We are Here only Temporarily:Human Consequences of Temporary Refugee Protection in Denmark

As a consequence of the so-called ‘paradigm shift’, that defines all refugee protection as temporary, the last decade has seen the focus for refugee administration in Denmark move from ‘integration’ towards ‘repatriation and self-provision’. Through analysis of life stories from people arriving to Denmark as refugees before and after this shift, this presentation will examine how people seeking protection in Denmark experience and make sense of their new reality as refugees within the Danish welfare state.<br/>Drawing on the perspectives of narrativity (Ricoeur 1986, Mattingly, 1994) and hauntology (Gordon 2008) the presentation shows that people living in temporary protection experience being kept waiting in a never-ending present. Uncertain waiting destroys people’s sense of agency and belonging and counteracts their ability to re-orient themselves towards a meaningful future.<br/> <br/>In this presentation, I address how people with refugee backgrounds experience feelings of home, security and belonging and how these feelings are entangled and subject to the shifting asylum- and foreign policies refugees in Denmark are met with. The analysis draws on the narrative accounts of people who have fled to Denmark at two different periods of time, namely people who fled the war in Bosnia in 1992–1995, who have now become legal Danish citizens; and following this, people arriving around 2015 due to the war in Syria. Characteristic of the latter is that their legal refugee status is subject to the so-called ‘paradigm shift’ within Danish law. Consequently, refugee protection is given only on a temporary basis and can be withdrawn at any time.<br/><br/>The analysis illustrates how similarities in the difficult and at times harmful experiences of waiting are present across both examples. However, due to the different political and administrative conditions around the two periods of time, the life conditions of being a refugee have changed radically. In effect, the precariousness of living in uncertainty while waiting for asylum to be granted has now been prolonged into a permanent form of protracted waiting in uncertainty. The article makes the argument that living in temporal uncertainty, as all legal refugees in Denmark do today, impairs their ability to construct a meaningful life story, and thus to orientate themselves (Ahmed 2005), regain agency and plan for a better future. In this way, living in temporal uncertainty implicates and harms people’s present and future lives.