This book’s goal can be restated in the following terms: How did a state (Sweden) that once prided itself as being “one of the most humanitarian nations in the Western World” (p. 14) become a terrain of banal far right practices, if not ideology? This is what the book’s title From Righteousness to Far Right intends to capture. To unpack this question, Emma McCluskey proposes to give critical security studies an anthropological twist. The main added value of such an anthropological view of critical security studies is that, so the argument goes, it places a novel emphasis on micro-practices of the everyday, on the one hand, and gives more weight to connections between local, national, and global environments, on the other hand. Empirically, the book’s plot occurs in Öreby, a village in the southern part of Sweden.

In addition to the introduction and the conclusion, the book develops its argument in four substantive chapters. Chapter 2 presents the constitutive elements of Swedish nationalism, including a deep-seated feeling of moral exceptionalism, which permeates not only individual attitudes and discourses but also Sweden’s relations with the outside world. Chapter 3 argues that the Swedish myth of moral exceptionalism lives on through and within performances that enact what a good Swedish citizen ought to be and do; it produces a distinctive identity of righteousness. Using Michel Foucault’s vocabulary, McCluskey argues that the Swedish national myth facilitates the emergence of a governable subject, one who embodies and expresses the features that characterize a good citizen. Such a governmentality of righteousness, however, also silences recalcitrant voices and practices. In this perspective, moral exceptionalism thrives as long as transcripts of racism remain hidden. Chapter 4 is concerned with showing how the governmentality of righteousness unravels, thus permitting heretofore hidden racist transcripts to come to light, notwithstanding attempts to decouple racist practices from far right vernacular. Finally, chapter 5 aims to draw the different theoretical threads together. Specifically, it gathers and discusses the conceptual, epistemological, and methodological relations between critical security studies and anthropology. The strategy is to point to the Copenhagen School approach to securitization theory as a series of assumptions that study top-down security interactions, at the expense of bottom-up, transversal encounters that have repercussions at the level of security policies.

The book primarily falls within critical approaches to security, which it proposes to extend by treating governmentality as an “ethnographic object” (p. 61). The governmentality of righteousness anchors this process. McCluskey argues that the Friends of Syria, a local NGO that was set up for the explicit purpose of handling the arrival of refugees in 2013, acted both as a facilitator for hosting refugees and as an instrument for performing the Swedish national myth of moral exceptionalism. Because the myth exerts such a powerful disciplining pressure on individuals, people of Öreby could not do other than conform to the underlying story of what it is to be an exemplary Swede; that is, a caring human being. Thus, the governmentality of righteousness created a taboo not to speak or act otherwise than prescribed by the national myth (p. 111). Yet, the governmentality of righteousness did not disable the cultivation of hidden transcripts of racism that, says McCluskey, can be witnessed in the extremely high level of obedience and passivity that the Swedish demand of refugees.

Because the governmentality of righteousness hinges on a subtle but transient silencing of banal kinds of racism, McCluskey correctly concludes that in her approach what matters is the following: to account for how certain layers of practices are overshadowed by others until the former takes hold thanks to an event that legitimizes overt expressions of discrimination and marginalization. In this light, after a Somali man was shot dead by the police in the north of Sweden, a moral panic gripped Öreby, and as a result, what was a taboo became explicit and the accepted way of relating to the refugees.

But McCluskey’s conception of the transformation from righteousness to far right, which underwrites her anthropological project for critical security studies, is beset with difficulties. To begin with, McCluskey argues that a focus on speech acts, a landmark of the Copenhagen view of securitization, is unwarranted for grasping how refugees’ status changed from victims to threats. However, the book is based on an impressionistic view of the approach she uses as a backdrop. Nowhere do we have a presentation, let alone a discussion, of securitization theory. Readers are assumed to know what it is and why she criticizes and rejects it. I suspect many would find this too demanding.

Second, the portrayal of Öreby’s people is likely to create a sense of uneasiness. The analysis traces how the myth of moral exceptionalism causes them to behave in a certain way, by conducting their conduct. But this runs in parallel with a hidden transcript of suspicion and racism, which erupts at the first occasion that seems to confirm the views they actually held. In some ways, the book then presents Öreby as a village of hypocritical people. It assumes that they already held those racist views in the first place and only waited for an occasion to let them out. If this interpretation makes sense, to what extent is this still a case of transformation of a public problem into a security problem? Because the images of refugees as threats have always been there, the book is more precisely about how an exogenous shock activates them. There is neither creation nor transformation.

Third, the book does not take seriously competing arguments brought up by the interviewees; namely, that Öreby received too many refugees given the size of the village, without consultation. In a country that values deliberative democracy, many argue that this left them with a strong sense of abandonment from the central government and fed their resentment against refugees. Öreby’s people might be wrong. But how can we test and weigh evidence if McCluskey decides to dismiss some accounts without justification? How does this tally with the reflexive sensitivity she calls for? Had she explored that side of the argument, her work would have taken on a new saliency by entering into conversation with similar concerns in political psychology, wherein scholars working on genocide, for instance, have theorized “cognitive stretching”; that is, a process through which the unthinkable becomes routine. In this case, there is no hidden transcript to crack open. Rather, there is the need to examine thorny social and psychological processes that underlie how the unimaginable comes to drive public action.

The book does, however, do a good job at showing how a threat image lingers underneath a cultural and morally disciplining framework. It would therefore be of broad interest to those who want to understand the apparent paradox between welcoming and rejection. Students of critical security studies will find herein a good anthropological account of the expressions of security issues in the Swedish context and the contradictions they raise. The book should also attract readers who want to appreciate how anthropology can enable students of securitization to extract a broader range of meanings, thereby reinforcing a convergence toward the ethnographic approach that has been underway for some time now. Although McCluskey presents the anthropological orientation as a panacea, the field has already turned its gaze toward a triangulation of methods that seeks to develop a more productive way to provide students with a thick explanation of how security problems emerge and dissolve. McCluskey’s book is valuable for making the case that anthropological approaches can and should be an important part of this process of triangulation.