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To better understand migration governance and the concrete, daily practices of civil servants tasked with enforcing state laws and policies, it is important to focus on documents, which are core artefacts of bureaucratic work. These can include certificates, letters, reports, case files, decisions, internal guidelines and judgements in both digital and paper form. Based on ethnographic studies in various geographical and bureaucratic contexts, this collection shows how civil servants produce statehood, restrict migrants’ movements and engage with migrants’ strategies to make themselves legible. It contributes to the study of the state as documentary practice and highlights the role of paperwork as a powerful practice of migration control.
“Well documented and well argued, with complementary approaches on a topical subject, addressed from an original angle that has recently emerged in the anthropology of the state and bureaucracies.” • Jean-Pierre Olivier De Sardan,École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales
Sophie Andreetta is an FRS-FNRS Research Associate at the University of Liège, Belgium.
Introduction: Governing Migration through Paperwork: Legitimation Practices, Exclusive Inclusion and Differentiation
Sophie Andreetta and Lisa Marie Borrelli
Chapter 1. Administrative Guidelines as a Source of Immigration Law? Ethnographic Perspectives on Law at Work and in the Making
Larissa Vetters
Chapter 2. Paperwork Performances: Legitimating State Violence in the Swedish Deportation Regime
Anika Lindberg and Lisa Marie Borrelli
Chapter 3. Municipal Undocumentedness: Paperwork and the Performativity of Population Registers in Italy
Enrico Gargiulo
Chapter 4. Writing for Different Audiences: Social Workers, Irregular Migrants, and Fragmented Statehood in Belgian Welfare Bureaucracies
Sophie Andreetta
Chapter 5. Governing Through Paperwork: Examining the Regulatory Effects of Documentary Practices in a Refugee Settlement
Sophie Nakueira
Chapter 6. Refugees and in the Making: Durable Marks of the Nansen Passport in Contemporary Humanitarian Governance
Hanna Berg
Postscript: Anthropology, Bureaucracy and Paperwork
Thomas Bierschenk