A feminist geopolitics of living: Syrians’ struggles to maintain and reunite intimate ties across borders

Abstract

In this article, I examine the protracted separation of Syrian families. As the number of people seeking asylum in Europe spiked during the summer of 2014, Denmark introduced a new refugee protection status to the Danish Aliens Act, known as §7.3: A General Temporary Protection Status (GTPS). This status enables recipients to legally reside in Denmark. Yet, it crucially permits the Danish state to suspend recipients’ right to family reunification for a three-year period, creating a condition of protracted separation. While feminist scholars have called attention to how intimate ties are being deliberately targeted by western states, I argue that there remains much to be said about how people actively negotiate these forms of bordering, sustain kinship, and build futures. To this end, I examine Syrians’ lived experiences of forced separation and their efforts to maintain intimate ties across time and space. Building on feminist and postcolonial scholars’ attention to life-making practices, I develop the analytic of a feminist geopolitics of living. This article offers two crucial insights. First, it makes visible the intimate and often hidden ways that the violence of protracted separation is materialized through kinship ties. Second, it illuminates the central roles of kinship ties within the struggles against violent bordering regimes. I argue that this analytic helps to understand how people make lives, assert rights, and build alternative futures collectively. In doing so, I grapple with the uncomfortable tensions, possibilities, and constraints at work within intimate ties.

Keywords:

• Denmark
• family reunification
• feminist political geography
• intimacy-geopolitics
• state-imposed separation

Introduction

In September 2015, an aerial strike destroyed Farah and Ahmed’s home in north-eastern Syria. While Farah and Ahmed had no desire to live elsewhere, they decided that it was time for them and their four children to leave the country. The daily dangers of the war had become too much. While Farah and Ahmed had sold their belongings and borrowed money from a distant relative, they still did not have enough money to leave Syria together. As an alternative, they agreed that Farah travel to Europe together with their youngest and oldest daughters, while Ahmed and their middle son and daughter would stay behind in Syria. Once Farah reached a place of safety, they hoped to reunite the family through the legal channel of family reunification. Farah and Ahmed had good reason to expect that this would be the case. Indeed, the right to family life has long been enshrined in national and international law.

However, as the number of people seeking asylum in Europe rose during 2014, European states took notice. Mobilizing discourses of crisis (Mountz and Hiemstra 2014), Danish politicians framed refugees as an undue ‘burden’ on the Danish welfare state and a threat to its ‘social cohesion’. Danish politicians articulated their growing anxiety about the potential of these newcomers gaining permanent residence in Denmark (Klarskov 2014). Politicians singled out Syrians as a particular ‘problem’ (Folketinget 2014), given their capacity to successfully make refugee claims due to the war in Syria.

Anticipating that many Syrians would obtain refugee protection, settle, and bring loved ones to Denmark, the Danish government moved swiftly to enact amendments to the Danish Aliens Act (Udlaendingeloven) to close these pathways. The first such measure came in March 2015 when the Danish government instituted §7.3, a general temporary protection status (hereafter GTPS) to the Danish Aliens Act (Folketinget 2015). In contradistinction to the pre-existing protection statuses outlined in the Danish Aliens Act (§7.1: Convention Status and §7.2: Individual Protection Status), GTPS was designed to prevent recipients from becoming permanent members of Danish society, offering only a one-year (renewable) residence permit, and suspending the right to family reunification for the first year of holding this status (Jacobsen 2022a). In February 2016, the government extended this suspension to three years and required refugees to pay the cost of transporting their families to Denmark, a cost the Danish state had previously covered (Folketinget 2016). In 2019, Denmark introduced a cap on the total number of family reunifications that could be granted each year (Folketinget 2019).

After successfully making the dangerous journey to Denmark, Farah and her two daughters soon encountered these legal changes and their stakes. Seven months after filing her asylum claim at a local police station, Farah received a letter from the Danish Immigration Service (DIS) announcing that the Danish state had granted her and her two daughters GTPS, thereby enabling them to remain legally in Denmark. Yet, Farah’s dream of quickly reuniting her family was quashed. Like many other Syrians, Farah and Ahmed began the struggle of maintaining their intimate ties across borders and reuniting their family, a struggle that would stretch over years.

Denmark’s suspension of the right to family reunification is in no way exceptional. It fits within a long history of Western states’ efforts to separate racialized, gendered, classed, and other subalternized people from their loved ones and communities (de Leeuw 2016; Holden 2018; Jensen et al. 2020). In relation to refugees, feminist scholars have called attention to how intimate ties are being deliberately targeted by western states (Coddington and Williams 2022; Conlon 2010; Jacobsen 2021a; Martin 2012). Following Denmark, several European countries have constrained refugees’ opportunities for family reunification (Kallio and Häkli 2019). Likewise in the United States, border guards have separated children from their parents at the US-Mexico border and through deportation (Licona and Luibhéid 2018; Ybarra and Peña 2017). In Australia, resettled refugees are subject to child welfare interventions and their children are often forcibly removed from their care (Ramsay 2019). While the intimate nature and violent consequences of state-imposed separation are well elaborated, there remains much to be said about how people negotiate such forms of bordering, sustain kinship, and build futures (Smith et al. 2019).

I understand the suspension of family reunification as an expression of white heteronormative state strategies to police intimate ties (Licona and Luibhéid 2018). Yet, this article’s primary focus is on Syrians’ experiences of state-imposed separation and their efforts to maintain intimate ties across time and space. Building on feminist and postcolonial scholars’ attention to life-making practices, I develop the analytic of a feminist geopolitics of living. I draw on feminist scholars’ attention to the global/intimate and intimacy-geopolitics. A feminist geopolitics of living centers the ways that the ongoing, mundane, and relational struggles to maintain kinship ties are co-constituted of geopolitics, traversing multiple scales and geographies. This article offers two crucial insights. First, it makes visible the intimate and often hidden ways that the violence of protracted separation is materialized through kinship ties. Second, it illuminates the central roles of kinship ties within the struggles against violent bordering regimes. I argue that this analytic helps to understand how people make lives, assert rights, and build alternative futures collectively. In doing so, I grapple with the uncomfortable tensions, possibilities, and constraints at work within intimate ties.

I begin by developing the concept of a feminist geopolitics of living, situating this within relevant postcolonial and feminist scholarships. I then provide a brief introduction of my research with Syrians in Denmark. I proceed to examine how Syrians negotiate protracted separation. Despite being physically separated across borders, Syrian families adjust and find ways to practice kinship. Yet, over time it becomes difficult to maintain these relations. Syrians, therefore, engage with various strategies to unite their families and put an end to their separation.

Toward a feminist geopolitics of living

The literature on refugee and migration governance has long focused on the bio- and necropolitics at work within these regimes (Fassin 2012). Feminist and post-colonial scholars have further called for the need to account for the practices, processes, and relationships through which refugees survive, build lives, and make claims (Espiritu 2014; Espiritu and Duong 2018). To center life-making, Feldman (2012) has proposed the notion of ‘the politics of living’. The politics of living, she argues, foregrounds the ways that people persistently engage in small-scale efforts to make life and change their circumstances, without ‘painting a picture of utter abjection or describing a scene of unending resistance’ (Feldman 2018, 5).

In this article, I extend Feldman’s impulse by bringing it into conversation with insights from feminist geography. More specifically, I develop the analytic lens of what I term a feminist geopolitics of living. Echoing Feldman’s concerns, a feminist geopolitics of living centers the mundane ways that people survive, build lives, and make claims. Yet, it is also attuned to how these practices of life-making move and work across the registers of the global/intimate (Pratt and Rosner 2012) and intimacy-geopolitics (Pain and Staeheli 2014). I argue that a feminist geographical focus enables us to better understand how strategies and practices of life-making are co-constitutive of geopolitics, rather than merely responses to it.

Some of the most foundational and longstanding contributions of feminist scholarship have been to challenge and undo gendered oppositions, such as public/private, domestic/global, familial/state, personal/political, peace/war, reconfiguring conventions of space and scale and contesting what ‘counts’ as political (Grewal and Kaplan 1994; Rose 1993). As part of this work, feminist scholars have challenged the binary of the global and the intimate, showing how the two are deeply intertwined (Berlant 1998; Pratt and Rosner 2012). As Mountz and Hyndman (2006, 448) aptly argue, the global and the intimate ‘coconstitute places such as the border, the home, and the body’. Feminists have shown how refugees and migrants maintain familial relations across borders through intimate forms of labor, which rely on transnational practices and technologies (Al-Sharmani 2010; Hyndman 2010; Nolin 2006; Pratt 2012). This body of work attunes us to the ways that the global/intimate is entangled and co-constitutive of everyday practices and political struggles of life-making.

Feminist political geographers have taken up the intimate in relation to geopolitics (Williams and Massaro 2013). Through the term ‘intimate geopolitics’, Smith (2012) has examined the body as a site through which the geopolitical is produced and comes to be known. Pain and Staeheli (2014) have furthered this intervention by inverting the usual framing of intimacy-geopolitics. That is, rather than focusing on how geopolitics affects intimate relations and spaces, they consider how geopolitics is configured in intimate ways (Pain 2015). As Pain and Staeheli (2014, 346) note: ‘Intimacy is not simply the terrain on which broader sets of power relations are written. It is already out there, quietly working to produce domination as well as resistance across all practices and sites’. Drawing on these insights, scholarship on the geopolitics of mobility, borders, and asylum has illustrated the intimate and relational ways that people make claims to mobility and belonging, and challenge exclusionary geopolitical practices (Askins 2014; Barabantseva, et al. 2021; Botterill, et al. 2020).

Attention to how people relationally build lives and make claims necessarily involves addressing the social ties through which such efforts are organized, such as friendship, community, and family. Within feminist analysis, however, the family has long been contentious. On one hand, feminist scholars have illustrated how the family can be a space of oppression and patriarchal violence (Valentine 2008). On the other hand, the family is a site through which people obtain normative values of love, identity, and belonging (Hall 2019). Feminist geographers have grappled with the contradictory roles that the family plays in intimate geopolitics (Brickell 2014; Smith 2012). Indeed, families and kinship practices can serve as means through which people deal with other, yet sometimes related forms of power struggles, such as occupation (Harker 2012), detention (Martin 2011, 2012), displacement (Al-Sharmani 2010; Pascucci 2019), deportation (Hiemstra 2012), and austerity (Hall 2019). Moreover, familial experiences and desires for intimate ties can motivate people to act politically. Lee and Pratt (2012, 899) argue that familial experiences, such as mourning and sacrifice ‘radiate affective intensities that can become provocative political resources’. In this article, I do not seek to romanticize the family, nor do I reject it. Rather, I wrestle with familial ties as simultaneously sites of desire and resentment, love and pain, fulfillment, and disappointment. Syrians’ struggles are structured around desires for and rights to family life with all its fraught-ness. Indeed, while taking seriously the feminist imperative to challenge the normativity of the (nuclear) family and the relations of domination it imposes (Lewis 2019), we should not lose site of the resources and forms of possibility that the family may offer those subject to other forms of violence, including war, occupation, and border enforcement.

A feminist geopolitics of living is not confined to a focus on gendered subjects or women’s lives. Rather, following feminist scholars’ longstanding contention that feminist analysis need not be centered on questions of gender or women per se (Espiritu and Duong 2018; Coddington 2015), my primary feminist concern is to develop a geopolitical analysis that actively situates life-making as co-constitutive of geopolitics. More specifically, I argue that a feminist geopolitics of living offers an analytic that makes visible refugees’ rich and complicated lives across borders and locates refugees’ efforts to make liveable lives as forms of intimate geopolitics. When approached through this analytic, everyday practices of making life such as expressing desire, maintaining kinship ties, wiring money, and applying for family reunification come into view as entangled with and co-constitutive of geopolitics, holding the potential to subvert governing norms and laws. It is an intimate (geo)politics of practice, rather than one of protest (cf. Bayat 2013).

Conditions of protracted separation

Since the 2011 uprisings in Syria, more than 20,000 Syrians have claimed asylum in Denmark (Udlaendingestyrelsen 2016, 2018). Initially, most Syrians obtained asylum according to §7.1: Convention Status of the Danish Aliens Act. Yet, following the institution of GTPS, the Danish immigration authorities increasingly granted Syrians protection according to this status. In 2017, for example, 72% Syrians were granted GTPS, while only 27% obtained Convention Status (Udlaendinge-og Integrationsministeriet 2018, 7). As of July 2017, 4039 Syrians and stateless Palestinians from Syria have been granted GTPS.

While GTPS is not officially a category reserved for Syrians, in practice it has been applied almost exclusively to Syrians. 99% of GTPS recipients are Syrians, the majority of whom are women (43%) and accompanied children (37%). Men have also received this status, though at a much lower rate (13%) (Udlaendinge-og Integrationsministeriet 2018, 5). The application of GTPS vis-a-vis Syrians thus varies by age and gender. This can be explained by the fact that most Syrian men aged 18 to 42 automatically qualify for Convention Status because they risk being drafted into the Syrian military. While women, children, and men over the age of 42 are more likely to receive GTPS, what concerns me here is how GTPS produces a condition of protracted uncertainty and separation for the recipient and their loved ones.

GTPS grants a refugee a 1-year residence permit. DIS can renew this permit for one or two years at a time if it determines that the applicant has a demonstrable need for protection (Udlaendingeloven 2016). This residence permit provides the person with rights to education and welfare as well as the obligation to reside in an assigned municipality and participate in a five-year integration program. Yet, GTPS suspends recipients’ rights to family reunification.¹ While GTPS recipients can obtain a ‘Danish Aliens’ passport, they cannot visit their families in their country of origin because such visits endanger them and jeopardize their legal status. When the three-year suspension period ends, a recipient of GTPS can apply for family reunification, a legal procedure that takes as little as 10 months, yet without a guarantee of obtaining an approval of family reunification. Furthermore, the Danish state can institute a monthly quota on the number of families granted reunification (Folketinget 2019), which further prolongs the separation of families. Thus, GTPS produces a condition of protracted separation characterized by physical separation of families, the inability to visit family members, and uncertainty about when families might be able to reunite.

This article is part of a larger study of Syrians’ experiences of refugee governance, which I conducted in Denmark and Jordan between October 2015 and August 2017. Here, I draw on data that speaks to the issue of Syrians’ struggles for family life in Denmark. This includes data from archival research of the Danish Aliens Act, six focus group discussions and 40 semi-structured interviews with Syrian men (n = 36) and women (n = 25), as well as ethnographic research at three different community centers where I volunteered. My research with Syrians was carried out in Danish, English, and/or Arabic, depending on people’s preference and language skills. At the time of this research, all the informants held a legal residence permit, either through being granted asylum or through family reunification.² More than half of the Syrians who participated in this study had dealt with issues related to family reunification. Some had brought their family members to Denmark through family reunification, or they had themselves arrived through family reunification. Others were still waiting for a ruling or had their claim rejected.

Inspired by feminist methodological approaches (Jacobsen 2021b; Espiritu and Duong 2018; Hiemstra and Billo 2017), I sought to better understand how those who are most affected by state policies encounter, experience, and negotiate border regimes. Writing against gendered and racialized representations of refugees as either passive victims or threats to society (Hyndman and Giles 2011), I approach Syrian refugees as knowledge producers, who articulate, contest, and alter ways of knowing, living, and claiming rights (Espiritu 2014). More specifically, this feminist approach made the problems of state-imposed separation intelligible and foregrounded the often hidden ‘routine, intimate and private sites where [state] power is both reproduced and contested’ (Shalhoub-Kevorkian 2015, also see Jacobsen 2016).

Indeed, Syrians’ intimate knowledge of forced separation provided me with detailed insights into how protracted separation imposed by the Danish state affected Syrians’ intimate lives as they longed for loved ones, tried to maintain contact with family members, and struggled to reunite with kin. During interviews and focus groups, Syrians brought up the prolonged separation caused by GTPS as they recounted the moment when they obtained protection or in our conversations about family and homemaking. Many were devastated by the news that they or their loved ones had received GTPS, knowing its stakes in precluding their ability to build lives in Denmark long-term. At the community centers, I learned about the complex legal ramifications of this status, not least of all the challenges of claiming the right to family life and contesting one’s legal status through the long appeals process (Jacobsen 2021b). Together, these ethnographic engagements highlighted the importance of social relations and practices of life-making within refugee geopolitics. Finally, to avoid reifying identities as somehow essential, stable, or determinative of experiences (Razack 2008), I do not analyze my informants’ testimonies according to gender, age or other (identity) markers (wives, mothers, fathers). Rather, as noted my feminist focus is concerned with where and how (state) power is exercised and contested within the contours of everyday life and intimate relations.

Living with protracted separation

As Syrian families negotiated their lives under conditions of protracted separation, they developed ways to care for family members at a distance, akin to what Parreñas (2005, 319) calls ‘transnational intimacy’. My informants utilized smartphone apps, such as Viber, WhatsApp, and Facebook, to sustain ties to loved ones in Syria. For instance, Hasan, a 30-year-old newlywed man from northern Syria, relied on WhatsApp to communicate with his wife Lee. Hasan and Lee expressed their mutual affection for each other through texts, emojis, and images. During one of our many conversations about family reunification, Hasan showed me some of their exchanges and explained that WhatsApp enabled him and Lee to ‘hold on to each other’ while being apart. Like many other Syrian families, Hasan and Lee were held together by these practices of care and intimate labor, under the expectation that their physical separation was only temporary.

Syrians who had left children behind in Syria did their best to sustain their parental roles remotely. Sami, a father of three children, had arrived in Denmark with his 18-year-old son, while his wife and two younger children remained in Damascus. Sami was committed to calling them daily, trying to spend time with his two children and asking them about their days. This allowed Sami to perform his role as a father at distance. Sometimes Sami invited me to participate in these calls, which I understood as an effort to open the door to his family and his home, providing a sense of hospitality. Like other Syrians who I interacted with, Sami sought to make a home in Denmark. Yet, he felt unable to complete such home-making until his wife and two children could join him. As such, the virtual space created through these video calls was a temporary ‘home’ in-between and across borders, which held the family together and made space for ‘guests’ like me.

Apps helped Syrian families mitigate and mediate the fragility of life in Syria and the ways it, at times, interrupted their connections. For instance, WhatsApp allows for asynchronous recording and transmitting of voice messages, which allowed families to communicate at times where the sender and/or the receiver did not have Internet access due to electricity outages in Syria. Hasan and Lee, similarly to other Syrians, sometimes resorted to recording and sending verbal messages rather than calling, a method that was additionally helpful for family members with limited literacy. This strategy enabled Lee to receive Hasan’s message as soon as she was able to reconnect to the Internet. She would then reciprocate by sending Hasan a pre-recorded message. At times, these transactions spanned just minutes. At others, they stretched over the course of several days. These apps and the virtual spaces they enabled, Syrians were able to maintain their connections to some extent.

However, these communication technologies at best mediated but never fully alleviated the anxiety of war, displacement, and separation. For instance, Selma, a 50-year-old woman from a village nearby Homs, told me that the first thing she thought about in the morning was her husband and her older daughter still in Syria. As I got to know Selma, it became clear that she worried about them constantly. She frequently and anxiously checked her phone to see if she had received new messages from them. Selma explained that the physical separation resulted in significant uncertainty because Selma was unable to determine whether the lack of response was caused by a power outage or something worse, illustrating the presence of wars in refuge (Jacobsen 2022b).

Syrians continued family life despite their physical separation. Moreover, their everyday labor of maintaining their ties across borders were both shaped by geopolitics (war, displacement, bordering, state-imposed separation) and acts of geopolitics as they intimately reconfigured their family practices and spacings in relation to ongoing challenges. Virtual spaces and digital forms of communication became important means through which their geopolitical acts of living were made possible. However, just as crucially, maintaining and sustaining transnational intimacies required Syrians to undertake mundane and emotional forms of labor and creativity. In contrast to other forms of transnational intimacies, Syrians’ struggles to maintain kinship were structured by the ongoing war, displacement, and the conditions produced by their precarious refugee status (Nolin 2006). More specifically, as Selma’s account illustrates, Syrians’ lives in Denmark were marked by the daily feeling of being worried for family members and fear of losing loved ones to the war. These feelings became particularly heightened when Syrians were unable to get in contact with their loved ones or when there were violent attacks on their hometowns and cities like Ghouta, Khan Sheikhoun, Aleppo, Hama, and Homs. While the war in Syria continued regardless of their refugee status and caused harm, anxiety, and loss, the suspension of family reunification through GTPS meant that for many Syrians, life, and kinship – and the struggles to maintain them – became structured by everyday uncertainty and a potentially unending state of protracted separation.

Intimate fractures

Thus far, I have described how Syrian families found ways to live with the condition of protracted separation, altering their practices of family life through various apps and virtual spaces. As months and years went by, however, Syrians often experienced difficulties in maintaining their kin across distance. In this section, I describe how protracted separation slowly fractured existing relationships between parents, their children, and between spouses, illustrating how the intimate violence of state-imposed separation intensified and multiplied over time.

To examine the texture of these intimate fractures, I return to Farah and her family, who I introduced at the beginning of this article. At the time of our interview, the family had been separated for more than two years with no foreseeable end in sight. When I asked Farah about how the prolonged separation affected her family, she turned to Jamila, their youngest daughter, and explained, ‘when I brought Jamila [to Denmark] she was not able to walk yet. It was here that Jamila started to walk, it was here that she started to speak’. Farah further elaborated that in phone conversations or when Jamila saw an image of Ahmed: ‘she [Jamila] will only call him by his first name, she does not call him baba [dad], she doesn’t know her father’. Farah was aware that Jamila was not able to recognize her father because she was only a year old when they left Syria. Yet, it upset Farah that Jamila was not able to identify Ahmed as her baba and that Ahmed had not been able to witness important moments of Jamila’s childhood, such as her first step and first word.

Furthermore, Farah expressed that keeping the relationship with Ranim and Ali, who remained in Syria with Ahmed, was becoming particularly fraught. Not only were their communications challenged by electricity blackouts in Syria, Ranim refused to speak with Farah in retaliation against her because Ranim believed that her mother had abandoned them in Syria. Farah explained that while Jamila and Reem were attending kindergarten and school in Denmark, Ranim and Ali were no longer going to school because of the war. Farah then looked over at Jamila and Reem, who were playing a game on the couch, and explained that every time she looked at them, she was reminded of their two siblings, Ranim and Ali. While Farah tried to maintain a presence in Ranim’s and Ali’s lives at a distance, she felt a sense of guilt because she was not able to care for them in the same way as she cared for Jamila and Reem; a guilt that she was reminded of daily.

Farah’s struggles to maintain her family and nurture her children at a distance show that virtual spaces and communication channels they give rise to can at best partially mitigate physical separation. As Pratt (2012, 55) notes, ‘the forms of communication available to most mothers [and fathers] who attempt to care at distance – tape recordings, phone calls, letters, text messaging – are all of necessity disembodied, decontextualized, and partial’, which may affect familial relations and children, who may suffer emotionally (Pyle 2006). Over the course of the two years that I conducted fieldwork for this study, I witnessed how the physical distance between loved ones fostered intractable feelings of emotional separation and alienation from one another. As a result, many parents found it impossible to play the roles in their children’s lives that they desired.

The more than two years of separation and uncertainty about the future had also taken a heavy toll on Farah and Ahmed’s marriage. While recalling that they had been inseparable in pre-war Syria, Farah lamented that:

Now sometimes months will pass without us [Farah and Ahmed] speaking to each other. Since we got married we had not left each other for more than an hour, now it is a matter of months that we do not speak with each other because there is no Internet.

Under these circumstances, sustaining their intimate bond became an ongoing struggle:

Sometimes I do not feel like speaking because every time we want to talk, we talk about family reunification, when and what happened [so far]. I have run out of lies to tell.

Farah did not specify what these lies were about. However, her act of lying and the fact that she was ‘running out of lies to tell’ indicate her difficulties in maintaining her previously healthy relationship with Ahmed. Lies had become a currency that their relationship depended on. When I asked Farah how the separation influenced their relationship, she lit a cigarette and explained:

It affects us mentally, psychologically very much. (…) Imagine that my husband – we would not use offensive language with each other at all – [So] imagine that now on the phone he could say one hundred bad words to me! Just because he thought that we came here, and there are no such laws [preventing family reunification]. This is all lies and maneuvering on my part because I don’t blame him because he is under pressure [in Syria]. And he says ‘do not blame me, it is just me burning to see you!’

As Farah explained, the separation imposed by GTPS violently disrupted their (pre-existing) ways of being together. The stresses borne out of separation compelled Ahmed to verbally abuse Farah and she increasingly turned to a strategy of lying to deflect his anger. Farah’s account shows the challenges of maintaining intimate partnerships across borders and how protracted separation renders intimate ties into seeds of discord and alienation.

As children grew older, the longing for loved ones intensified, and the worrying for family members’ safety and wellbeing became part of everyday life, Syrian families struggled to maintain intimate relations across borders. For Syrians, markers of time, including daily routines, birthdays and anniversaries, and religious and cultural celebrations, became reminders of their physical separation. Thus, working in conjunction with the geographic separation, the temporality of the separation as well as the uncertainty about when families will be able to reunite shape Syrians’ ability to maintain kinship ties. Attending to Syrians’ embodied accounts of separation and how they struggle to maintain intimate ties over time shows how time ‘thickens’ space (Valverde 2015, 10). That is, time shapes the spatial separation of families; the prolonged and uncertain nature of separation shapes Syrians’ ways of living with separation and their ability to maintain kinship ties. Moreover, Syrians’ embodied accounts illustrate how living with is not just a matter of maintaining intimate ties through new means and (virtual) spaces. It also includes intimate labor and is an emotional struggle laden with tension, resentment, and guilt as well as hope, dreams, and love.

The intimate labor that family members perform is interrupted and altered as they care for one another remotely. Ranim’s refusal to speak to her mother, Ahmed’s ‘bad words’, and Farah’s ‘lies’ are all examples of how the geopolitical violence of state-imposed separation manifests in intimate and painful ways and transforms intimate relations. Attention to Syrians’ narratives more readily illustrates how state-imposed separation works as a practice of violent bordering, which ‘cut[s] across conventional bounds of places and scales, connected by political relations that traverse the intimate and the geopolitical’ (Pain and Staeheli 2014, 344). Moreover, by attending to often-overlooked life-making practices, we see how a seemingly ‘minor’ legal change has profound and wide-ranging consequences, which saturate the everyday lives of families separated between Denmark and Syria, and in some cases destroys kinship ties.

Importantly, however, my informants refused to internalize their difficulties of maintaining ties under these conditions as their own personal or ‘private’ failings as spouses, fathers, or mothers. Rather, they explained how their struggles were direct consequences of unnecessary and unjust imposition of forced separation. Syrians further located the lies that they needed to tell as strategies to cope with the impossible situation that protracted separation imposed on them and how it ate away at their dreams of being together once again. In doing so, they exposed the questionable assumptions underpinning state-imposed separation; namely that maintaining kinship across borders for years is straightforward; that returning to Syria was imminent; and that family members stuck in Syria were somehow unworthy of protection. Like other migrants who are involuntarily separated from their families (Bélanger and Silvey 2020), Syrians’ indignation and refusal to accept state-imposed separation and its consequences motivated some to act and find ways to remake their worlds and lives, ‘despite of impossibility’ (Feldman 2018, 191). In the following section, I turn to Syrians’ efforts to reunite their families before the end of the three-year suspension period.

Reassembling kinship

Under conditions of state-imposed separation, Syrian families actively searched for ways that would enable them to be reunited. They sought assistance from friends, family members, and community centers offering legal counseling and explored legal and political strategies. Syrians found various creative ways to re-unite their families before the end of the mandated three-year suspension period. Some Syrians employed extra-legal and sometimes dangerous strategies. For example, Salam, a 46-year mother of three children who she had left behind with relatives in Damascus, brought her children to Denmark through informal channels. Salam explained to me that she could not wait three years to live with her children. Not all parents were as brazen as Salam, however. Nor did they or their families have the sufficient financial means to pursue informal channels. In this section, I focus on how Syrians challenged state-imposed separation.

Several Syrians enacted their right to petition for redress by suing the Danish state for suspending their right to be with their loved ones (Pedersen 2016). One of them was Mosalam Albaroudi, a 58-year-old Syrian doctor from Damascus who arrived in Denmark in 2015. Shortly after obtaining GTPS, Mosalam applied for family reunification with his wife who had remained in Syria. In September 2016, Danish immigration authorities refused Mosalam’s request on the grounds that he was still subject to the three-year suspension period. Unwilling to accept the authorities’ decision, Mosalam filed a lawsuit against Denmark for its decision to deny him family reunification (Frich 2017). Using the language of rights and prohibition of discrimination, Mosalam insisted on Denmark’s obligation to acknowledge and uphold (Syrian) refugees’ right to family life, without differential treatment based on a person’s legal protection status.

During 2017, Mosalam’s lawsuit moved through the Danish courts. Both the High Court of Eastern Denmark and the Supreme Court affirmed the immigration authorities’ decision (A mod Udlaendingenaevnet 2017). Despite this setback, Mosalam refused to accept Danish courts’ rulings and persisted in demanding his right to family life by bringing the case to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). Mosalam’s lawsuit was successful. On July 9, 2021, ECHR found that the three-suspension period was a violation of Mosalam’s right to family life and asserted that Denmark was obliged to change its amendment (M.A. v. Denmark 2021). While Denmark has yet to comply with this demand, ECHR’s ruling has set a significant precedent that will constrain Denmark’s and other European states’ ability to legally suspend refugees’ right to family life. Mosalam’s persistence in his legal struggle illustrates how Syrians’ aspirations for family life motivate them to take political action. Through lawsuits, like Mosalam’s, Syrians situated themselves as rights-bearing subjects, capable of making legal demands on the state. Mosalam’s legal efforts received attention from the media, making broader publics aware of how Syrians were denied rights that they saw as granted to them based on Denmark’s international obligations to refugees. Hence, Syrians’ challenges to western states’ geopolitical strategies of limiting refugees’ rights to family life have proven formative in contesting these strategies’ legitimacy.

Syrians also sought to reclaim their rights to family life in more discreet ways. In the winter of 2017, I met Nour, a 46-year-old man from Damascus at one of the community centers where I volunteered. Nour asked me if I knew of a competent immigration lawyer who he could consult about family reunification, stating ‘I need to know all my options’. After consulting with an immigration lawyer, Nour decided to challenge Denmark’s decision to grant him GTPS. In June 2017, Nour received news that the Danish Refugee Appeals Board would hear his case and an immigration lawyer was appointed to his case. Following a ruling in his favor, Nour’s protection status was amended to Convention Status, thereby providing him with the right to family reunification. Filing a complaint was a strategy that enabled Nour to indirectly obtain his right to family life and reunite with his wife and two children.

Nour’s story is far from exceptional. Between July 2015 and August 2017, the Danish Refugee Appeals Board processed 219 appeals filed by Syrians, challenging Denmark’s decision to grant them GTPS. Out of these, 46 Syrians were successful in having their statuses converted to Convention Status or Individual Protection Status (Udlaendinge-og Integrationsministeriet 2018, 9). When situated in this broader context, Nour’s story illustrates how Syrians’ refusals to accept the status quo of protracted separation motivated them to make rights claims and challenge the state’s decision to suspend family reunification. By asserting ‘their right to more’ (Espiritu 2014, 14) significant numbers of Syrians have subverted efforts to keep them separated from their kin.

Syrians mobilized their right to appeal the Danish state’s decisions on their asylum cases as a strategy to reunite with loved ones. Syrians demanded that Denmark use its sovereign power to reevaluate its initial ruling of their cases and thereby rescind the suspension of family reunification imposed by GTPS. Many Syrians’ political actions are more discreet than Mosalam’s; they operate quietly within the existing legal framework to assert their right to family reunification on an individual basis, rather than directly challenging the law itself. We might think of these actions as a ‘[geo]politics of practice, of redress through direct and disparate actions’ (Bayat 2013, 20) carried out by individual actors motivated by a desire to live with their loved ones.

Other Syrians sought to end the separation of their families by applying for family reunification before the three-year suspension period ended. It was possible for Syrians to do so because Denmark is required to process these cases and establish whether a suspension violates other international conventions. For example, Denmark does not suspend a recipient’s right to family reunification if this person’s family member has a disability. By July 31, 2017, 1,420 recipients of GTPS had applied for family reunification (Udlaendinge-og Integrationsministeriet 2018, 14).³ Hamid was one of these. Approximately six months prior to our interview, Hamid had filed a family reunification application for his wife and three daughters in Syria. Still waiting for a ruling, Hamid was aware that their family reunification case could be rejected but he hoped that Denmark would grant them an approval. He said:

I think there is a 70 to 80 percent chance that they will accept our application, because it is a humanitarian situation. I don’t think that they will reject our case, I try not to think about this possibility. But if, God forbid, if this happens, my life will be destroyed. A drowning man will clutch at a straw. I am like a drowning man, holding on to a straw. I am resisting, surviving, still floating…

Likewise, Farah filed a family reunification application for her two children and husband. She elaborated: ‘I manage to ignore them [the people who tell me that our case is likely to be rejected]. I live in a hope that there is an ‘Okay’ [approval of her family reunification case]’. By filing a family reunification application, Hamid and Farah both sustained the hope that their families could reunite soon, a hope that they held onto in under challenging circumstances.

Farah further elaborated on the violent and dehumanizing consequences of the process of applying for family reunification. Farah focused on the anguish that she endured while waiting on their pending case:

Imagine a woman sitting on pins and needles [waiting anxiously], there is the word YES and the word NO – to family reunification – still YES or NO. I try to distract myself. I would say yes, it is definitely going to happen. I try to pretend it is going to be okay. How would I accept a NO?!

While fully aware of the acute possibility that their application could be rejected, Farah, like Hamid, emphasized that she would not be able to accept such an outcome. She repeatedly emphasized, if the Danish state truly knew the specificities of her case and ongoing struggles to sustain her family as a family it would be impossible for them to issue a ‘NO!’ According to Farah, rejecting her case would (hopefully) prove impossible because it would be so unjust and dehumanizing. Both Farah and Hamid wrestled with intense emotions, fighting for ways to sustain future for their families, against the odds.

Yet, filing an application represented more than just an attempt to maintain hope; it also became a way for Syrians to demonstrate to their families that they were committed to them. Several of the Syrians I worked with took pictures of their family reunification application before mailing it to the DIS. When I asked them why they did this, they explained that the picture served as ‘proof’ to their family that they were doing everything in their power to fulfill their collective aspirations to be reunited in Denmark. Thus, the act of filing for family reunification illustrates how Farah, Hamid, and other Syrians were not willing to give up and let Danish authorities destroy their families. Rather, they mobilized legal avenues as a way of maintaining hope and coping with the violence of forced separation, even when they were unsuccessful in reuniting with kin. In this sense, not getting worn out by the protracted separation becomes both a site of struggle and the horizon of what is politically possible (Berlant 2011).

Syrians mobilize various strategies, which challenge and engage with the fundamental rule of law. Their attempts to fight in court and assert their right to family life can be interpreted as ‘acts of citizenship’ (Isin and Nielsen 2008). Beyond such acts that fall squarely within liberal paradigms of citizenship, I argue that Syrians’ multiple strategies and ordinary practices work cumulatively to ‘quietly imping[e] on the propertied and powerful’ in Bayat’s (2013, 15) sense. Syrians made claims and contested the injustices of protracted separation through ordinary legal actions, such as filing a lawsuit, a complaint, or an application for family reunification, notably though their legal status formally precluded them of such a right. For example, the 1420 family reunification applications filed by Syrian families are parallel acts that were not collectively organized or coordinated. Nevertheless, in their sum they generated a body of legal cases that the Danish state is required to process. I, therefore, suggest that they should be considered as acts of encroachment that conspire against the geopolitical project of protracted separation. It is through practices like these that Syrians inscribe their active presence in Denmark, asserting their rights to kinship as well as their rights to be in and part of Denmark now and in the future.

Conclusion

In this article, I have focused on Syrian refugees’ experiences and strategies of living with forced separation, caused by displacement and prolonged by Denmark’s decision to suspend their right to family life. Situated within western states’ historical and ongoing practices of separating subalternized people from their kin, the suspension of family reunification actively prolongs the separation of Syrian families and fractures their intimate relations over time. This geopolitical strategy bleeds into the intimate spaces of Syrians’ everyday lives in Denmark and beyond.

The analytic of a feminist geopolitics of living advances feminist political geography as it centers life-making as part of the geopolitical. I have extended Feldman’s notion of the politics of living in at least two crucial ways. First, a feminist geopolitics of living helps to unpack the spatiality of this geopolitics by theorizing the connections and overlaps between the intimate and the global. Second, it connects the realm of everyday life with distinctly geopolitical struggles, for instance around belonging, territory, borders, etc. Thus, a feminist geopolitics of living enables us to better understand how strategies and practices of life-making are co-constitutive of geopolitics, rather than merely responses to it.

Through the analytic of a feminist geopolitics of living, I have offered new empirical insights into the texture of everyday life under conditions of state-imposed separation. Although bordering regimes like GTPS are imposed onto recipients as individuals, the ramifications of GTPS are experienced by a wide range of kin in Syria and the diaspora. I have shown how Syrians find creative ways to practice and maintain kinship ties transnationally. Yet, my findings also illustrate that over time it becomes difficult to sustain these ties, compelling Syrians to contest the violent conditions imposed upon them and reunite. In doing so, they continuously sought to ‘work toward particular kinds of futures’ (Ramsay 2019, 519) rather simply than settling for the legal or political status quo.

Syrians’ desires to care for one another, be together as kin, and build lives in Denmark motivated them to seek possible avenues to overcome forced separation. These spanned a range of tactics and strategies from the mundane to more dangerous and overt. Mosalam used his right to sue the Danish state to continue the life that he and his wife had built over more than 25 years of marriage. Nour’s complaint over the Danish immigration authorities’ ruling of his asylum case was rooted in his deep desire to physically live together with his wife and children. And like many other Syrians, Hamid and Farah filed an application for family reunification with the hope that the Danish immigration authorities would acknowledge their intimate struggles and grant them family reunification, thereby enabling them to fulfill the promise they had made to their families when they left Syria. While the differences between these strategies are important, I understand all of them as intimate geopolitical acts. They are active forms of geopolitical struggle and opposition and thereby redress the injustices of state power (Harker 2012; Ehrkamp 2013). Thus, by situating refugees, their lives, and their actions in relation to their social ties, we gain a more dynamic and expansive conception of where and what the political is in relation to refugee geopolitics.

Acknowledgement

I wish to thank the journal’s editors as well as the three anonymous referees for their helpful comments and engagement with this article. An earlier version of this article appears in my PhD dissertation ‘Unsettling Refuge: Syrian Refugees’ Account of Life in Denmark’, University of Kentucky. Thanks to Patricia Ehrkamp, Sue Roberts, Anna Secor, Carrie Mott, and Mary Gilmartin who at various stages of the writing provided me with generous advice and supported my efforts to better understand the (geo)politics of refuge. Finally, I want to acknowledge and thank the Syrians who generously shared their insights and experiences with me and who have taught me about what it means to fight for their rights to be together with loved ones.

Disclosure statement

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation under Grant BCS-1558400, the Social Science Research Council (the 2016 Mellon International Dissertation Research Fellowship), and the Danish Institute in Damascus Research Award.

Notes on contributors

Malene H. Jacobsen

Malene H. Jacobsen is currently a NuAcT Fellow in Geography at Newcastle University, United Kingdom. As a feminist political geographer, her work focuses on war, displacement, and the geopolitics of refuge with an empirical focus on Europe and the Middle East. Jacobsen’s recent publications address the legal re-writing of refugee protection (Annals of the American Association of Geographers), the spatialities and temporalities of war in refuge (Political Geography), and feminist collaborative methodologies (Area). Funded by the European Commission’s Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship, Jacobsen’s current research project “Geographies of asylum justice: the lived realities and spaces of the Danish asylum procedure” explores the juridical border work at play in asylum adjudication.

Notes

1 Notably, the time spent waiting for one’s asylum case to be determined does not count toward meeting the 3-year requirement.

2 Names of participants have been changed and any identifying details have been removed to preserve their anonymity.

3 By July 31, 2017, the Danish Immigration Service had ruled on 480 of the 1420 cases. 112 of the 480 cases obtained family reunification before the end of the three-year suspension period (Udlaendinge- og Integrationsministeriet 2018, 16-17).