2021
Statelessness & Citizenship Review
3(2)
migration regime, but also how precarious migrants struggle to search for dignity
and rights. 1
This article investigates the ways in which precarious migrants seek to resist
the disciplinary mechanisms of migration regimes. More precisely, this article
explores how stateless Palestinians in Sweden act in order to transform their future
and resist the conduct and governmentality of Swedish migration politics.
Although precarious migrants are often categorised as vulnerable and situated
outside of politics as non-subjects (either as victims or threats), recent research
within the field of autonomy of migration illuminates the agency and political
struggles of vulnerable migrant groups. 2 Migrants engage with the
governmentality of securitised and neo-liberal border regimes 3 of the Global
North in their continuous movement for freedom.
The aim of this article is to contribute to both empirical and theoretical
understandings of the strategies used by stateless migrants in order to alter their
situation. It will do so through a case study that pays attention to stateless
Palestinians seeking asylum in Sweden, with a particular focus on persons who
have received decisions ordering deportation. Deportation and return-migration
are particular features of migration regimes and affect stateless people in particular
ways. The main question to be addressed is: how do stateless refugees resist the
governmentality of migration regimes? Following theoretical and methodological
considerations, the article is organised by the identification of stateless resistance
to different aspects of governmentality: categorising, temporal and spatial
mechanisms and the actual conducting of behaviour.
THEORETICAL CONSIDERATIONS: STATELESSNESS, DEPORTABILITY AND
MIGRANT RESISTANCE AS COUNTER-CONDUCT
This article combines readings on the literature of statelessness with that of
migrant resistance and draws inspiration from an emerging field within migration
studies that considers how borders and governmentality are navigated and
countered by ‘unwanted’ migrants. Migration, as such, is seen as a process towards
autonomy (or freedom) and involves ‘migrant’ claims of rights to mobility and
1
2
3
Conversation with Ahmed (Helena Lindholm, Vänersborg, 18 February 2020 and 20 March
2021).
See Martina Tazzioli, ‘The Temporal Borders of Asylum: Temporality of Control in the EU
Border Regime’ (2018) 64(1) Political Geography 13; Maurice Stierl, Migrant Resistance in
Contemporary Europe (Routledge 2019); Fiorenza Picozza, The Coloniality of Asylum:
Mobility, Autonomy and Solidarity in the Wake of Europe’s Refugee Crisis (Rowman
International 2021).
See, eg, Alice Bloch and Liza Schuster, ‘At the Extremes of Exclusion: Deportation,
Detention and Dispersal’ (2005) 28(3) Ethnic and Racial Studies 491. See also Jef Huysmans,
The Politics of Insecurity: Fear, Migration and Asylum in the EU (Routledge 2006); Philippe
Bourbeau, The Securitisation of Migration: A Study of Movement and Order (Routledge
2015); Didier Fassin, ‘Policing Borders, Producing Boundaries: The Governmentality of
Immigration in Dark Times’ [2011] 40 Annual Review of Anthropology 213; Jennifer
Hyndman, ‘The Geopolitics of Migration and Mobility’ (2012) 17(2) Geopolitics 243; Bridget
Anderson, Us and Them?: The Dangerous Politics of Immigration Control (Oxford
University Press 2013); Alexandria J Innes, Migration, Citizenship and the Challenge for
Security: An Ethnographic Approach (Palgrave Macmillan 2015); Vanessa Barker, Nordic
Nationalism and Penal Order: Walling the Welfare State (Routledge 2017); Nicholas De
Genova (ed), The Borders of ‘Europe’: Autonomy of Migration: Tactics of Bordering (Duke
University Press 2017); Ruben Andersson, No Go World: How Fear Is Redrawing Our Maps
and Infecting Our Politics (University of California Press 2019).
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