Refugee Biopolitics: A discourse analysis of the Swedish government’s recent shift in the speech on refugees

Abstract

The increased movement of people across nation borders of recent years further complicates the relation between nationality and citizenship, thus challenging the nation state’s project of controlling its population. One group that perhaps provide the starkest contrast between birth and nation are refugees, who are forced to flee their homes and whose juridical status in practice is ambiguous. The war in Syria has resulted in a sharp increase in the number of refugees, which had already been growing steadily. 2015 saw a record number of people seeking refuge within the European Union and this increase in asylum seekers has sparked an intensive debate within Europe and the pressure on policy makers to act is growing. Sweden received historically large numbers of asylum seekers in 2015 and along with Germany it granted the most asylums in the EU. But in only a few months the Swedish government went from having the most generous European asylum policy per capita to placing itself at the European minimum level in refugee acceptance numbers. The Swedish government has since the tumultuous autumn of 2015 announced the planned deportation of up to 80 000 failed asylum applicants as well as introduced obligatory ID controls on the border, all while maintaining the rhetoric of a humanitarian superpower. This study builds on the field of biopolitics, which is focused around the notion that the main function of modern politics is to ensure the tractability and the productivity of the population, and this is done through techniques of power directed at the biological qualities and behaviour of the population itself. The purpose of this study is to analyse the discursive shifts in the Swedish government’s response to the refugee reception. To pursue these aims the study is centred on the following questions: “How did the Swedish government’s reasoning around refugee reception shift from autumn of 2015 to spring of 2016?” and “How can these discursive shifts of the government be understood from a biopolitical perspective?” This study is centred on a discourse analysis of a number of the Swedish government’s speech acts on refugees in the months spanning the government’s shifts in policy. This study has found indications of an underlying biopolitical logic in the language surrounding the discursive shifts of the Swedish government concerning refugees. This study can be read alongside other studies dealing with the discursive aspects of modern politics.