The aim of the paper is to explore the dominating perception of the Other after the conflict regarding the Danish Mohammed caricatures. How Swedish newspapers have portrayed Arabs, which role they have been given in society and what problems they are struggling with is going to be the focus of this thesis.

As methodological approach I chose discourse analysis, since it presents a view where language defines and structures our understanding of reality. Through the study of various Swedish newspaper articles, this essay tries to illustrate the implicit yet existent negative image of the Arabs as a group and potential alternative ways of understanding the Other.

The perception of Arabs is a product of a necessary imaginary foe, a mirror image of the bad and strange in contrast to the idyllic and safe Swedish nationality. The rhetoric’s of the discourse are therefore constructed between a politics of acknowledgement and a will to culturally dominate the Other. To challenge this view the citizens of a nation must accept it as nothing more than an imaginary design.