2021 Statelessness & Citizenship Review 3(2) NEGOTIATING RE-LABELLING WITHIN SWEDEN Upon arriving in Sweden, the participants shared similar experiences of how their Palestinianness was seen as an irrelevant label by the Swedish Migration Agency or Migrationsverket (‘SMA’). All those spoken to were labelled as refugees (flyktingstatus) or person in need of subsidiary protection (alternativt skyddsbehövande) by the SMA. Their ‘citizenship’ was recorded as stateless (statslös), with Syria as their country of origin. No reference to their Palestinianness was made on any official documents or databases. This stateless label was imposed on them despite the SMA having no law, policy or guidance on how statelessness should be determined or categorised, and there being no mechanism to appeal the decision. 65 Zahra explained how she, as with all the other participants spoken to (excluding those who arrived through family reunification), raised her Palestinianness during the asylum procedure, only to have its relevance rejected: The first thing they wrote when I told them that I am Palestinian-Syrian … they registered me as statslös, stateless, like I have no country that I belong to, that I have no nationality. So, I was stateless, and this is something that makes you wonder: If I’m stateless and I’m considered stateless, where do I come from? What are my origins? Who gave me the right to be Palestinian? 66 For Mohammed, recognition of his Palestinianness by the SMA was ‘an issue of respect and it’s also an issue of existence, which is our resistance against the Israeli occupation’. 67 When the SMA referred to him as stateless he noted that ‘it was a shock for me … I’m here, you can see me, but do I have a country or what? I must be from somewhere. I’m not from the moon’. For Mohammed and Zahra, along with other participants, it was at the point when their citizenship was recoded as statslös by the SMA that they felt like they were made stateless for the first time. When being labelled as a stateless refugee from Syria by the SMA, all the participants demanded, unsuccessfully, for their Palestinianness to be officially recognised. This was the beginning of a pattern of resistance and rejection to their non-labelling as Palestinian that would continue, and in several cases intensify, as the participants moved closer to acquiring Swedish citizenship. Unlike many other bureaucracies that the participants had previously navigated, the citizenship or statelessness of refugees does not negatively impact their access to services or opportunities in Sweden. This demand for Palestinianness to be recognised as part of the participant’s status in Sweden, as compared to transit states, reflects the importance of this label for individual or group identity in the participant’s final country of asylum. BECOMING SWEDISH AND THE BUREAUCRATIC ERASURE OF THE STATELESS REFUGEE LABELS Prior to the 2016 temporary asylum laws, the culmination of asylum procedure in Sweden was the acquisition of Swedish citizenship. 68 All but two of the 65 66 67 68 Jason Tucker, ‘Sweden’s Temporary Asylum Law and the Indefinite Statelessness of Refugees’ (2018) 2(7) Oxford Monitor of Forced Migration 21. Interview with Zahra, 24 years old from Yarmouk (Tom Rollins, 29 April 2017). Interview with Mohammed, 26 years old from Damascus (Tom Rollins, 26 April 2017). Tucker (n 65) 21. 344