Racial Profiling in the Racial Welfare State: Examining the Order of Policing in the Nordic Region

Building on two interview studies conducted in Finland and Sweden , this article examines policing practices in order to elaborate on the understanding of what we define as the “racial welfare state”. The analysis draws attention to the fact that bordering practices reproduce racial orders, within and beyond the nation-state. The embeddedness of the Nordic region in the European and Western sphere, with its colonial and racial legacies, is highlighted through the empirical material that focuses on the consequences of internal and external migration controls, as well as more general police stop-and-search practices. The study underlines the need to investigate racial profiling as a practice that enforces an imagined community based not on whiteness in general, but on Nordic whiteness in particular as the norm against which the bodies of ‘others’ are measured.