Debatten om IS-svenskarna (och deras barn)

Sammanfattning: This article is the product of a close chronological reading of the debate surrounding the so called ‘’ISIS-returnees’’ in Sweden during the spring of 2019. The debate itself, as well as the situation it concerned, has been treated as a discursive field where a securitization has been attempted and resisted by several actors. The study has found that an intersubjective struggle between these actors and the audience, as well as several important events ‘’on the ground’’, have changed the structure of this debate over time, and thus the wider discursive field which it is a part of. Several competing constructions of citizenship has been produced in this process by different types of actors finding themselves on opposing sides of the securitization as such. The main argument this article proposes as a partial explanation for this development is that specific media reports, images, actors and discourses put emphasis on the returnees’ children’s suffering, rather than their threatfulness. This emphasis, in turn, dispositioned parts of the relevant audience to empathize with the returnees which obstructed the more intensive securitization-dynamic which was prevailing in the debate in its earlier stages.