The Architecture of Invisibility: LKAB, Swedish Mining Law, and the Structural Erasure of Sámi Land Use

Sammanfattning

This thesis examines how Swedish legal and administrative frameworks governing LKAB’s mining operations have historically produced and reproduced the invisibility of Sámi land use, and how these patterns of exclusion continue to be mobilized within contemporary green transition justifications. Drawing on settler colonial theory and anopticism, the study argues that Sámi exclusion within Swedish resource governance is not incidental but structurally generated and continuously reproduced across shifting political and economic contexts. The thesis employs a qualitative, single-case study design using document analysis across three interconnected analytical dimensions: the historical legal architecture governing mineral extraction and reindeer herding rights; the Mertainen mine permitting proceedings as an empirical site through which to analyze how these structural conditions are re-enacted in contemporary administrative practice, examining court judgments and Reindeer Herding Community submissions; and EU and Swedish green transition policy documents, government statements, and LKAB’s corporate communications, analyzed to identify how contemporary extractive justifications reproduce historical patterns of Sámi exclusion under new moral and political cover. The findings demonstrate that Sámi invisibility operates across three analytically separable but structurally interdependent levels: encoded in law, re-enacted through administrative practice, and ideologically renewed through successive dominant political narratives. The green transition framework does not represent a departure from historical patterns but furnishes them with new moral insulation, framing extraction as a universal collective good while distributing its costs onto communities whose land relationships remain structurally unrecognized. The study contributes to socio-legal scholarship on the regulatory gap between international Indigenous rights standards and Swedish domestic law, while extending existing analysis to the specific institutional role of LKAB as a state-owned actor whose operations both reflect and reinforce the legal subordination of Sámi land use.