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Deportation limbo
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POLITICAL ETHNOGRAPHY
The Political Ethnography series is an outlet for ethnographic research into politics
and administration and builds an interdisciplinary platform for a readership inter-
ested in qualitative research in this area. Such work cuts across traditional scholarly
boundaries of political science, public administration, anthropology, social policy
studies and development studies and facilitates a conversation across disciplines. It will
provoke a re-thinking of how researchers can understand politics and administration.
Previously published titles
The absurdity of bureaucracy: How implementation works Nina Holm
Vohnsen
Politics of waiting: Workfare, post-Soviet austerity and the
ethics of freedom Liene Ozoliņa
Diplomacy and lobbying during Turkey’s Europeanisation: The private
life of politics Bilge Firat
Dramas at Westminster: Select committees and the quest for
accountability Marc Geddes
When politics meets bureaucracy: Rules, norms, conformity
and cheating Christian Lo
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Deportation limbo
State violence and contestations
in the Nordics
Annika Lindberg
Manchester University Press
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Copyright © Annika Lindberg 2022
The right of Annika Lindberg to be identified as the author of this work has been
asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This electronic edition has been made freely available under a Creative Commons
(CC BY-NC-ND) licence, thanks to the support of the Swiss National Science
Foundation, which permits non-commercial use, distribution and reproduction
provided the author(s) and Manchester University Press are fully cited and no
modifications or adaptations are made. Details of the licence can be viewed at
https://creativecommons .org /licenses /by -nc -nd /4 .0/
Cover image: Thomas Elsted
Published by Manchester University Press
Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL
www .man ches teru nive rsit ypress .co .uk
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Annika Lindberg’s inaugural dissertation was submitted in the fulfilment of the
requirements for the degree of Doctor rerum socialum at the Faculty of Business,
Economics and Social Sciences at the University of Bern. The faculty accepted this
work as dissertation on 19 September 2019 at the request of the two advisors
Christian Joppke and Shahram Khosravi, without wishing to take a position on the
view. The dissertation has been re-written and developed for the purpose of this
monograph.
ISBN 978 1 5261 6087 4 hardback
First published 2022
The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for
any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does
not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or
appropriate.
Typeset
by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India
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The power relations that characterize any historically embedded
society are never as transparently clear as the names we give to them
imply. Power can be invisible, it can be fantastic, it can be dull and
routine. It can be obvious, it can reach you by the baton of the police,
it can speak the language of your thoughts and desires. It can feel like
remote control, it can exhilarate like liberation, it can travel through
time, and it can drown you in the present. It is dense and superficial, it
can cause bodily injury, and it can harm you without seeming ever to
touch you. It is systematic and it is particularistic and it is often both
at the same time. It causes dreams to live and dreams to die.
(Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 2008: 3)
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Contents
Series editors’ preface page viii
List of figures x
Acknowledgements xi
Prologue 1
Introduction: deportation fantasies 4
1 The politics of deportation and the Nordic welfare state 25
2 What you get is a prison: detention in Denmark 43
3 Deporting with care: detention in Sweden 67
4 Politics that kill, slowly: the Danish deportation camps 93
5 The idea is to exhaust them: minimum welfare
provisions in Sweden 117
Conclusion: state violence and its effects 140
Epilogue: Abolfazl’s death and other afterlives 151
Appendix: on methods 153
References 160
Index 185
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Series editors’ preface
Ethnography reaches the parts of politics that other methods cannot reach.
It captures the lived experience of politics; the everyday life of political elites
and street-level bureaucrats. It identifies what we fail to learn, and what we
fail to understand, from other approaches. Specifically:
1. It is a source of data not available elsewhere.
2. It is often the only way to identify key individuals and core processes.
3. It identifies ‘voices’ all too often ignored.
4. By disaggregating organisations, it leads to an understanding of ‘the
black box’, or the internal processes of groups and organisations.
5. It recovers the beliefs and practices of actors.
6. It gets below and behind the surface of official accounts by provid-
ing texture, depth and nuance, so our stories have richness as well as
context.
7. It lets interviewees explain the meaning of their actions, providing an
authenticity that can only come from the main characters involved in
the story.
8. It allows us to frame (and reframe, and reframe) research questions in a
way that recognises our understandings about how things work around
here evolve during the fieldwork.
9. It admits of surprises – of moments of epiphany, serendipity and hap-
penstance – that can open new research agendas.
10. It helps us to see and analyse the symbolic, performative aspects of
political action.
Despite this distinct and distinctive contribution, ethnography’s potential is
rarely realised in political science and related disciplines. It is considered an
endangered species or at best a minority sport. This series seeks to promote
the use of ethnography in political science, public administration and public
policy.
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Series editors’ preface ix
The series has two key aims:
1. To establish an outlet for ethnographic research into politics, public
administration and public policy.
2. To build an interdisciplinary platform for a readership interested in
qualitative research into politics and administration. We expect such
work to cut across the traditional scholarly boundaries of political sci-
ence, public administration, anthropology, organisation studies, social
policy, and development studies.
R. A. W. Rhodes, Professor, University of Southampton
Nina Holm Vohnsen, Associate Professor, Aarhus University
Series editors
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