Deportation limbo is a political ethnography of deportation enforcement in Denmark and Sweden. Building on research on frontline officials working in immigration detention and deportation camps, it traces the continuum of state violence mobilised to pressure non-deported people to leave, and its injurious effects.

PrologueIntroduction: deportation fantasies1 The politics of deportation and the Nordic welfare state2 What you get is a prison: detention in Denmark3 Deporting with care: detention in Sweden4 Politics that kill, slowly: the Danish deportation camps5 The idea is to exhaust them: minimum welfare provisions in SwedenConclusion: state violence and its effectsEpilogue: Abolfazl’s death and other afterlivesIndex

Deportation limbo traces the efforts of two Northern European welfare states, Denmark and Sweden, to address the so-called implementation gap in deportation enforcement. It offers an original, detailed account of the often futile and injurious effects of policy measures that routinely fail to increase deportation rates, while exposing non-deported people to radical forms of exclusion that are justified with reference to their liminal legal status. The book takes this ‘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 immigration detention, deportation camps, and migration offices in both countries, it presents unique ethnographic material that captures frontline officials’ ambivalent efforts to pressure non-deported people to leave. Using the continuum of state violence as an analytical lens, the book offers a comprehensive account of how the borders of these welfare states are drawn through practices that subject racialised ‘others’ to forced removal and incarceration, bureaucratic derecording, and destitution. Deportation limbo makes an important, critical contribution to current academic and political debates on the endemic violence of deportation regimes, the politico-bureaucratic practices that sustain them, and their human costs.

‘Annika Lindberg has provided an essential piece of scholarship that analyses Nordic migration regimes. For people who have experienced European migration and asylum regimes, and scholars who research semi-carceral systems of border regulation, Lindberg’s theorisation of a “Deportation limbo” is compelling and convincing in equal measure. Moreover, it is underpinned by exhaustive ethnographic research with people on the sharp end of Nordic immigration control. Their stories and testimonies are written up with compassion and grace. The book is indispensable reading for scholars of migration and asylum – but also for those seeking to understand how racism works its way through contemporary European states, constructing the lives of migrant others as exploitable, disposable and deportable.Arshad Isakjee, Senior Lecturer in Human Geography, University of Liverpool‘In a world where borders are increasingly becoming sites of violence and death as well as of resistance and contestation, Deportation limbo provides a thorough analysis and a powerful critique of the daily operation of states’ mobility control regimes. Taking us on a journey through the landscapes of the Swedish and Danish detention and deportation systems, Lindberg’s book unveils deportation as a form of state violence, which suspends people’s lives and traps them in indefinite, deadly, limbo. This violence, which stems from fantasies of controlling human mobility, is being normalised and concealed, as Lindberg brilliantly demonstrates, making visible the racist infrastructures of nation states’ projects and the political prioritisation of some lives over others. Lindberg’s compelling book is ultimately a call for us all: to bear witness to state sanctioned border violence and to envision alternative futures that can allow us to “be in the world together”. This is essential and timely reading for anyone interested in a complex understanding of state violence and border regimes, and their multiple, devastating effects on us all.’Francesca Esposito, Lecturer in the School of Social Sciences, University of Westminster and Associate Director for Community Engagement and Activism at Border Criminologies, University of Oxford