‘ARE WE GOING TO STAY REFUGEES?’ Hyper-precarious Processes in and Beyond the Danish Integration Programme

Abstract

The Danish welfare state is designed to protect and support people in need. However, refugees experience hyper-precarity related to a restrictive socio-legal regime connecting them to the state. Based on 4 months of ethnographic fieldwork in and around a local community organisation, including 35 qualitative interviews with refugees, social workers and volunteers, the article examines hyper-precarious processes constituted by a nexus of immigration and labour regimes. Theoretically, the article draws on the concepts of precarity and social navigation, which centre the analysis on the interface of agency and moving social forces, while advocating for an analysis sensitive to context-specific variations of everyday practice. By empirically exploring how refugees navigate complex state connections and expectations of self-reliance articulated in the Integration Programme, the article contributes to an understanding of hyper-precarity as ambiguous processes producing subjectivities of not only victimisation and despair but also fragile spaces of sociality, hope and resistance in rural contexts.