The antifascist blockades in Lund 1991-1993 : Shifting repertoires of contention between local cultures of protest and trans-local connections.

This paper looks at the how a new kind of South Scandinavian radical left emerged around 1990. It argues that its repertoire of contention neither can be understood as simply a product of struggles in local contexts or as diffusion of an already existing repertoire through trans-local mobilisations. The contingent history of the counter-claims to the far right Charles XII march in Lund throughout 1980s produced Lund as a key site for intervention and experimentation by movements in the making. Experiences made in defence of squatted houses in Copenhagen gave the militant anti-fascists the upper hand against an unprepared police in Lund, as it was combined with local political imaginaries and practices. The trans-local linking of two different situated streams of struggles not only produced a new repertoire by assembling elements of both, but also seems to have been crucial in constructing a regional scale of intervention as crucial to the young antifascist movement.
By being part of the invention of a new kind of militant anti-fascist repertoire of contention the actors also reinvented themselves. The radical left was transformed by employing tested practices in this new political context. The experiences in Lund were part of a series of events that shaped the political imagination and repertoires of contention for the far left in Southern Scandinavia for at least a decade, and would resonate as a crucial historical lesson for longer than that.