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.
, published in Magnusson and Mikkelsen, 2017, author’s translation) On 25 August 2017, the Swedish border police raided a weekend leisure camp organised by the Swedish church for families who lived under threat of deportation. The incident attracted significant media attention, since the police had breached the informal principle of church asylum; a principle that, with few
being rejected here, it’s not the same as in Greece, Italy, or Spain … there, you are allowed to walk around freely without documents, because they cannot afford or organise your deportation. But in Sweden, Denmark, Germany, it’s more difficult … The system is made to protect you but can also control you. That’s why, when the economic situation was good
From 1945 until around 1960, ceremonies of a new kind took place throughout Europe to commemorate the Holocaust and the deportation of Jews; ashes would be taken from the site of a concentration camp, an extermination camp, or the site of a massacre and sent back to the deportees country of origin (or to Israel). In these countries, commemorative ceremonies were then organised and these ashes (sometimes containing other human remains) placed within a memorial or reburied in a cemetery. These transfers of ashes have, however, received little attention from historical researchers. This article sets out to describe a certain number of them, all differing considerably from one another, before drawing up a typology of this phenomenon and attempting its analysis. It investigates the symbolic function of ashes in the aftermath of the Second World War and argues that these transfers – as well as having a mimetic relationship to transfers of relics – were also instruments of political legitimisation.
This article discusses how Armenians have collected, displayed and exchanged the bones of their murdered ancestors in formal and informal ceremonies of remembrance in Dayr al-Zur, Syria – the final destination for hundreds of thousands of Armenians during the deportations of 1915. These pilgrimages – replete with overlapping secular and nationalist motifs – are a modern variant of historical pilgrimage practices; yet these bones are more than relics. Bone rituals, displays and vernacular memorials are enacted in spaces of memory that lie outside of official state memorials, making unmarked sites of atrocity more legible. Vernacular memorial practices are of particular interest as we consider new archives for the history of the Armenian Genocide. The rehabilitation of this historical site into public consciousness is particularly urgent, since the Armenian Genocide Memorial Museum and Martyr’s Church at the centre of the pilgrimage site were both destroyed by ISIS (Islamic State in Syria) in 2014.
( Government of Jordan, 1973 ). They must provide extensive documentation to obtain a work permit and pay high annual fees of around US$994 for those in our study. Even refugees meeting these requirements feared jeopardising their UNHCR protection and possibilities for resettlement ( Human Rights Watch, 2021 ; Waja, 2021 ). Sudanese and Somalis faced fears of detention and deportation. A number of Sudanese were deported following protests outside UNHCR
internal borders, or when they are faced with deportation. Such support has nevertheless been significant, because it potentially challenges the right of nation-states to determine who enters their territory and who is allowed to stay, and because it is often primarily prompted by a sense of solidarity, rather than by a sense of compassion towards suffering fellow humans. Those engaged in such acts of solidarity include, for example, French olive farmer Cédric Herrou, who since 2015 has assisted migrants crossing from Italy to France, and Swedish student Elin Ersson, who
impact may be more subtle, and some may amount to ‘self-censorship’ on the part of analysis teams. Table 3 presents some of the main categories of the manner in which the influences are manifested in analyses and analytical processes. Overt government interference included reports being quashed, analyses being stopped and individuals being threatened with deportation (if international) or removed from their jobs (if national
‘Mass deportations and ethnic cleansing is morally justified to counter this, and these bleeding heart NGO’s [ sic ] will be wholly responsible.’ Then, a second video, ‘La verità sui MIGRANTI’ ( Donadel, 2017 ), was uploaded to YouTube in March 2017 by a 23-year-old Italian right-wing activist and vlogger Luca Donadel. It used a similar methodology as the earlier Gefira video, including tracing the routes of rescue vessels on a map from close to Libya
brought back some Soviet footage after a visit to the Volga region in November 1921. 3 These movies demonstrate a growing competition to use visual media to promote relief operations in Russia, Armenia, or Greece. Although, nothing competed with the massive commercial success of Auction of Souls , a movie adapted from the book Ravished Armenia , written by a survivor of the genocide, Aurora Mardiganian, and released in 1919 by NER. The plot depicted the deportation of entire Armenian families and religious leaders in April 1915, killed along the forced marches or