The Cultural Imaginary of Terrorism: Close and Distant Readings of Political Terror in Swedish News and Fiction During the Cold War

Abstract

The digital history project ’The Cultural Imaginary of Terrorism’ (2022–2025) examines the cultural meaning-making of political terror in Swedish nonfiction and fiction during the Cold War, a critical period for the formation of the international discourse on terrorism. To explore the Swedish ‘cultural imaginary of terrorism’ is to study how a society makes sense of terrorism and itself in relation to the phenomenon through figures of thought, frames of reference and fantasies in, among other things, national newspapers and periodicals. This paper gives an overview of the project, demonstrating our integrative use of distant and close reading methods through a pilot study of elements of the cultural imaginary of terrorism as represented in the conservative periodical Svensk Tidskrift 1945–1991. Our exploratory analysis focuses on the extraction of relevant texts, the visualization and mapping of the discourse through the development of key terms as well as individuals, places, groups and states associated with political terror and terrorism. We conclude by stressing the benefits of an integrative research design drawing upon complementary perspectives: how our text mining methods allow us to identify significant patterns in the text data and how our historical expertise allows us to single out aspects that call for further investigation.