around the areas that needed attention to prevent future riots of the same kind. Politicians from all parties rallied around the need to improve existing social institutions. The socially deprived neighbourhoods around the big cities needed better schools, social activities for the youth, more policing, and more labour market policies – that was the nature of the challenges that the riots posed. Johan Linander again spoke for the ruling right-wing coalition:

This is about employment and education, employment and education. Beyond that, we need a community-based and accessible police, working with a long-term view in the neighbourhoods.

The same areas returned when Morgan Johansson, the Social Democratic Chairman of the Parliamentary Committee on Justice, entered the debate.

Our proposals are thus centred on the police, the social services, labour market policy, schools, social insurances and child allowances. This is not an immigration issue. It is a question of social class.

Causes and solutions were thus sought in the relatively conflict-free domain of the social: more employment, better schools and less discrimination. From a Thompsonian perspective, the dominance of the social reading within the political establishment can be seen as an endorsement of the customary conceptions of justice and of social order, which were also articulated by the Husby residents. Of course, residents and politicians differed on whether the racism of the police was structural or incidental, whether the local community had experienced drastic cut-backs of social services, how to interpret the statistics on unemployment or school results, how unsuccessful the projects of urban development had been, or whether inequality necessarily resulted in severe tensions. Still, most people in the neighbourhood and in parliament never really questioned the overall social interpretation; namely, that the riots had something to do with the police, with the delivery of social services, with employment opportunities, and with inequality. Although the riots themselves were often perceived in moral terms – as criminal or misguided – the causes attributed to the riots, and the proposed solutions, belonged to the social dimension.

That being said, the same social conditions were not assigned the same meaning. Just like the bread-rioters of the 18th century, the Husby residents had been left behind by capitalist development. Their customary conceptions of justice and social order were out of step with the overall project of streamlining public administration, strengthening global competitiveness and channelling capital investment to attractive sites, bolstered by security regimes for disadvantaged areas and populations (Brenner, 2003; Eick and Briken, 2014). Difficult social conditions showed up as risk factors to be managed under the conditions and institutional arrangements of the current, globalized stage of capitalism, with little space for the general social policies of the welfare era. As a consequence, unemployment, police racism and poor social services were seen as indicators of unrest and not as unjustifiable indifference to customary rights. Ironically, just before the riots broke out, the local police in the Husby area had completed a three-year project to develop a risk management strategy towards social unrest, co-funded by the European Union (Lindblom, 2013). So, although most members of parliament endorsed the local moral economy, the nature of that endorsement was nostalgic, or cynical.

Conclusions

In the absence of identifiable causes or organization, the 2013 Husby riots appeared to be diffuse expressions of protests, mainly carried out by working-class youth, the precise meaning of which was being articulated and contested at various levels. At the local level, in the community, entrenched conceptions of justice and of social order ascribed a temporary legitimacy to the Husby riots. For a short period of time, the limits to justifiable actions were subject to negotiation. Setting fire to cars or throwing rocks at the police were weighed against the fatal police action and government neglect more generally. During the first two nights, the riots were met with silent approval, or widespread understanding, but during the third night this shifted into a distancing from, or condemnation of, further violence.

The temporary legitimacy had a material base. The post-war Swedish welfare state created a set of expectations and assumptions tied to the idea of citizenship and the distribution of rights and obligations between rulers and ruled. The grounds for and limitations of what was reasonable to expect were indirectly articulated in the interviews by the use of geographical metaphors. ‘Sweden’ was the point of reference for the justified grounds of expectations, while ‘Kista’, the subway station before Husby, was the point of reference for the clear limitations of the same expectations. Regular employment and free access to uniformly delivered social services constituted the base-line as well as the horizon of expectations. These conceptions constituted a modern-day moral economy – generated by earlier institutional arrangements, widely shared within the local community, and reactivated in decades of struggle. Such notions of legitimacy are central in the context of riots, since it is not direct exposure to social change in itself, but this exposure as mediated through community conceptions of customary rights that motivates extraordinary courses of action. Hence, to local residents, the 2013 Husby riots were a response to the high unemployment, poor social services and everyday racism perceived as government infractions of entrenched conceptions of justice and social order. The perception was condensed in the interaction with the police, as the immediate representatives of government.

The political establishment shared some of the concerns and the conceptions with the local community. Even conservative party leaders discussed the riots in relation to high unemployment and unequal living conditions. The dominance of the social reading in parliament could be seen as partial endorsement of the moral economy of the welfare state, associated with far-reaching state responsibilities for each citizen’s basic needs. But the same social conditions were not assigned the same meaning in the community and in the parliament. The moral economy is curiously lagging behind. It articulates the common sense of social and economic relations, which belong to a previous era, in the encounter with new socio-political realities. The underlying concerns were part of the institutional memory of the state that once formulated the welfare deal. But they were inscribed in a risk management approach geared towards overall stability rather than the well-being of Husby residents. In this sense, the endorsement of the local moral economy was nostalgic and cynical at the same time.

The Husby riots were spectacular but not unique. What theoretical lessons could be drawn for the study of contemporary urban riots? The contentious politics model, lately so popular within the literature on urban unrest, cannot capture the tacit politics of the riots. The car burnings and the attacks on the police were not accompanied by political claims or sustained by separate organization. And without separate organization and without explicit claims, the riots lack precisely that which characterizes political movements according to the contentious politics model (Tarrow, 1998; Tilly and Tarrow, 2007). Instead, the driving normative element in Husby, and by extension in similar riots, was a modern-day moral economy. The tacit politics of contemporary urban riots resembles the moral economy described by EP Thompson. Just like the classical moral economy, the modern version comprises commonly shared conceptions of justice and social order, which were generated by earlier institutional arrangements and met a belated understanding within the political elites. And, as in the 18th century, what propelled the riots was the perception that the established authorities had broken their part of the social contract. But the notion of moral economy needs to be extended. In Husby, the assumptions and the expectations were tied to a concept of citizenship that was unavailable in the 18th century. The residents did not consider themselves as subjects of the king with the right to have food on the table, but as citizens who work, consume, educate themselves, need healthcare and interact with the authorities. In all these roles, the residents expected certain rights to be respected, which have been part of what it means to be a citizen since the establishment of the welfare state. At the same time, many residents were aware that the welfare model was not intended for them. The classical moral economy needs to be extended with a racialized dimension. Whereas the rights and expectations may be unproblematic for a native population with first-hand experiences of the welfare state, the moral economy in Husby was characterized by a double claim to citizenship. The self-evident rights could not simply be taken for granted but had to be actively claimed, since they were perceived to be questioned on ethnic grounds. Finally, the moral economy was exposed not on the market but on the street. What triggered the riots was still the perception that the political establishment was failing to honour its part of the social contract, although the actors who embody the violation had shifted from middlemen on the market to police officers on patrol.