This is a conceptual and explorative article that discusses how the police and policing in Sweden and the UK are affected by global and transnational conflicts, politics and events that spill over into local contexts. Our examples are the riots after the burning of the Quran in Sweden during Easter 2022 and the riots that followed the murders in Southport in the UK in summer 2024. To deal with these and similar conflicts, we argue that the police must pay closer attention to global and transnational dimensions and events. Despite that there are empirical reasons for arguing that “the local” is closely entwined with “the global” in areas such as economics, politics and social media, there is very little (if any) research on how police and policing are affected by the complex processes that interlinks local delivery with global events, and how these tensions are experienced by and affecting police officers in their everyday work. This article wants to draw attention to this research lacuna and call for more research on how global and local dimensions are interlinked and have an effect on public discourses, conflicts and tensions in communities, and on policing.

Multiagency collaboration between state and municipal actors such as schools, social services and the police is at the core of the Nordic countries’ approach to preventing radicalization and violent extremism. Yet, assessment of reported concerns of radicalization differs across countries. This qualitative study analyze how professionals negotiate assessments to identify factors that shape whether a concern of radicalization develops into a perception of risk. We argue that differences in structural factors and “institutional logics” in addition to trustful relations between practitioners at the local level affect collaboration and shape the perception of the task when the assessments of concrete concerns are negotiated. 

Municipalities and other forms of local government function as the backbone of European counterterrorism strategies. The rationale behind the responsibilisation of municipalities is that they are perceived as best positioned to discover and intervene against signs and factors that indicate vulnerability to radicalisation among specific groups or individuals. This chapter explores how vulnerability to radicalisation is made sense of in Swedish (n=20) and Danish (n=20) municipal preventing/countering violent extremism (P/CVE) policies, and we then categorise our findings according to a typology of societal, group and individual level factors. Drawing on sociological institutionalism and previous literature on P/CVE policymaking, we discuss the cognitive-cultural dynamics underpinning the rationalisations of vulnerability in the policies. The chapter shows how municipalities in both countries predominantly perceive radicalisation as driven by societal injustice. This narrative functions to legitimise radicalisation as a municipal issue and, therefore, mobilise social welfare actors and practices in the organisation. In addition, this finding suggests that the differences between national level polices, where Denmark has been found to draw more explicitly on a societal security logic, while Sweden leans towards a social care logic, seem to fade out as radicalisation is localised and made into a municipal issue.

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