The negative spiral of violence among young men in Swedish suburbs has been apparent since 2011. For the past nine years the yearly average has been forty persons killed and 500 injured in gang-related assaults and shootings. In this study, women/mothers have stopped waiting passively for the state to react and instead choose to form networks between themselves in order to defend their neighbourhoods and their children in the suburb, on Friday and Saturday nights. They consciously build their conflict-resolution strategies using the fact that in this context they, as mothers that have passed child-bearing age, carry an aura of pondus and respectability that can calm rather than provoke more violence. This represents both a novel move of agency in the public sphere, but it is also in line with traditional motherhood, the mother as the first protector of all, with her special relationship to reproduction. What happens when the mothers become defenders, as the state monopoly of violence is clearly out of order? Do women, when no longer removed (excluded) or hidden away in the private sphere of home and family, change in relation to others and society into political subjects? If so, how does this manifest itself? What sources of resistances from husbands, family, neighbourhood, religious community and the state do they experience?

Dr in Political Science from Lund University. Presently a Senior Lecturer in International Relations at Global Political Studies and a Member of the Steering Committee of the Gender Studies Collegium at Malmö University. Previously for eight years Senior Lecturer in Gender Studies at Örebro University (with Professor Anna Jónasdóttir and Sofia Strid).

Have co-edited (with Annica Kronsell) Making Gender. Making War (2012) Taylor & Francis. Peer-Reviewed chapter titled „East- West Negotiations“ in Karin Aggestam & Ann Towns (Eds.) Gender & Diplomacy (2017)

No co-authors

I imagine that my paper would fit into theme 4. Along and across Borders: Proper Objects and Intersectionalities