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This article explores and analyses the activities of Swedish organised crisis volunteers during Covid-19. Based on a questionnaire and interviews, we set out to answer research questions on what characterised organised volunteerism during the pandemic, how organised volunteers experienced cooperation with local public actors and how they view political steering. We contribute to a growing literature on the role of volunteers and link that role to views on political steering, something that is rarely done in disaster research. Sweden is useful to explore because of how Covid-19 was managed; because there are organised crisis volunteers and a debate on how the Swedish system is steered. We show how organised volunteers adapted to changing needs and adopted new roles, that experiences of cooperation with local authorities varied and that calls were made for a stronger national leadership and for more explicit central political steering.

In Sweden, local authorities are encouraged to cooperate with civil society to promote resilience to violent extremism. However, some (mostly Muslim) organisations are approached with suspicion and sometimes accused of not subscribing to basic democratic principles. Along with cooperation and resilience, suspicion seems to be a recurrent and global theme in the relationship between the prevention of violent and hateful extremism (VHE) and civil society. This paper builds on empirical research by the author and others, which examined how NGOs and FBOs operating within Sweden conducted and were challenged by preventive work. The paper compares results from the Swedish study against findings from international humanitarian-development NGOs via a scoping study to examine the similar and different dynamics around cooperation, resilience, and suspicion in prevention of VHE. Results will help progress the discussion on the challenges that civil society faces in its attempts to promote resilience to VHE.

In this research note, we present results from a review of research on local resilience in relation to radicalization in public health, social work, crisis management, and community policing using terrorism studies as a point of departure. In order to identify agreements between literatures, we focus on how local resilience is understood, how it is said to be promoted, and how this knowledge could be synthesized. We show that resilience by and large is understood as both a process and a capacity underpinned by cooperation, social networks, and community resources and that an initial mapping of existing strengths and resources is pivotal for local resilience-building.

Pandemin har tydligt visat vilken betydande roll frivilliga resurser spelar vid en omfattande samhällskris. Samtidigt visar analyser att det frivilliga engagemanget inte nyttjats på ett optimalt sätt av offentliga krishanteringsaktörer som exempelvis myndigheter (Coronakommissionen, 2021). I denna policy brief sammanfattas centrala insatser och erfarenheter från Frivillig Resursgrupp (FRG) under pandemin och tre rekommendationer, riktade både till FRG och kommuner, presenteras för att stärka det frivilliga engagemanget ytterligare och öka förutsättningarna för ett bättre nyttjande av frivilliga resurser.

The Swedish National Board of Institutional Care (SNBIC) is an independent governmental agency that provides compulsory care for minors with psychosocial problems, criminal behavior, and substance abuse. During recent years, a noticeable number of the youth placed at compulsory care institutions have been asylum-seeking minors who have arrived in Sweden without parents or guardians. This steady increase in placements has raised questions and concerns among the involved actors regarding the motives and needs underlying these placements. This qualitative study investigates the main motives that lead unaccompanied asylum-seeking minors to be placed at SNBIC residential homes and the problems that are to be solved during their placement, according to social workers and SNBIC staff. The study is based on 28 in-depth interviews with social workers and SNBIC staff. Findings indicate clear disagreement between social workers and SNBIC staff with regard to the motives for placing unaccompanied minors at SNBIC homes. Although the social workers and SNBIC staff explain that most of the unaccompanied youth placed at SNBIC homes have some form of criminal behavior or substance abuse, SNBIC staff believe, in some cases, the problem is not sufficiently serious to warrant compulsory care. As these disagreements and misunderstandings between the actors have an impact on their collaboration and, consequently, the situation of the unaccompanied minors, all attempts to reach a consensus on the leading causes for placement and the problems that need to be solved with SNBIC placement would increase security for both the young people and the relevant staff.