SweTerror– Terrorism in Swedish politics: a multimodal study of the configuration of terrorism in parliamentary debates, legislation, and policy networks in Sweden 1968–2018

SweTerror makes a significant contribution to the neglected study of terrorism in Sweden through a comprehensive mixed methods study of the formation and development of the political discourse on terrorism since the late 1960s to the present. Drawing on state-of-the-art language technology, the project studies all parliamentary utterances of interest. It explores and curates an exhaustive and understudied multi-modal national cultural heritage collection of primary sources of central relevance to Swedish democracy: the audio recordings of the debates in the Swedish Parliament.

SweTerror studies the framing of terrorism both as policy discourse and enacted politics, and explores the semantic and emotional components of the political discourse on terrorism as well as major actors and social networks involved in the parliamentary process. The project covers the political responses to a range of terrorism-related events and controversies as well as factors influencing policy- makers’ engagement, including political ideology and gender.

SweTerror develops an online portal, featuring the complete research material and searchable audio madereadily accessible for further exploration. Long-term, it establishes a model for combining extraction technologies (speech recognition and analysis) for audiovisual parliamentary data with text mining and HSS interpretive methods. The portal is fully open access tools and is designed to serve as a prototype for other similar projects.