Jurisprudence Commons^™

This article investigates the historical development and transformation of Swedish integration policy, including its predecessor immigrant policy, as a “biopolitics of the population”. “Biopolitics of the population” refers in this article to all governmental interventions targeting the population, or parts of it, with a view to producing a collective body of a particular quality and identity. Swedish integration policy is thus analyzed in order to answer questions such as: how has the population been embodied over time? How has the Swedish grammar of multiplicity and fragmentation changed? Which groups within the population have been considered to be in need of …

This article aims to contribute to the history of biopolitical thought through a more accurate understanding of the Swedish professor of political science Rudolf Kjellén considered both in his historical and political context. Kjellén coined the term ‘biopolitics’, as early as 1905, in a two-volume work entitled The Great Powers, and developed it even further in a 1916 book entitled The State as a Form of Life. Because of the organicist analogies deployed by Kjellén, his biopolitical theory of the state is considered as a form of ‘vitalism’ or ‘organicism’ in the contemporary literature on biopolitics. Based on a close …