“No One is Illegal” As a Reverse Discourse Against Deportability

ABSTRACT

After 2015, state authorities in many European countries actively stigmatised asylum-seekers and paperless, framing them as “illegal”. In Finland, this illegality discourse was countered by resistant non-citizen and citizen subjects at multiple levels. This article examines the ways in which the arguments presented in the “No one is illegal” campaign can be considered to constitute a reverse discourse in a Foucauldian sense, and how it operates in the context of deportability which maintains structural inequality and racialised hierarchies based on the logic of political exclusion/inclusion embedded in state-centric sovereignty. It demonstrates how the state's illegality discourse contributed to a strong advance of social controls but enabled the formation of a reverse discourse that helped promote non-citizens' legal and political demands. While operating within the legal–illegal binary under which non-citizens were “disqualified” by the state, simultaneously, the reverse discourse strategically challenged it by utilising shared humanity as a common category.

KEYWORDS:

• Asylum-seekers
• deportability
• reverse discourse
• human rights
• citizenship

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their constructive and helpful comments. She would also like to express her sincere gratitude to the activists who agreed to be interviewed for the study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 This “crisis” rhetoric has been criticised from multiple perspectives (e.g. Triandafyllidou 2018, 3; Crawley et al. 2017), and many scholars find the term “refugee management crisis” more suitable as the 2015 situation demonstrated the inability of national reception and registration systems to keep up with the arrivals, casting doubt on the sustainability of the Common European Asylum System (e.g. Baldwin-Edwards, Blitz, and Crawley 2019; Brekke and Staver 2018).

2 Under the new government, this document has been updated. It now mentions that asylum-seekers may reside in the country legally during their application process (Ministry of the Interior n.d., b).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Academy of Finland [grant number 316443].

Notes on contributors

Tiina Seppälä

Dr. Tiina Seppälä is a senior researcher in International Relations at the University of Lapland, and adjunct professor of International Development Studies at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. She is interested in activism, social movements, development, displacement, post/decolonial studies, feminist theory, ethnography and arts-based methods. She is the author of Globalising Resistance against War? (Routledge, 2012) and co-editor of Arts-Based Methods for Decolonising Participatory Research (Routledge, 2021) and Civil Disobedience from Nepal to Norway (Routledge, 2022).