A growing number of states are adopting a feminist foreign policy (FFP). While this change has excited much scholarly attention, the process by which countries decide to adopt FFP remains unclear: How can we explain their journey toward the formal adoption of FFP? What factors create an environment in which these states were willing (and able) to declare their foreign policy feminist? We bring together literature on FFP and foreign policy change to identify the factors that lead to the uptake of FFP. The roles of a favorable domestic context, policy entrepreneurs, a new governing coalition, and the international context for feminism are highlighted as having clear impact on the decision to adopt FFP. The paper focuses on two different cases: Sweden, which pioneered the idea of FFP until a rollback on its position following domestic elections in 2022, and Chile, which only adopted FFP in 2022.

Social democratic parties have contributed to the development of welfare state retrenchment in many European countries. While numerous studies have attempted to explain this, few have focused on how parties legitimize cuts, given that they are often unpopular with social democratic voters. Examining Sweden, we argue that the Swedish Social Democratic Party has developed a legitimation model that presents welfare cuts as a way of safeguarding the welfare state. This model has been persistently used since the early 1990s and is now central to the party's rhetoric. This has implications for how we should understand the ideological development of Swedish social democracy and suggests that it may be fruitful to study how welfare cuts are justified in other empirical contexts.

We present results from a pre-registered, well-powered $(N \gt 3,000,000)$ text message get-out-the-vote (GOTV) experiment, conducted during the 2019 European Parliament election in Sweden. Our findings suggest that a simple text message increases the likelihood of voting by 0.3 percentage points. Half of this effect spills over to untreated household members while workplace spillovers are near zero. Subsequent analysis reveals that the direct treatment effect is noticeably stronger among individuals with below-average voting propensities. Interestingly, within this same group, the household spillovers are significantly negative. We speculate and provide some indirect evidence, that these negative spillover effects may stem from the text message reminder influencing the behaviour of voters already motivated to vote. Above all, we propose that an increase in early voting, as opposed to voting on Election Day, among treated individuals may weaken the mechanisms thought to explain spillover effects since voters are less likely to bring their family members with them when voting early.

This article investigates changes in the right to social assistance – a means-tested cash support programme, regulated by the Social Services Act – for irregularised migrants over a period of four decades, 1982–2022. The article makes the case that austerity policies have hollowed out the right to support, with significant repercussions for those with irregularised residency status. In doing so, it draws on a range of empirical data to shed light on the dynamics of legal change over time and across various settings, identifying both continuities and critical turning points. The latter include shifts in national or local migration policies, and novel intersections between migration law and social law, epitomised by court judgments that have redrawn the lines of inclusion and exclusion in the sphere of rights holders. The article also highlights continuous issues concerning inconsistencies in the legal sources made used of by courts, neglect of children’s interests and needs, and an application of requirements for participation in work-related activities that disadvantage migrants and citizens alike. Ultimately, the article offers insights into how social rights can be preserved in the context of increasingly restrictive migration and social policies.

In September 2023, the trial at Stockholm District Court against Orrön Energy (previously Lundin Energy) and two corporate directors for complicity in war crimes in Sudan between 1999 and 2003, started. The Lundin case is part of a trend of attempts to hold corporations criminally accountable for their alleged involvement in serious human rights abuses and provides a unique opportunity to assess the possibilities of such attempts in relation to the rights of the victims. This article analyzes how human rights obligations and the objectives of reparations for victims are satisfied by Swedish law and practice in the Lundin trial. It shows that while the law allows victims participating in trial to put forward civil claims, it denies this right to the large number of victims not participating, and the decision early in the Lundin proceedings to separate damage claims from the criminal trial has left the participating victims effectively denied reparations.

The aim of this study was to understand how and why relational welfare works to support young people who are not in employment, education or training (NEET). It builds on research discussing the limitations of work-first and human capital strategies in social policy while responding to calls for theory-driven insights into initiatives that move beyond employability and rapid employment. The material for this realist evaluation includes programme documents, fieldnotes and 75 interviews with practitioners and participants in community-based multicomponent initiatives delivered by Swedish municipalities. These data were scrutinised against programme theories while integrating literature on relational welfare as underpinned by co-creation and capability approaches. The results illustrate how flexible, challenging and coordinated programming strengthen beings and doings of young people in NEET situations while improving their wellbeing by overcoming isolation and forming a future orientation. The study provides guidance for supporting NEET-situated young people through a relational approach to welfare. It also offers a model against which local initiatives provided to a youth group high on the policy agenda can be mapped.

This investigation sheds light on the social history of pathogenic dirt and its significance for shaping medical practices during the nineteenth century. It consists of an analysis focusing on Swedish medicine, using 8800 yearly reports written 1820–1900 by Swedish provincial doctors for the National Board of Health in Stockholm. The main argument is that the provincial doctors’ perceptions of the relationship between dirt and health during this century can be better understood by focusing on similarities in the handling of different kinds of pathological dirt over the course of many decades, rather than seeing interest in cleanliness as something mostly unprecedented. A novel cleanliness regime became dominant during the latter third of the century, meant to counter a new hybrid between everyday dirt – bodily emanations from healthy bodies – and matter believed to have caused miasmatic and contagionistic disease. New ideas about filth and its impact on health played a crucial role in the development of public health and sanitation movements, and were a precondition for everyday dirt becoming a central medical problem around the turn of the twentieth century, but as is shown, they built on old precedents. Thus, the miasmatic and contagionistic approach to disease shaped conceptions of hygiene and cleanliness.

The Paleoproterozoic Stollberg Zn-Pb-Ag plus magnetite ore field contains SVALS-type stratabound, limestone-skarn hosted sulphide deposits within volcanic (bimodal felsic and mafic rocks)/volcaniclastic rocks metamorphosed to the amphibolite facies. The sulphide ores consist of semi-massive to disseminated to vein-network sphalerite-galena and pyrrhotite (with subordinate pyrite, chalcopyrite, arsenopyrite and magnetite). Thermochemical considerations and stabilities of minerals in the systems K-Al-Si-O-H and Fe-S-O and sulphur isotope values for sulphides of δ34SVCDT = +1.12 to +5.71 ‰ suggest that sulphur most likely formed by inorganic reduction of seawater sulphate that was carried in hydrothermally modified seawater fluid under the following approximate physicochemical conditions: T = 250o–350 oC, δ34SΣS = +3 ‰, I = ∼1 m NaCl and a total dissolved S content of ∼0.01 to 0.1 moles/kg H2O. However, a magmatic contribution of sulphur cannot be discounted. Carbon and oxygen isotope compositions of calcite in altered rocks spatially associated with mineralisation show values of δ13CVPDB = −2.3 to −0.8 ‰ and δ18OVSMOW = +9.5 to +11.2 ‰, with one anomalous sample exhibiting values of δ13CVPDB = −0.1 ‰ and δ18OVSMOW = +10.9 ‰. Most carbonates in ore show lighter C and O isotope values than those of Proterozoic (Orosirian) limestones and are likely the result of premetamorphic hydrothermal alteration involving modified seawater followed by decarbonation during regional metamorphism. The isotopically light C and O isotope values are consistent with those for carbonates spatially associated with other SVALS-type deposits in the Bergslagen ore district and suggest that such values may be used for exploration purposes.