The Long and Short Arms of the State: Swedish Multidirectional Controls of Afghan Asylum Seekers During the Cold War

Abstract

Abstract Drawing on unique sources from the Swedish Migration Agency Archive, this article examines how Afghan asylum seekers and refugees fared in their encounter with Swedish internal and external controls of people seeking protection from persecution during the Cold War. Within a theoretical framework that draws on the concept of statist logic, the history of refugeehood, interactionist sociology and critical legal studies, two key findings are presented and discussed. First, Afghan refugees and asylum seekers encountered multidirectional restrictive control measures despite Sweden’s strong support of Afghan refugees in Pakistan, and despite the low numbers of Afghan asylum applicants in Sweden. Second, a focus on how immigration controls affected one specific national group reveals a broader pattern of how internal and external controls of asylum seekers in the 1980s, under the aegis of the Swedish state, were distributed between state, non-state and international organizations. The article provides a critical history that sheds new light on the situation following the ‘refugee crisis’ of 2015–16, when over 40,000 Afghan asylum seekers entered Sweden. In doing so, the article ties in to a burgeoning development within refugee studies that seeks to include a historical perspective, since such an inclusion is necessary to identify continuities and changes that remain highly relevant for understanding, assessing and offering real alternatives to today’s dominant approaches to refugee governance, policy, experiences, social and political practices and discourses.