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Deporting Black Britons provides an ethnographic account of deportation from the UK to Jamaica. It traces the painful stories of four men who were deported after receiving criminal convictions in the UK. For each of the men, all of whom had moved to the UK as children, deportation was lived as exile – from parents, partners, children and friends – and the book offers portraits of survival and hardship in both the UK and Jamaica. Based on over four years of research, Deporting Black Britons describes the human consequences of deportation, while situating deportation stories within the broader context of policy, ideology, law and violence. It examines the relationship between racism, criminalisation and immigration control in contemporary Britain, suggesting new ways of thinking about race, borders and citizenship in these anti-immigrant times. Ultimately, the book argues that these stories of exile and banishment should orient us in the struggle against violent immigration controls, in the UK and elsewhere.
Deportation limbo traces the efforts of two Nordic welfare states, Denmark and Sweden, to address the so-called implementation gap in deportation enforcement. It offers an original, empirically grounded account of how often-futile, injurious policy measures devoted to pressuring non-deported people to leave are implemented and contested in practice. In doing so, it presents a critique of the widespread, normalised use of detention, encampment, and destitution, which routinely fail to enhance deportations while exposing deportable people to conditions that cause their premature death. The book takes the ‘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 detention and deportation camps and migration offices in both countries, it presents ethnographic material capturing frontline officials’ tension-ridden efforts to regulate non-deported people using forced deportation, incarceration, encampment, and destitution. Using a continuum of state violence as the analytical lens, the book offers a uniquely comprehensive account of how the borders of Nordic welfare states are drawn through practices that subject racialised ‘others’ to expulsion, incarceration, and destitution. The book is the first to systematically document the renewed deportation turn in Denmark and Sweden, and to critically examine its implications: for the people targeted by intensified deportation measures, and for the individual officials, institutions, and societies enforcing them. It offers an important, critical contribution to current debates on the violence of deportation regimes, the politico-bureaucratic structures and practices that sustain them, and their human costs.
Chapter 7 Post-deportation: citizenship and the racist world order The chapters so far have focused mostly on racism, criminalisation and immigration control in Britain, even if narrated from Jamaica. In this chapter, however, I want to think from and about Jamaica, questioning what deported people encounter when they return, and what their experiences reveal about citizenship in global perspective. Where the previous chapter offered some tools for theorising hierarchies of (non-)citizenship in contemporary Britain, this chapter explores hierarchies of
, published in Magnusson and Mikkelsen, 2017, author’s translation) On 25 August 2017, the Swedish border police raided a weekend leisure camp organised by the Swedish church for families who lived under threat of deportation. The incident attracted significant media attention, since the police had breached the informal principle of church asylum; a principle that, with few
Chapter 8 Deportation as foreign policy: meanings of development and the ordering of (im)mobility In the last chapter, I developed a critical account of citizenship from the perspective of the ‘deportee’. I described people’s struggles post-deportation, with a particular focus on Chris’s experiences in East Kingston, and argued that poverty, insecurity and frustrated mobilities characterise citizenship for Jamaica’s poor more generally. In this sense, the effective immobilisation of ‘deportees’ is symptomatic of the wider function of citizenship as a global
being rejected here, it’s not the same as in Greece, Italy, or Spain … there, you are allowed to walk around freely without documents, because they cannot afford or organise your deportation. But in Sweden, Denmark, Germany, it’s more difficult … The system is made to protect you but can also control you. That’s why, when the economic situation was good
From 1945 until around 1960, ceremonies of a new kind took place throughout Europe to commemorate the Holocaust and the deportation of Jews; ashes would be taken from the site of a concentration camp, an extermination camp, or the site of a massacre and sent back to the deportees country of origin (or to Israel). In these countries, commemorative ceremonies were then organised and these ashes (sometimes containing other human remains) placed within a memorial or reburied in a cemetery. These transfers of ashes have, however, received little attention from historical researchers. This article sets out to describe a certain number of them, all differing considerably from one another, before drawing up a typology of this phenomenon and attempting its analysis. It investigates the symbolic function of ashes in the aftermath of the Second World War and argues that these transfers – as well as having a mimetic relationship to transfers of relics – were also instruments of political legitimisation.
This article discusses how Armenians have collected, displayed and exchanged the bones of their murdered ancestors in formal and informal ceremonies of remembrance in Dayr al-Zur, Syria – the final destination for hundreds of thousands of Armenians during the deportations of 1915. These pilgrimages – replete with overlapping secular and nationalist motifs – are a modern variant of historical pilgrimage practices; yet these bones are more than relics. Bone rituals, displays and vernacular memorials are enacted in spaces of memory that lie outside of official state memorials, making unmarked sites of atrocity more legible. Vernacular memorial practices are of particular interest as we consider new archives for the history of the Armenian Genocide. The rehabilitation of this historical site into public consciousness is particularly urgent, since the Armenian Genocide Memorial Museum and Martyr’s Church at the centre of the pilgrimage site were both destroyed by ISIS (Islamic State in Syria) in 2014.
Mikhail Mizintsev, who claimed that Russian authorities had a database with 2.8 million appeals from Ukrainians asking for evacuation to Russia. In this way, the Russian regime spreads its narrative of saving Ukrainians from their own regime. In contrast, Ukrainian authorities often present Ukrainians who went to Russia since February 2022 as deportees ( Ukrinform , 2022a ). They focus on Ukrainians who were forcibly deported from occupied territories and have been kept in Russia against their
( Government of Jordan, 1973 ). They must provide extensive documentation to obtain a work permit and pay high annual fees of around US$994 for those in our study. Even refugees meeting these requirements feared jeopardising their UNHCR protection and possibilities for resettlement ( Human Rights Watch, 2021 ; Waja, 2021 ). Sudanese and Somalis faced fears of detention and deportation. A number of Sudanese were deported following protests outside UNHCR