‘For two years I have been in this large prison’: Conditional inclusion and refugee mobility in Norway and Germany

Abstract

This article provides insights into the mobility implications of the new contingency in the European governance of refugees. In doing so, it contributes to and advances debates on the increased conditionality of refugees’ inclusion by mobilizing an im/mobility lens. So far, the literature on refugees’ conditional inclusion has mainly explored the introduction of integration requirements and their implications for refugees’ incorporation in their countries of asylum. By mobilizing an im/mobility lens, we push the thinking of conditional inclusion beyond the nation-state frame that has characterized scholarly engagements so far. We also broaden the understanding of conditional inclusion by including a focus on revocation/cessation practices. While integration requirements and revocation/cessation practices are mostly addressed separately in literature, the article shows the ways in which they entangle and immobilize refugees. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Germany and Norway, the article explores how refugees’ spatial mobility is constrained through the interplay between legal frameworks that impose conditionality, entangled practices of state bureaucracies that execute conditionality, and refugees’ affective, ethical, and political navigations of their conditional inclusion.