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Nationality underwrites a great deal of the Danish asylum process, and of the refugee regime as a whole. The housing and care of asylum seekers, handled by the Danish Red Cross, is based on classifications by nationality. Bending a phrase from Benedict Anderson, these might be called "appointed communities". While the Danish asylum system in principle performs individual determination procedures for asylum seekers, granting refugee status on a case-by-case basis, in practice those identified as Iraqi or Afghani have had a very high acceptance rate. However, it is clearly the case that not all asylum seekers have citizenship of the countries they claim to come from, or indeed feel they come from the countries of which they have citizenship. In this context, we must enquire about the mechanics of determining nationality and about how asylum seekers themselves relate to national identities. I argue that although the social networks that are significant to asylum seekers at times may be composed mainly of individuals from a single nation, they are also thoroughly transnational, and embody a sense of home not necessarily so tightly bound to place, as the asylum process presumes. (Original abstract)

AbstractUkrainian migration to Denmark has been structured by national fast‐track programmes, predominantly funnelling Ukrainians towards low‐skilled and precarious jobs in Danish livestock production. However, since the recent Russian invasion, the introduction of Law L145 has entitled Ukrainians in Denmark to similar employment rights as the European Union citizens through an SL1 visa. While this opens up previously inaccessible areas of the Danish labour market, it also makes Ukrainians subject to the same restrictive legislation as other refugees and puts a hard end date to their visas, making their future status uncertain. Drawing on in‐depth interviews with nine Ukrainian agricultural workers living in Denmark at the time of the invasion, this article explores their attempts to navigate precarities of work, gender and legal status in Denmark. Precarities of work sprang from differences between agricultural sectors, as year‐round work with livestock involved a dependence on farmers, where workers accepted exploitative conditions in order to maintain their residence and work permits. Precarities of gender were reflected in the way women were made dependent on their partner through an "accompanying family members" visa, which shaped family lives and became problematic in the case of separations. Precarities of legal status were created by frequent legislative changes that made legal status uncertain and destabilized the long‐term investments of Ukrainians planning to stay in Denmark. While the SL1 offered a way out of some of the precarities experienced by agricultural workers, it did so at the cost of added complications and continuing uncertainty, pushing people from one kind of precarity to another.

Carceral junctions are confining structures, where people wait in situations of pressure and possibility before they move or are moved elsewhere. They are sites of interface and contestation. Conceptualizing camps as carceral junctions means examining the double sense of 'moving camps': On the one hand, camps shape, detain and enable particular forms of movement for residents as they move between camps and cultivate networks in hopes of viable futures. On the other hand, camps themselves are also mobile in the sense that models of encampment travel and shift within and between states, just as individual camp staff careers may span multiple camps. Bringing these senses together, the contributions in the special issue develop the concept of the carceral junction as a way of grasping the paradoxical work and consequences of camps. By proposing the concept of carceral junctions we intend to draw on but also critique conceptualizations and theories that either reify the confining nature of camps as places of exception or overly celebrate the agency of migrant mobility. The term is coined to grasp the mobilities of knowledge, power and bodies that characterize asylum camps, as well as their interfaces and connectedness in a context where states adopt increasingly restrictive refugee policies.

AbstractAsylum policies in the Global North have increasingly turned towards populist policies of deterrence, as states attempt to make themselves seem as unattractive as possible to would-be asylum seekers. This article examines one such case: the tent camps for asylum seekers that were hastily erected in Denmark in early 2016. However, while the tent camps surely are an instance of symbolic politics, we argue that to understand their daily operation, attention must also be paid to their infrastructural qualities. Drawing on two months of fieldwork at a tent camp in Næstved, this article examines the ways in which asylum policy and infrastructure interact to shape the daily lives and interactions of camp residents and staff. We propose two paradoxical frames for the analysis, which we term 'spectacular obscurity' and 'successful failure'. The tent camps were trumpeted as symbolic politics, while their daily operation remained obscured, only to burst in to scandal as reports emerged of threatening and violent behaviour on the part of the staff. The tent camps' infrastructure was constantly failing, as both material and social support broke down, but at the same time these failures successfully formed the basis for the everyday interactions that structured life in the camps. We conclude by questioning the effect of the policies of deterrence as mediated through particular infrastructures, suggesting that the materialities of the tent camps played a more significant role than supposed by policy makers, and that paradoxes of infrastructure provide a useful perspective through which to analyse migration management more broadly.

Questioning what shelter is and how we can define it, this volume brings together essays on different forms of refugee shelter, with a view to widening public understanding about the lives of forced migrants and developing theoretical understanding of this oft-neglected facet of the refugee experience. Drawing on a range of disciplines, including sociology, anthropology, law, architecture, and history, each of the chapters describes a particular shelter and uses this to open up theoretical reflections on the relationship between architecture, place, politics, design and displacement