Paperwork performances

Legitimating state violence in the Swedish deportation regime

in Journal of Legal Anthropology
Author:
Lisa Marie Borrelli HES-SO Valais-Wallis lisa.borrelli@hevs.ch

Search for other papers by Lisa Marie Borrelli in
Current site
Google Scholar
PubMed
Close
and
Annika Lindberg University of Copenhagen annika.lindberg@soz.unibe.ch

Search for other papers by Annika Lindberg in
Current site
Google Scholar
PubMed
Close
Restricted access

Abstract

Deportation regimes mobilise coercive state powers, but also entail extensive paperwork, the latter of which remains underexplored in deportation studies. Building on ethnographic fieldwork in border police units and a migration-related detention centre in Sweden, this article explores how bureaucratic practices of detecting, detaining and ultimately deporting people whose presence has been illegalised are enforced and legitimated through the use of paperwork. Paperwork, we argue, becomes the ‘signature of the state’ that enables state agencies to assert themselves as ‘rational’ actors, even when their own practices are ridden by dilemmas, inconsistency and sometimes arbitrariness. We show how the same documents that are meant to ensure fairness and accountability in bureaucratic processes may render state actions even more unreadable, and further serve to rationalise and legitimise intrusive, violent and discriminatory state actions. The article thus highlights the importance of considering the often-tedious paperwork as essential to the operation of coercive state powers, such as the detainment and deportation of illegalised persons.

Contributor Notes

Lisa Marie Borrelli works as a postdoctoral researcher at the HES-SO Valais-Wallis and the University of Neuchâtel within the National Centres of Competence in Research (nccr) – on the move project ‘Governing Migration and Social Cohesion through Integration Requirements’, led by Christin Achermann and Stefanie Kurt. Email: lisa.borrelli@hevs.ch

Annika Lindberg is a visiting postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Advanced Migration Studies, University of Copenhagen. Her research project is supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation and focuses on the deportation turn in Danish and Swedish asylum policy and practice. Email: annika.lindberg@soz.unibe.ch

  • Collapse
  • Expand
  • Anderson, Bridget (2011), ‘Migration: Controlling the unsettled poor’, OpenDemocracy, 1 August, https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/5050/migration-controlling-unsettled-poor.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Asad, Talal (2004), ‘Where are the margins of the state?’ In Das, Veena and Deborah Poole (eds), Anthropology in the Margins of the State (Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press): 279288.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Bierschenk, Thomas (2014), ‘From the anthropology of development to the anthropology of global social engineering‘, Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, 139 no. 1:7398.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Borrelli, L. M. (2020). ‘Between suspicion, nicknames, and trust—renegotiating ethnographic access with Swedish border police’, Journal of Organizational Ethnography. https://doi.org/10.1108/JOE-01-2019-0010.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Bosworth, Mary (2016), ‘Paperwork and administrative power in detention’, Oxford Law Faculty Blog. 13 June, https://www.law.ox.ac.uk/research-subject-groups/centre-criminology/centreborder-criminologies/blog/2016/06/paperwork-and.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Bosworth, Mary and Gavin Slade (2014), ‘In search of recognition: Gender and staff-detainee relations in a British immigration removal centre’, Punishment & Society 16, no. 2: 16986, https://doi.org/10.1177/1462474513517017.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Bosworth, Mary, Alpa Parmar and Yolanda Vázquez (eds) (2018), Race, Criminal Justice, and Migration Control: Enforcing the Boundaries of Belonging (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Cabot, Heath (2012), ‘The governance of things: Documenting limbo in the Greek asylum procedure’, PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review 35, no. 1: 1129, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1555-2934.2012.01177.x.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Canning, Victoria (2017), Gendered Harm and Structural Violence in the British Asylum System (London: Taylor & Francis).

  • Canning, Victoria (2019), ‘Keeping up with the kladdkaka: Kindness and coercion in Swedish immigration detention centres’, European Journal of Criminology, published 3 January, https://doi.org/10.1177/1477370818820627.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Cohen, Stanley (2001), States of Denial: Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering (Oxford: Wiley).

  • Cole, Mike (2009), ‘A plethora of “suitable enemies”: British racism at the dawn of the twenty-first century’, Ethnic and Racial Studies 32, no. 9: 16711685, https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870903205556.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Corrigan, Philip, and Derek Sayer (1985), The Great Arch: English State Formation as Cultural Revolution (Oxford: Blackwell).

  • Das, Veena (2004), ‘The signature of the state: The paradox of illegibility’, in Das, Veena and Deborah Poole (eds), Anthropology in the Margins of the State (Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press): 225252.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • DeBono, Daniela, Sofia Ronnqvist and Karin Magnusson (2015), Humane and Dignified? Migrants’ Experiences of Living in a ‘State of Deportability’ in Sweden (Malmö: Malmö University).

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Dhupelia-Mesthrie, Uma (2014), ‘Paper regimes’, Kronos 40: 1022.

  • Drotbohm, Heike and Ines Hasselberg (2015), ‘Deportation, anxiety, justice: New ethnographic perspectives’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 41, no. 4: 551562, https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2014.957171.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Ellermann, Antje (2009), States Against Migrants: Deportation in Germany and the United States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

  • Eule, Tobias G., Lisa Marie Borrelli, Annika Lindberg and Anna Wyss (2019), Migrants Before the Law: Contested Migration Control in Europe (London: Palgrave Macmillan).

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Fischer, Nicolas (2015), ‘The management of anxiety: An ethnographical outlook on self-mutilations in a French immigration detention centre’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 41, no. 4: 599616, https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2014.960820.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Gibney, Matthew J. (2008), ‘Asylum and the expansion of deportation in the United Kingdom’, Government and Opposition 43, no. 2: 146167, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1477-7053.2007.00249.x.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Graeber, David (2012), ‘Dead zones of the imagination: On violence, bureaucracy, and interpretive labor – The Malinowski Memorial Lecture, 2006’, HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 2, no. 2: 105128, https://doi.org/10.14318/hau2.2.007.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Grinberg, Omri (2018), ‘Facsimileing the state: The bureaucracy of document transmission in Israeli human rights NGOs’, Anthropologica 60, no. 1: 259273, https://doi.org/10.3138/anth.60.1.t24.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Gupta, Akhil (2012), Red Tape: Bureaucracy, Structural Violence, and Poverty in India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press).

  • Hull, Matthew S. (2012), Government of Paper: The Materiality of Bureaucracy in Urban Pakistan (Berkeley: University of California Press).

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Joppke, Christian (1998), ‘Why liberal states accept unwanted immigration’, World Politics 50, no. 2: 266293, https://doi.org/10.1017/S004388710000811X.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Kafka, Franz and Anthea Bell (2009), The Castle (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

  • Latour, Bruno (1988), ‘Drawing things together’, in Michael Lynch and Steve Woolgar (eds), Representation in Scientific Practice (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), 1968.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Lindberg, Annika (forthcoming 2020) ‘Minimum Rights Policies Targeting People Seeking Protection in Denmark and Sweden’, in Abdelhady, Dalia, Nina Gren and Martin Joormann (Eds.), Refugees and the Violence of European Welfare Bureaucracies (Manchester: Manchester University Press).

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Lindberg, Annika and Lisa Marie Borrelli (2019), ‘Let the right one in? On European migration authorities’ resistance to research’, Social Anthropology 27, no. S1: 1732, https://doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12659.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Lipsky, Michael (1980), Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of the Individual in Public Services (New York: Russell Sage Foundation).

  • Mathur, Nayanika (2016), Paper Tiger: Law, Bureaucracy and the Developmental State in Himalayan India (Delhi: Cambridge University Press).

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Navaro-Yashin, Yael (2007), ‘Make-believe papers, legal forms and the counterfeit: Affective interactions between documents and people in Britain and Cyprus’, Anthropological Theory 7, no. 1: 7998, https://doi.org/10.1177/1463499607074294.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Nugent, David (2010), ‘States, secrecy, subversives: APRA and political fantasy in mid-20th-century Peru’, American Ethnologist 37, no. 4: 681702, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1425.2010.01278.x.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • O'Brien-Olinger, Sam (2016), Police, Race and Culture in the ‘New Ireland’: An Ethnography (London: Palgrave Macmillan).

  • Parmar, Alpa (2018), ‘Policing belonging: Race and nation in the UK’, in Bosworth et al. (2018): 108126.

  • Parmar, Alpa (2019), ‘Arresting (non)citizenship: The policing migration nexus of nationality, race and criminalization’, Theoretical Criminology 24, no. 1: 2849.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Pigg, Stacy Leigh, Susan L. Erikson and Kathleen Inglis (2018), ‘Document/ation: Power, interests, accountabilities’, Anthropological Quarterly 60, no. 1: 167177.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Riles, Annelise (ed) (2006), Documents: Artifacts of Modern Knowledge (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press).

  • Rosenberger, Sieglinde and Sabine Koppes (2018), ‘Claiming control: Cooperation with return as a condition for social benefits in Austria and the Netherlands’, Comparative Migration Studies 6, no. 1, https://doi.org/10.1186/s40878-018-0085-3.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Rozenblit, Leonid and Frank Keil (2002), ‘The misunderstood limits of folk science: An illusion of explanatory depth’, Cognitive Science 26, no. 5: 521562, https://doi.org/10.1207/s15516709cog2605_1.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Salter, Mark B. (2006), ‘The global visa regime and the political technologies of the international self: Borders, bodies, biopolitics’, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 31, no. 2: 167189.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Scott, James C. (1998), Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press).

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Stoler, Anne (2004), ‘Affective states’, in David Nugent and Joan Vincent (eds), A Companion to the Anthropology of Politics (Oxford: Blackwell), 420.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Taussig, Michael (1984), ‘Culture of terror – Space of death: Roger Casement's Putumayo report and the explanation of torture’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 26, no. 3: 467497.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Trouillot, Michel-Rolph (2001), ‘The anthropology of the state in the age of globalization: Close encounters of the deceptive kind’, Current Anthropology 42, no. 1: 125138, https://doi.org/10.1086/318437.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Tuckett, Anna (2018), Rules, Paper, Status: Migrants and Precarious Bureaucracy in Contemporary Italy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press).

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Vohnsen, Nina Holm (2017), The Absurdity of Bureaucracy: How Implementation Works (Manchester: Manchester University Press).

  • Walters, William (2016), ‘The flight of the deported: Aircraft, deportation, and politics’, Geopolitics 21, no. 2: 435458, https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2015.1089234.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation

Metrics

All Time Past Year Past 30 Days
Abstract Views 2440 1115 64
Full Text Views 116 8 0
PDF Downloads 115 13 0