Legal geographies of deportability – Entanglements of power between nomospheric guardians, technicians, and figures

Abstract

In this article, I apply the framework of legal geographies to an empirical investigation of asylum seekers’ deportability, combining the analysis of both asylum and appeals processes and the implementation of and resistance to deportation journeys from Finland. Theoretically, my aim is to consider how the legal geographical concept of nomospheres, developed by Delaney (2004, 2010, 2015), can be used to examine deportability in combination with feminist political and legal geographical research on the scales of power and mundane practises of law. I demonstrate how examining the practices and relationships between nomospheric guardians – the key authorities of the so-called deportation machinery – and nomospheric technicians – whose task is to work on behalf of deportees – are essential to unravelling the ever-changing spatio-temporal-legal dynamics of forced removals. Moreover, in order to understand the embodied forms of resistance, nomospheric figures – that is the deportable people – are discussed in the analysis. All these various actors shape the actual practice of law, and I examine their efforts to implement, resist, or transform the law from a spatio-temporal perspective of power. My data comprises in-depth interviews with 39 nomospheric guardians and technicians, conducted in 2019–2020, and 16 monitoring reports from the Finnish Non-Discrimination Ombudsman’s officers in 2018. I demonstrate how the legal geographies framework, with a particular focus on multiscalar entanglements of power, can provide us with new ways of exploring deportability and deepen our understanding of the relationships between the implementers of forced removals and those seeking spatial justice. This provides a pathway for developing the emerging subfield of spatio-temporal deportation studies.