Pathways to Violence Against Migrants traces the different pathways, or combinations of causal mechanisms, that lead from nonviolent opposition to migration into anti-migrant violence.

Applying the conceptual apparatus of social movement studies (frames, relations, opportunities, and collective emotions), the book develops six distinct sequences of causal mechanisms. These show how violence can develop through rapid processes of moral outrage and far-right mobilisation, through long processes of uneven demobilisation and escalation or independently of any nonviolent protest at all. The six pathways are developed through a comparative, mixed-methods study of 81 cases of anti-migrant violence in Sweden between 2012 and 2017. The cases involve various actors (ranging from unorganised youth gangs and village associations to neo-Nazi organisations) as well as very different types and intensities of violence (from death threats to arson attacks and bombings). Demonstrating the diversity of pathways to violence in a restricted setting and against a restricted category of targets, the book argues strongly against reducing the causes of violence to individual pathology, to ideological “extremism”, or to any single explanatory model.

This book will be of interest to researchers of political violence, the far right, anti-migrant politics, racism, and social movements.