Event

The first wave of terrorism in Sweden saw two lethal terrorist attacks in 1908 and 1909 which however constitute only a small, however deadly, part of the first wave. The Swedish terrorism of the first wave has a much larger history than two years and with wider effects than two people killed. The paper demonstrates how this national wave of terrorism is thoroughly transnational, through its flows of foreign news reports and intellectual influences, through movements of cosmopolitan individuals and through importing enabling commercial technologies such as revolver pistols, dynamite sticks and aniline dyes. This history of terrorism should not be unique to Sweden and to the first wave, but should apply equally well to many other countries and to subsequent waves of terrorism. Therefore, the article's conceptual gambit is that if scholars of terrorism are to better understand its historical import as well as its present status, we need to expand the scale and scope of our histories and of what constitutes terrorism and its effects; to study in what ways terrorism exists, effects and affects even without terrorists.

Professor Mats Fridlund holds the first Finnish professorship in the history of industrialization at Aalto University in Helsinki. His research focus on the role of science and technology in the development of modern terrorism and his project 'Spreading Terror: Technology and Materiality in the Transnational Emergence of Terrorism' in financed by Swedish Research Council (VR) within its research program "The Globalization of Society". He has held faculty and research positions at leading international universities and research centers in STS and security studies such as Center for Advanced Security Theory (CAST), University of Copenhagen, Northwestern University, Imperial College London, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and University of Manchester and University of Gothenburg.