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This thesis studies the development of the Swedish criminal policy debate regarding how the Social Democrats and the Moderates, portray and propose to address gang criminality from a security perspective. Debate articles and election manifestos of 2018 and 2022 have been analyzed with the purpose of examining if there is evidence for an assumption that political parties in Sweden, other than the right-wing populist party Sweden Democrats, have come to adopt strategies to communicate with voters that are based on so-called securitization agendas. By doing this, the aim of this thesis is to deepen our understanding of whether the international trend of securitizing gang criminality has come to play also in a Swedish context. The analysis is based on the following research questions: 1) How do Social Democrats and Moderates portray gang crime following up to the elections of 2018 and 2022? 2) What securitizing statements can be identified in these representations? To answer these questions, Carol Bacchi’s analytical approach ”What’s the problem represented to be” was used in order to structure a qualitative content analysis. The theoretical foundation of the study is securitization theory, with the aim of identifying securitization efforts, more specifically regarding what or who are presented to be under threat of gang crime. Furthermore, policy suggestions by the respective party was analyzed as being either conventional or extraordinary – the latter indicating an effort to securitize this political issue. 

The study finds that there has been a shift between 2018 and 2022 regarding how Social Democrats and Moderates portray gang crime as well as how they propose to address the problem. Following up to the election in 2022, both parties argued that safety, security and trust in the society are not only threatened but undermined. This causes the Moderates to present a preventive program that partly contains elements of extraordinary measures. Based on the analysis, we can establish that Social Democrats and Moderates portray the problem towards a more securitizing discourse in 2022, and, in that regard, also have come to adopt the Sweden Democrats parties attempt to securitize gang crime.