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.