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The chapter details the work of migration officials in Sweden to enforce so-called voluntary deportations and how ‘voluntarism’ is used to responsibilise non-deported people for their deportation. Drawing on interviews with migration officials, social workers, and police officers, the chapter further examines the effects of a new Swedish law that withdraws access to minimum welfare for non-deported individuals, leaving them destitute. This policy, it is argued, constitutes a form of indirect violence that signals a shift from intensive bureaucratic regulation towards a politics of derecording and formal abandonment. Finally, the chapter shows how non-deported people contest derecording, either by refusing to disappear, or by moving on. Their tactics demonstrate how deportation regimes extend transnationally and the opportunities that emerge from the uneven implementation of immigration law in Europe, including the Dublin Regulation.
The chapter introduces the significant gap between government fantasies of effective and ‘humane’ deportation enforcement, and the violent, and seemingly counterproductive, realities that deportation policies create – not least during an ongoing pandemic. The chapter situates the research within the growing field of deportation studies, on the one hand, and sociological and anthropological research on bureaucracy and ‘the state’, on the other. It proposes the concept ‘deportation limbo’ as a starting point of analysis as well as the conceptual framework of a continuum of state violence. It introduces the empirical material and discusses the ethics and politics of ‘studying up’ the institutions and organisations responsible for enforcing state violence at the border
The chapter provides an overview of the politics of deportation in Denmark and Sweden and contextualises the expansion of the countries’ respective deportation regimes since 2015. While Denmark and Sweden have been discussed as radically different in terms of their approaches to migration, the chapter traces similarities and continuities between them. They include, first, the social imaginaries of Nordic ‘exceptionalism’, which encompass a denial of complicity in racist global histories and structures, and related narratives of social, cultural, and racial homogeneity. Secondly, the bureaucratised welfare state apparatuses, ostensibly designed to foster and protect the lives of the population, are also mobilised to render the lives of those excluded from the welfare state, including non-deported people, unliveable.
If deportation prisons represent the direct violence that states may use to control and put pressure on non-deported people, the Danish deportation camps exemplify how such pressure is also applied through indirect violence. The deportation camps are operated by the Danish Prison and Probation Service and the Red Cross in an uneasy alliance, and are meant to pressure non-deported people to leave by subjecting them to injurious conditions of indefinite semi-confinement, isolation, and circumscribed autonomy. Building on ethnographic fieldwork with prison officers in one of Denmark’s three deportation camps and engagements with resident protest movements, the chapter describes how officers navigate their ‘mysterious’ task of symbolically – but rarely practically – performing authority in the camp. Meanwhile, residents experience being ‘left to die, slowly’, at the same time as staying put and waiting out the state becomes a way of contesting deportation. The chapter discusses the necropolitical logic behind slow violence; its lasting, injurious effects; and its contestations.
The chapter details the everyday work of prison officers inside Denmark’s deportation prison, which incarcerates foreign nationals awaiting deportation. The prison officers in charge of the prison conceive themselves as marginal players in the deportation regime and take on their work tasks with a mixture of neglectful inaction and anticipation of violent action. The chapter depicts how the predominantly White officers use their prison training in applying ‘force’ and racial matrices to construct incarcerated people as criminal, unreliable, and prone to violence. Officers’ suspicion becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy when they use pre-emptive violence and degradation to discipline those detained. The chapter thus discusses how the systemic violence of the deportation prison translates into everyday violence, which dehumanises not only the people detained, but also those who incarcerate them.
This forum brings together a diverse group of scholars from political geography, international relations, critical organisation studies, global development, international studies and political sociology to explore the debates and dynamics of celebrity engagement with development and humanitarianism. The contributions here come from a series of roundtables organised in 2021, including one at the 6th World Conference on Humanitarian Studies of the International Humanitarian Studies Association in Paris that discussed the findings and insights of the book Batman Saves the Congo: How Celebrities Disrupt the Politics of Development (University of Minnesota Press, 2021).
Gender-based violence (GBV) is a complicated challenge embedded in displaced people’s lived experiences throughout the conflict displacement cycle. Despite the awareness of existing institutionalised help-seeking referral pathways, these do not necessarily translate to the full utilisation of such services. This paper examines the critical role of refugee leaders and service providers in potentially enabling and realising a GBV survivor’s help-seeking. By adapting a meso-level analysis, it attempts to explain how social networks built within conflict and displacement contribute to responding to GBV. Based on the review of collected interviews in 2019 from refugee leaders and service providers working with South Sudanese refugees in selected settlements in Uganda, the paper reflects on the importance of network, norms and trust in effectively responding to GBV in conditions of conflict-affected displacement.
Despite its long history, plague has not been an internationally significant disease since the mid-twentieth century, and it has attracted minimal modern critical attention. Strategies for treating plague are generally outdated and of limited effectiveness. However, plague remains endemic to a few developing nations, most prominently Madagascar. The outbreak of a major plague epidemic across several Madagascan urban areas in 2017 has sparked a wider discourse about the necessity of improving global preparedness for a potential future plague pandemic. Beyond updating treatment modalities, a key aspect of improving preparedness for such a pandemic involves a process of sophisticated review of historical public health responses to plague epidemics. As part of this process, this article outlines and compares public health responses to three separate epidemics from the early modern era onwards: Marseille in 1720–22, San Francisco in 1900–04 and Madagascar in 2017. Based on this process, it identifies three key themes common to successful responses: (1) clear, effective and minimally bureaucratic public health protocols; (2) an emphasis on combating plague denialism by gaining the trust and cooperation of the affected population; and (3) the long-term suppression of plague through the minimisation of contact between humans and infected small mammals.