Covered tracks? Deportation as a historical blind spot in twentieth to twenty-first century Nordic countries

Abstract

The article addresses modern forms of deportation – that is, the forced removal of non-citizens from a state territory – as a significant but frequently overlooked part of the histories of nation building, migration control and international relations. The authors approach deportation in the twentieth to twenty-first centuries as primarily a tool of selective nation-building intimately tied up with the boundary drawing of the nation/welfare states and the rise of the international nation-state system. Through the case of Nordic history, the authors identify four long-term logics of forced removals that serve as heuristic tools in examining long-term continuities and changes in the practice of deportation: 1) socioeconomic selection; 2) deportation as a foreign-policy instrument; 3) racial/cultural gatekeeping; and 4) guarding the administrative power of the state. The article argues that scarcity of research on deportation specifically as a long-term phenomenon in the Nordic and broader European context hinge on non-transparent administrative processes, opaque record keeping and archiving, and the missing voices produced by the physical act of removing migrants from the nation-state’s territory. The authors suggest ways to address silences, including the use of oral history materials and reading administrative sources ‘against the grain’. More broadly, the article calls for an epistemological shift from a nation-state-centred perspective that has omitted those whom the state has disposed itself of.