ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to provide analytical clarity and a context for understanding both the possibilities and the limits facing religious contemporary civil society activists in the Nordic countries in responding to migration and especially the refugee crisis of 2015. It focuses more broadly on the position of civil society within the Nordic social contract, before proceeding to concentrate on religious civil society in particular. In contemporary Nordic countries, as noted previously, the social contract is at heart based on a moral economy whose core principle is that of reciprocity. The Nordic states are thus less ‘welfare states’ than ‘social investment states’; less ‘socialist’ states protecting themselves from the harshness of capitalism than highly successful ‘competition states’ within a global market economy. The politics of migration in general, and the refugee crisis of 2015 in particular, has involved a great deal of confusion at the highest political level in Sweden.
