Deportation Limbo: State Violence and Contestations in the Nordics - Hardcover

by Annika Lindberg (Author)

Deportation limbo is a political ethnography of deportation enforcement in Denmark and Sweden. Building on research on frontline officials working in immigration detention and deportation camps, it traces the continuum of state violence mobilised to pressure non-deported people to leave, and its injurious effects.

Back Jacket

Deportation limbo traces the efforts of two Northern European welfare states, Denmark and Sweden, to address the so-called implementation gap in deportation enforcement. It offers an original, detailed account of the often futile and injurious effects of policy measures that routinely fail to increase deportation rates, while exposing non-deported people to radical forms of exclusion that are justified with reference to their liminal legal status.

The book takes this '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 immigration detention, deportation camps, and migration offices in both countries, it presents unique ethnographic material that captures frontline officials' ambivalent efforts to pressure non-deported people to leave. Using the continuum of state violence as an analytical lens, the book offers a comprehensive account of how the borders of these welfare states are drawn through practices that subject racialised 'others' to forced removal and incarceration, bureaucratic derecording, and destitution.

Deportation limbo makes an important, critical contribution to current academic and political debates on the endemic violence of deportation regimes, the politico-bureaucratic practices that sustain them, and their human costs.

Author Biography

Annika Lindberg is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg