Deportation limbo: State violence and contestations in the Nordics traces the violent state practices deployed by Nordic welfare states to contain, pressure, and deport people who have been made deportable. The book builds on ethnographic research of the institutions, actors and practices that make up Sweden’s and Denmark’s deportation regimes. It details how state fantasies of ‘effective’ deportations and ‘humane’ enforcement politics translate into practices of slow violence and dehumanisation – of the deportable people it targets, and and of those enforcing it. This talk provides an overview of some of the book’s key findings and discusses what they might imply for our understanding of state violence (direct and slow), the racial welfare state, and the imperative of radical change in the ways borders shape our political imagination.
About the speaker
Annika Lindberg (she/her) is a researcher at the School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg, and the HES-SO Valais. Her research draws on critical border studies and political ethnography, and focuses on deportation regimes, bureaucracy, and the different forms of violence manifesting at Europe’s borders. She is the author of Deportation limbo: State violence and contestations in the Nordics (Manchester University Press, 2022) and co-author of Migrants Before the Law: Contested Migration Control in Europe (Palgrave, 2019), and of the research report Stop Killing us Slowly. Her work on state power and bordering also appears in Geopolitics, Social Anthropology, and Migration and Society.
