Visible transition: invisible harm? : Assembling the Green Deal and local realities in Luleå and Kiruna

Sammanfattning

This thesis examines how the European Green Deal is assembled and materialized at the local level in northern Sweden and how this process generates uneven forms of contestation and harm. Focusing on the Arctic municipalities of Kiruna and Luleå, the study conceptualizes the green industrial transition not as a linear or purely technological shift, but as a sociotechnical and political assemblage constituted through heterogeneous actors, infrastructures, and policies operating across European, national, regional, and municipal scales. While northern Sweden is increasingly framed as indispensable for Europe’s decarbonization, particularly through green steel production and critical raw material extraction, this strategic positioning obscures how costs and risks are redistributed locally. The thesis addresses two research questions: how the green industrial transition is assembled in Kiruna and Luleå, and what forms of contestation and violence emerge through this process. To answer these questions, it combines Actor–Network Theory and Assemblage Thinking with the concepts of slow violence and extractive violence in a theoretical framework. Methodologically, the thesis employs a qualitative multiple instrumental case study design based on document and media analysis of EU and Swedish policy documents, municipal planning materials, corporate reports, environmental permitting decisions, and regional news coverage. The analysis demonstrates that the green transition assemblage is fragile, contested, and shaped by persistent extractivist legacies. In Kiruna, the expansion of mining and the development of rare earth extraction are tightly entangled with the large-scale relocation of the city itself and the reconfiguration of surrounding landscapes, intensifying long-standing conflicts over Sámi land use and decision-making authority. In contrast, Luleå’s role as an industrial processing and logistics hub gives rise to more diffuse and incremental forms of harm, as industrial reconfiguration generates cumulative pressures on housing provision, energy systems, infrastructure, and municipal finances, which materialize over time as latent and cumulative forms of violence. The thesis concludes that, without addressing these relational power asymmetries and cumulative harms, the green industrial transition risks reproducing, and increasing existing inequalities while being contested in itself.