Re-constructing the peaceful nation: negotiating meanings of whiteness, immigration and Islam after a shopping mall shooting

In many European countries, gendered violence has become a topic frequently used to construct distinctions and hierarchies on the basis of 'race' and ethnicity. Focusing on the media coverage and political debates following the shootings at a Finnish shopping mall on New Year's Eve 2010, when a former Kosovan refugee killed his ex-girlfriend, four other people and himself, the article analyses the negotiation of difference and the shifting processes of racialisation in relation to whiteness, migrant 'others' and Islam. It examines how whiteness figures as a source of differentiation and sameness when the perpetrator is constructed as both a white European and a Muslim 'other' from the warridden Balkan area. I argue that what was at stake in the debates was the fracture that the event caused to the imagined national identity - Finland as a peaceful, civilised and rational white European nation - and attempts to solve this dilemma by defusing the threat (of violence) and re-installing the (peaceful) national self-image. In the process, the dilemma was solved, first, by a privatisation of the threat originally coined as public and national; and secondly, by emphasising the 'outsider' position of the perpetrator: a move that enabled the 'bad' to be symbolically excised from the national body.