Liminal disappearance: forced migration, institutional exclusion, and transnational resistance in Scandinavian welfare states

This thematic literature review examines how Scandinavian welfare states produce and reproduce conditions of precarity, erasure, and conditional belonging for forced migrants in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden between 2000 and 2025. Drawing on Bourdieu’s field theory, social disappearance and civic death, and the coloniality of power, supported by civic stratification, racialisation, and intersectionality, it argues that Scandinavian asylum and integration governance does not merely regulate forced migrants, but actively generates what this review terms ‘liminal disappearance’: a bureaucratically enforced suspension between legal existence and social erasure. Three thematic sections develop this argument. The first shows how dispersal, temporary protection, and family separation function as interlocking mechanisms of civic death across all three countries. The second shows how educational, language, and labour market institutions systematically devalue non-Western capital through symbolic violence, individualising institutionally produced failure. The third examines how forced migrants resist structural erasure through transnational kinship, chosen families, remittances, and everyday practices, reconstituting belonging despite dispersal and institutional exclusion. Although the three countries diverge in policy instruments, they converge on a shared racialised logic: the conditions for belonging are structurally designed to remain unreachable. The review concludes by proposing liminal disappearance as an analytical contribution to comparative Nordic migration scholarship and calling for future research that centres forced migrants as knowledge producers.