My dissertation explores how states categorise refugees to control migration and make migrants governable. Through a comparative case study of Sweden and Canada, it looks at two key aspects of refugee categorisation. First, the historical origins and development of processing systems for making refugees administratively and legally legible. Second, how dilemmas of classification are resolved in migration courts when individuals don’t fit the categories. The study addresses how, in the context of two countries with very different immigration histories, boundaries have been drawn and negotiated around categories of immigrants, such as Convention refugees and unaccompanied minors.
The dissertation is informed by historical institutional theory and writings on classification. Rather than seeing the categories through which asylum is regulated as static, it precedes from the notion that categories are deeply political tools for ordering the world. This makes them function as an infrastructure of migration control, impacting notions of deservingness and who gets to be a refugee. Similar to many other categorisation system, it is contested: the complexity of migrants’ lives defy administrative simplification, and people react to the categories imposed upon them. This means that the categories are continuously negotiated and re-made. Rather than being transplanted onto migrants, I see categorisation as constituted in a relationship between the governing and the governed.
Andreas Lundstedt
Workshop: The Framing of The ‘Migration Crisis’ Cross-Nationally - From Problem Definition to Institutionalization (Or Not). Istanbul: 4-5 oktober, 2018.
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2018