Nordic vagabonds: The Roma and the logic of benevolent violence in the Swedish welfare state (original) (raw)
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The Exceptional State of "Roma Beggars" in Sweden
European Journal of Homelessness, 2018
Across Europe, social-democratic, liberal democracies have become host to growing numbers of impoverished EU migrants (often called "Roma beggars") who seem to pose a challenge to the tenets of egalitarianism and social protection that are the foundation of the welfare state. Sweden is no exception. Nor has it been exceptional in its response: creating what can be described as a "state of exception" for homeless, impoverished EU migrants wherein they are afforded fewer rights, and almost no access to care, compared to other migrants to the country (such as refugees and asylum seekers). In this paper we examine the nature of this "state of exception"-and consequent denial of rights for poor and homeless EU migrants-and how it has been justified by invoking the inherent fairness of the Swedish system. We do so by reviewing, but especially extending, the Italian philosopher Georgio Agamben's concepts of state (and space) of exception, bare life, and homo sacer to describe the way homeless EU migrants are understood and treated in Sweden, and then by carefully examining the major policy statement on the matter, the "Valfridsson Report," which was written to harmonize practices across Swedish jurisdictions while providing the legal basis for making an exception of impoverished EU migrants, and which is now being implemented in law.
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Free to Move Along: On the Urbanisation of Cross-border Mobility Controls - A Case of Roma 'EU migrants' in Malmö, Sweden, 2019
This thesis traces the local government response to the presence of impoverished and street-homeless so-called vulnerable EU-citizens in Malmö (Sweden’s third largest city) between the years 2014-2016, and develops an analysis about how bordering takes place in cities. “Vulnerable EU-citizens” is an established term in the Swedish context, used by the authorities to refer to citizens of other EU Member States who are staying in Sweden without a right of residence and in situations of extreme poverty and marginality. A majority of those whom are categorised as “vulnerable EU-citizens” are Roma from Bulgaria or Romania. Starting from the observation that “vulnerable EU-citizens” have been pervasively problematised as unwanted migrants, the thesis asks how the municipal- and local authorities in Malmö act to discourage and otherwise manage their mobilities by controlling their conditions of stay. In doing so, it seeks to elaborate on theories about intra-EU bordering practices, and to elucidate some of the mechanisms, effects and implications of urban mobility control practices. Methodologically, the thesis is structured as a case study, centring on the case of the intensely contested Sorgenfri-camp – a makeshift squatter settlement that housed a large proportion of Malmö’s estimated total population of “vulnerable EU-citizens”. The Sorgenfri-camp was established in 2014 and lasted for a year and a half before it was demolished in November 2015 on the order of the City of Malmö’s environmental authorities. Often referred to in the media as “Sweden’s largest slum”, the Sorgenfri-camp was quite literally a central locus of a local and national political “crisis” regarding the growth of unauthorised squatter settlements. As a “critical case”, it offers a vantage point from which to trace the development of policy and government practices towards “vulnerable EU-citizens” and observe how the authorities negotiate the legal ambiguities, moral-political dilemmas, and social conflicts that swirl around the unauthorised settlements of “vulnerable EU-citizens”. It also serves as a key example of a more widespread framing of “the problem of vulnerable EU-citizens” as an order, nuisance and sanitation problem. The analysis is carried out with a theoretical framework informed by Foucaultian poststructuralist theory and theories of scale, combining insights from the field of critical border and migration studies with concepts from the legal geographic literature on urban socio-spatial control. In particular, it follows socio-legal scholar Mariana Valverde’s (2010) call to foreground the role of scalar categorisation and politics in the networked policing of various non-citizens. The analysis addresses the construction of the Sorgenfri-camp and its residents as a “nuisance problem” in popular and policy discourse, and explores the effects and consequences of this framing in the context of the administrative-legal process that resulted in the demolition of the settlement. The thesis highlights the city as a space where complex negotiations over residency-status, rights and belonging play out. It submits that local authorities in Malmö have responded to the presence and situation of vulnerable EU-citizens in the city by enacting a series of practices and programs that jointly add up to an indirect policy of exclusionary mobility control, the cumulative effect of which is to eliminate the “geographies of survival” for the group in question. Furthermore, it argues that this reinforces the complex modulations of un/free mobility” in the EU: destitute EU-citizens who are formally free to move and reside within the union are repeatedly moved along, and thus effectively prevented from settling. This is taken to be illustrative of an urbanisation of mobility control practices: a convergence between mobility control and urban socio-spatial control, or a rescaling of mobility control from the edges of the nation-state to the urban scale and, ultimately, to the body of the “vulnerable EU-citizen”.
Local Economy, 2018
The chief aims of the Swedish municipality-based Facebook network SEM, 'Solidarity with EU migrants' [Solidaritet med EU migranter!] are to fight for better conditions and humane treatment of migrants primarily from Romania, who came to Sweden in hope of finding work and the ability to provide for their families. The site is to transmit relevant news, actions, organise money collections, political actions and alike. Those volunteers active in the group believe that 'righteousness and solidarity' should apply, even those who are in the grip of European Union bureaucracy. 1 Using theories of civil movements in the IT age, I elaborate on how the activists on the site respond to the challenges of the crim-inalisation of vulnerable European Union citizens, by balancing their engagement between the dimensions of 'pragmatic voluntarism' versus 'subversive humanitarianism'. Furthermore, I explore how the site counteracts hegemonic master narratives on Roma as both idle and victims, who need to be saved from begging, by providing alternative narratives of subjectivities and identities to the Roma men and women they work with and for, seeing them as agents struggling to improve the lives of their families.
Nordic Social Work Research
In this article, we bring attention to the local-level administration of social services as a site of bordering. Specifically, we focus on the provision of social assistance (i.e. a means-tested cash support program, ekonomiskt bistånd) for irregularised migrants. Based on a close comparative reading of the City of Malmö's 2013 and 2017 guidelines on social assistance, we analyse how entitlements to social assistance have been redefined and restricted following the 2015 so-called refugee crisis and the subsequent overhaul of Swedish asylum policy. Prior to this 'crisis', in 2013, the City of Malmö became the first Swedish municipality to extend access to social assistance to irregularised migrants. In 2017, the guidelines were revised with the expressed aim to discourage irregularised migrants from remaining in the country. We see this as a shift from a needs-based approach to one that, instead, sees social policy as subordinate to the goals of immigration enforcement. Further, we conceptualize this as a shift towards a type of indirect internalized bordering measure that so far has received relatively little scholarly attention in the Nordic context, namely self deportation measures that aim to deter immigration and encourage 'voluntary return' by restricting access to public services and welfare benefits for (irregularised) migrants. Finally, we argue that the overall specialization, juridification and standardization of social service provision supports the shift in question, providing a convenient justification for restricting entitlements to irregularised migrants.
Updated version of a paper from 2008. This paper traces how Swedish official policy language on human rights and racism within the context of a new minority politics functioned in regards one of the country’s official national minorities, the Roma. It asks how this group was made to fit into official policy discourse first as 'zigenare' and more recently as 'romer'. The paper maps how policy discourse on Roma transformed between the early 1990s and 2007, in relation to the domestic economic and political environment as well as under the influence of intra-European policy developments. The minority policy has failed to protect and ensure the rights of Romani people who have recently migrated to Sweden from the newest EU member states. The paper suggest that this failure has occurred primarily for two reasons. First, the policy was created in a political climate where the majority of Roma living in Sweden had done so for centuries. It was not designed to address questions of equality and rights relating to the recent Roma migrants fleeing poverty, violence, and systematic discrimination in other EU countries. Secondly, and following directly from the first point, the policy has little practical affinity to the human beings who are identified and/or self-identify as Romani. It was created to promote a new language of equality and rights in a society that already prized itself on its glowing equality record. It was not designed to deal with practical and very real impediments to a safe, dignified, and liveable life for anyone residing in Sweden. In sum, in order to understand the current failure of the Swedish state to sufficiently address the situation of Romani EU-migrants living in Sweden, it is important to understand how the policy language on minorities was created and legitimised.
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This ethnographic article addresses social work’s participation in exclusionary practices performed by migration authorities in Sweden, leading to extreme precariousness among young people searching for protection. Through ethnographic descriptions of young people who fled from Sweden to other European countries, we argue that Swedish social workers played an active role in depriving young people of their social rights. A central concept in the article is administrative violence. Such institutionalised violence risks being excluded from a moral assessment. We argue that moral responsibility is not about following state rules, but may instead involve acting in a way that rules do not support. If social work accepts the boundaries of the nation-state, its border work and the logics of neoliberal ideologies, it cannot live up to the ethical standards of social work and its emphasis on social justice.