Unintended but not unanticipated consequences: youth work, organized crime, and concealed radicalization

Abstract

This is a case study of youth work in a deprived neighborhood in Gothenburg, Sweden. The case is retrospective, and the period studied was 2012–2016, when gang violence became prevalent and young adults from the neighborhood traveled to Syria and Iraq to join the Islamic State of Iraq and Al-Sham (ISIS) and similar violent movements. Kingsfield (pseudonym for the neighborhood) is one of the several deprived areas in Gothenburg that has been reported in the media for intense violence in the last 15 years, but it was never mentioned as an area that was also a potential recruitment hub for ISIS. The retrospective case study sets out to examine how this recruitment was missed both by the media and the bureaucrats of the city of Gothenburg. The empirical data were collected from semi-structured interviews with eleven professionals working in Kingsfield during 2012–2016. The case study revealed a potential misuse of youth workers with immigrant backgrounds in Kingsfield, which could have led to an unintended support for criminal structures. The study draws theoretically on De Zwart’s (2015) distinction between unintended and unanticipated consequences.

Keywords

• youth work
• organized crime
• concealed radicalization
• sociology