Terrorist Reporting in the Swedish Media: Reinforcing an Oriental/Occidental Division?

Paper 1 ‘Terrorist Reporting in the Swedish Media: Reinforcing an Oriental/Occidental Division?’ was prepared by Therese Rudebeck during an internship at the CSRP in 2011. The paper is of importance because it highlights the political assumptions of terrorism in Sweden by the media fuelled by some political quarters such as the Sverigedemokraterna (Swedish Democrats, SD). Within this paper Rudebeck argues that the terrorist attacks on Stockholm on 11 December 2010 brought as a result a worrying assumption that terrorists were Islamists associated with foreign refugees living in Sweden and that the openness of Sweden towards foreigners and asylum seekers constituted a risk to all Swedish citizens. This series of papers under the title of Current Issues in Religion and Politics aims at presenting original research conducted at the Centre for the Study of Religion and Politics (CSRP) of the University of St. Andrews.