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The present article focuses on how the so-called War on terror discourse has merged into the educational system and brought about a securitization of education. As a part of efforts to prevent young people from becoming radicalized into terrorism, the educational system is expected to be able to detect individuals 'at risk' and deploy methods to prevent radicalization from happening. Through the critical discourse analysis of a collection of educational practices, sampled by the European Union working group Radicalisation Awareness Network, we have been able to generate knowledge about how the War on terror discourse tends to individualize and decontextualize tensions in society that may ultimately cause terrorism. With this individualized and decontextualized approach to preventing radicalization, it appears more important to control students rather than to develop their ability to analyse complex conflicts in society.

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Research has shown that a young person's situation at school, and pupils' relationships with their teachers, have a clear impact on the processes which lead to young people being radicalized. The present study is a retrospective study based on interviews with former neo-Nazis and their teachers at the time when they became involved in neo-Nazi organizations or milieus in Sweden. In order to better understand the logics of pedagogy and what their teachers' decisions to intervene and to confront their extremist beliefs and lifestyles led to, we focus on a particular case study. The results show that teachers' attempts to isolate these students, and thereby contain the "problem", failed. Confrontations and strategies designed to discipline the students instead led to resistance and stigmatization. Reflecting upon this situation today, both students and teachers agree that these confrontational strategies fueled the radicalization process.

The present article analyzes Swedish local municipal action plans for prevention of violent extremism. Sweden began adopting local policies for detection and prevention of violent extremism in 2015. Until today, about 40% of Swedish municipalities have done so. The present article examines how policy ideas have been transferred from abroad and the transnational level into a national Swedish discourse and has continually, via vertical transfer, ended up in local municipalities. This is seemingly being done without any profound understanding of or reflection on local needs, that is, the presence of violent extremist groups or other forms of violent radicalization. A major focus in these plans, as revealed in the study, is on instructing school and social welfare agencies to develop systems for detecting risk signals and instructing, among others, teachers to search for and report pupils who might be radicalized to the police or the security police. These policy ideas are then horizontally transferred to neighboring municipalities. The article, making use of critical discourse analyses, investigates the consequences for the teaching profession, as regards changing the preconditions for social practice, which might occur when teachers are instructed to monitor their pupils’ thoughts and behavior.

The politics of youth culture is a politics of metaphor: it deals in the currency of signs and is, thus, always ambiguous, because the subcultural milieu has been constructed underneath the authorized discourses, in defiance of the multiple disciplines of the family, the school, and the workplace. Subculture takes shape in the space between surveillance and the evasion of surveillance; it translates the fact of being under scrutiny into the pleasure of being watched. It is a way of "hiding in the light" (Hebdige, 1988, p. 35).

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The present article focuses on teaching and learning about the Holocaust in Sweden, conducted as study trips to Holocaust memorial sites. Although about a quarter of Swedish teenagers visit the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum each year, this study is the first to examine these Swedish study trips. Since there are no centralised systems for arranging these study trips, this study regards dedicated teachers as the main stakeholders. By deploying critical discourse analysis of transcripts of nine in-depth interviews with teachers, the study terms the discursive order of the teachers’ talk about the study trips ritual democratic catharsis. The teachers’ two main purposes are the use of the study trips as a vehicle for the social dynamics in the group to evolve in order to promote personal growth among the students, and the students’ learning about democracy and human rights. Their overarching didactic strategy of focusing on the suffering of the victims is meant to evoke empathy among the students, but lacks an explanatory aim. The study critically points out the teachers’ unreflected relationship to historiographic Holocaust content as a subject, making their teaching vulnerable to contemporary political influences, jeopardising the democratic purpose of these trips.