What caused the Swedish riots?

Sweden is a famously welcoming and generous home to migrants. But last week the capital was hit by seven days of rioting. What went wrong? Simon Wilson investigates.

What's happened?

Last week Sweden was hit by seven nights of rioting involving young male immigrants. The trouble began in Husby, a poor suburb of Stockholm, before spreading to a dozen parts of the capital. Teenagers and young men set cars ablaze about 100 were torched on the worst night of violence and some public buildings, including schools. Compared with the major riots in Paris, which spread across France in 2005, or the riots in London and other English cities in 2011, the unrest was minor. In England five people died, 3,000 were arrested, and there was mass arson and looting. In Sweden, police say a few hundred people were involved, there were few reported injuries, and only a few dozen people have been arrested.

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Simon Wilson’s first career was in book publishing, as an economics editor at Routledge, and as a publisher of non-fiction at Random House, specialising in popular business and management books. While there, he published Customers.com, a bestselling classic of the early days of e-commerce, and The Money or Your Life: Reuniting Work and Joy, an inspirational book that helped inspire its publisher towards a post-corporate, portfolio life.   

Since 2001, he has been a writer for MoneyWeek, a financial copywriter, and a long-time contributing editor at The Week. Simon also works as an actor and corporate trainer; current and past clients include investment banks, the Bank of England, the UK government, several Magic Circle law firms and all of the Big Four accountancy firms. He has a degree in languages (German and Spanish) and social and political sciences from the University of Cambridge.