“No One is Illegal” as a Reverse Discourse against Deportability

Tiina Seppälä

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleScientificpeer-review

4 Citations (Scopus)
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Abstract

After 2015, state authorities in many European countries actively stigmatised asylum-seekers and paperless, framing them as “illegal”. In Finland, this illegality discourse was countered by resistant non-citizen and citizen subjects at multiple levels. This article examines the ways in which the arguments presented in the “No one is illegal” campaign can be considered to constitute a reverse discourse in a Foucauldian sense, and how it operates in the context of deportability which maintains structural inequality and racialised hierarchies based on the logic of political exclusion/inclusion embedded in state-centric sovereignty. It demonstrates how the state's illegality discourse contributed to a strong advance of social controls but enabled the formation of a reverse discourse that helped promote non-citizens' legal and political demands. While operating within the legal–illegal binary under which non-citizens were “disqualified” by the state, simultaneously, the reverse discourse strategically challenged it by utilising shared humanity as a common category.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)391-408
Number of pages18
JournalGlobal Society
Volume36
Issue number3
Early online date25 Mar 2022
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2022
MoEC publication typeA1 Journal article-refereed

Keywords

  • asylum seekers
  • deportability
  • reverse discourse
  • human rights
  • citizenship
  • Asylum-seekers

Field of science

  • Multidisciplinary
  • Political science
  • International political science

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