Deportation limbo traces the efforts of two Nordic welfare states, Denmark and Sweden, to address the so-called implementation gap in deportation enforcement. It offers an original, empirically grounded account of how often-futile, injurious policy measures devoted to pressuring non-deported people to leave are implemented and contested in practice. In doing so, it presents a critique of the widespread, normalised use of detention, encampment, and destitution, which routinely fail to enhance deportations while exposing deportable people to conditions that cause their premature death. The book takes the ‘deportation limbo’ as a starting point for exploring the violent nature of borders, the racial boundaries of welfare states, and the limits of state control over cross-border mobility. Building on unprecedented access to detention and deportation camps and migration offices in both countries, it presents ethnographic material capturing frontline officials’ tension-ridden efforts to regulate non-deported people using forced deportation, incarceration, encampment, and destitution. Using a continuum of state violence as the analytical lens, the book offers a uniquely comprehensive account of how the borders of Nordic welfare states are drawn through practices that subject racialised ‘others’ to expulsion, incarceration, and destitution. The book is the first to systematically document the renewed deportation turn in Denmark and Sweden, and to critically examine its implications: for the people targeted by intensified deportation measures, and for the individual officials, institutions, and societies enforcing them. It offers an important, critical contribution to current debates on the violence of deportation regimes, the politico-bureaucratic structures and practices that sustain them, and their human costs.
deaths is shifted from the state to the migrant,3 accompanied by a moral shifting of responsibility for the fact of migration, as well as for dignifying and identifying the bodies of migrants found on EU territory. Critical border studies has increasingly turned to both Foucault’s biopolitics and Agamben’s concept of bare life, understood as what remains when human existence is stripped of the encumbrances of social location and bereft of the qualifications of political inclusion and belonging (Agamben 1998). Politics for Agamben is an ongoing tension between inclusion
Bordering intimacy is a study of how borders and dominant forms of intimacy, such as family, are central to the governance of postcolonial states such as Britain. The book explores the connected history between contemporary border regimes and the policing of family with the role of borders under European and British empires. Building upon postcolonial, decolonial and black feminist theory, the investigation centres on how colonial bordering is remade in contemporary Britain through appeals to protect, sustain and make family life. Not only was family central to the making of colonial racism but claims to family continue to remake, shore up but also hide the organisation of racialised violence in liberal states. Drawing on historical investigations, the book investigates the continuity of colonial rule in numerous areas of contemporary government – family visa regimes, the policing of sham marriages, counterterror strategies, deprivation of citizenship, policing tactics, integration policy. In doing this, the book re-theorises how we think of the connection between liberal government, race, family, borders and empire. In using Britain as a case, this opens up further insights into the international/global circulations of liberal empire and its relationship to violence.
. Mai, J. Moll, and A. Vion, 2014. ‘The AntiAtlas of Borders: A Manifesto’, Journal of Borderlands Studies 29(4): 503–12. Parker, N. and N. Vaughan-Williams, 2009. ‘Lines in the Sand? Towards an Agenda for Critical Border Studies’, Geopolitics 14(3): 582–7. Rose, N., 1999. Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought , Cambridge: Cambridge
surveil bodies as part of the domesticating state. However, despite a complex and highly developed conception of the border, studies of borders, both from within migration studies and even from critical border studies, still broadly remain fixated on the evolving and contemporary nature of borders – and in doing so deny their colonial histories and orientations. Whilst the ‘line-in-the-sand’ definition of borders has long been disputed and transformed, borders are still largely equated with state sovereignty, the nation state and practices of immigration (Parker and