Search

Local Migration Policy: Governance Structures and Policy Output in Swedish Municipalities by Gustav Lidén and Jon Nyhlén addresses the changing character of refugee settlement and integration policy in Swedish municipalities over a 10-year period, before and after the 2015 so-called ‘European migration crisis.’1 Theoretically grounded in the political science literature on central-local state relations, the monograph follows the ‘local turn’ in migration research. More specifically, it is framed as a study of migration policy dynamics following the implementation of the Swedish Settlement Act (SFS 2016: 38).

Under det senaste decenniet har idéburna offentliga partnerskap (IOP) – ett ramverk för samverkan mellan kommuner och idéburna organisationer – blivit ett allt vanligare sätt att tillhandahålla välfärdsinsatser. Ett område där samverkansformen användes tidigt var i arbetet med så kallade utsatta EU/EES-medborgare. Här har IOP inneburit en tredje väg mellan en generös respektive restriktiv tolkning av målgruppens rättigheter. Syftet med denna artikel är att genom djupintervjuer med representanter för idéburna organisationer belysa ett fält av problematiker som uppstår genom lokala IOP. Artikeln bygger på fallbeskrivningar av IOP i tre kommuner – Göteborg, Lund och Malmö. Utifrån dessa argumenterar vi för att ramverket medför en påtaglig volatilitet som påverkar den idéburna partens handlingsutrymme: IOP-formen etablerar en oförmedlad konjunkturkänslighet för socialt arbete som är direkt beroende av lokala maktförhållanden och händelseutvecklingar.pdf, Over the last decade, IOPs – a framework for collaboration between municipalities and NGOs – have become a common way of organizing certain welfare services. One area where this institutional arrangement was used early on was in relation to EU/EEA citizens without right of residence. Here, IOPs have provided a “third-way” between a generous and restrictive interpretation of the target group’s social rights. The purpose of this article is to highlight, through interviews with representatives of NGOs, a field of problems related to IOPs. The article is based on case descriptions of IOPs in three municipalities - Gothenburg, Lund and Malmö. Based on these, we argue that IOPs entail a significant volatility in that IOP form establishes a precarious institutional sta-tus for certain forms of social work, making these increasingly dependent on local power relations and developments.

This chapter considers the interface of human rights and ‘urban law’,such as environmental nuisance and public order law. It revolves around a set of cases concerning a community of some two-hundred Romanian Roma ‘EU migrant’ squatters in Malmö, Sweden, and builds on our first hand experiences as members of a street-law collective, the Centre for Social Rights (henceforth, the Centre).1Between 2015 and 2017, we par-ticipated in organising efforts to promote the interests and social rights of the Roma community in question. We also represented them in a number of legal cases against the City of Malmö and the local police authorities. In this chapter, we focus on our efforts to prevent the squatter community from being evicted from an unauthorised settlement – the Sorgenfri Camp – without a viable resettlement plan. We account for our experiences of attempting to mobilise a human and minority rights dis- course and invoke the case law of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), and discuss why this approach was eventually unsuccess- ful. This book chapter is an attempt to summarise our experience and analyse it with the benefit of hindsight as well as a greater theoretical understanding of the processes that we were a part of in 2015.

EU legal geography concerns itself with the mutually constitutive relationship between EU law and space (also, and increasingly so, time). This requires reconstructing and systematizing the widely used concepts which reveal the geographical basis of EU law (such as movement and circulation), but also developing a particular viewpoint, indeed a specific “ethos of investigation”, which equips us with the tools to challenge and transcend the dominant ways of doing EU law. In particular, it is argued that a geographic turn in European legal studies will foster the study of how law works “on the ground” and will allow challenging taken-for-granted ideas about the relationship between law and political order, while throwing new light on the very technical concepts with which we reconstruct, analyse and assess EU law., Avancerade rättsliga praktiker i välfärdsstaten

Following the 2015-peak of asylum-seeking migrants in Europe, asylum-policies have become increasingly restrictive. As bordering has become a prioritized issue among many European national governments, including in the Nordic countries, practices of bordering have also become more decentralised, diffuse and dispersed. This special issue set focus on such bordering practices as these are manifest in the social service sector. It draws on research conducted in Norway and Sweden and consists, besides this introduction, of seven original articles.Of particular focus is how social work, in its regulations and practices, are involved in the bordering of both the nation and the welfare state. Connecting insights from border studies – and related critical research – with social work research, the articles present empirical analyses of the dynamics of bordering practices among varying practitioners and in varying organizations, including legislators, courts, municipalities, street-level social workers and civil society organizations. The special issue as a whole also raises questions about the ethical and political challenges that emerge at the nexus of bordering and social service provision. In this introductory article, we provide an overview of the field of border studies and discuss how it relates to social work research. This serves as a conceptual foundation which we hope will enable critical reflections on the relationships between social service provision and bordering practices in Norway, Sweden and beyond., Avancerade rättsliga praktiker i socialt arbete (ARPIS)

In this article, we bring attention to the local-level administration of social services as a site of bordering. Specifically, we focus on the provision of social assistance (i.e. a means-tested cash support program, ekonomiskt bistånd) for irregularised migrants. Based on a close comparative reading of the City of Malmö’s 2013 and 2017 guidelines on social assistance, we analyse how entitlements to social assistance have been redefined and restricted following the 2015 so-called refugee crisis and the subsequent overhaul of Swedish asylum policy. Prior to this ‘crisis’, in 2013, the City of Malmö became the first Swedish municipality to extend access to social assistance to irregularised migrants. In 2017, the guidelines were revised with the expressed aim to discourage irregularised migrants from remaining in the country. We see this as a shift from a needs-based approach to one that, instead, sees social policy as subordinate to the goals of immigration enforcement. Further, we conceptualize this as a shift towards a type of indirect internalized bordering measure that so far has received relatively little scholarly attention in the Nordic context, namely self deportation measures that aim to deter immigration and encourage ‘voluntary return’ by restricting access to public services and welfare benefits for (irregularised) migrants. Finally, we argue that the overall specialization, juridification and standardization of social service provision supports the shift in question, providing a convenient justification for restricting entitlements to irregularised migrants.

Tidigt på morgonen 3 november 2015 utrymdes och revs Sorgenfrilägret i?Malmö, en icke tillståndsgiven boplats som fungerat som ett tillfälligt boende?för omkring 250 rumänska ”EU-migranter”1? under drygt ett och ett halvt års tid.?I efterhand går det att konstatera att avhysningen kom att markera en avgörande punkt i den politiska utvecklingen rörande olovliga boplatser. Regeringen?hade tidigare intagit en något avvaktande hållning i frågan. Nu meddelade de?i stället att de förordade en nolltolerans mot olovliga bosättningar. Budskapet?framfördes först av den nationella samordnaren för utsatta EU-medborgare,?Martin Valfridsson, 31 oktober 2015 i Ekots lördagsintervju på Sveriges?Radio P1 (Sveriges Radio 2015) och kom sedan att upprepas av, bland andra,?statsministern Stefan Löfven (TT 2015). Några månader senare, i februari?2016, offentliggjordes den nationella samordnarens slutbetänkande, Framtid?sökes (SOU 2016:6). En av betänkandets huvudsakliga rekommendationer?var att offentliga institutioner bör undvika att skapa incitament för fattiga EUmedborgare att söka sig till Sverige. Till exempel avråddes kommunerna från?att erbjuda matservering och skolgång till ”barn till utsatta EU-medborgare” (SOU 2016:6: 51ff.). I betänkandet upprepades också förslaget om en nolltolerans mot olovliga bosättningar (SOU 2016:6: 62ff.).

The question of social dumping has again climbed the EU policy agenda. In this article, we call into question some established views of social dumping that conceptualize the relationship between EU internal market and Member States in binary terms. Based on an analysis of relevant case law, and drawing on the conceptual tools provided by critical legal geography, we show that the project of EU integration relies as much on the scalar differentiation of powers as it does on the ‘upward’ shift of powers from the national- to the supra-national level. We propose an understanding of EU internal market law as productive of a ‘labour law patchwork’, defined by the simultaneous fragmentation and overlap of labour law regulations across and within EU Member States. Here, we re-conceptualize cross-border social dumping as a ‘game of jurisdiction’ – a set of strategic moves by actors within a multi-scalar and multi-jurisdictional space.

Den här avhandlingen – som jag valt att ge den svenska titeln Fri att röra sig, förvisad att röra sig: Rörlighetskontrollens urbanisering – Fallet med romska EU-medborgare i Malmö – behandlar den lokala politik som utvecklades i Malmö under åren 2014–2016 i förhållande till närvaron av så kallade utsatta EU-medborgare, och utvecklar ett teoretiskt resonemang om hur exkluderande gränser tar plats och blir till i städer. ”Utsatta EU-medborgare” är ett begrepp som används av svenska myndigheter för att beteckna medborgare från andra EU länder som vistas i Sverige utan en fast uppehållsrätt och som befinner sig i situationer präglade av extrem fattigdom och marginalisering. Medparten av dem som klassas som ”utsatta EU-medborgare” är romer med ursprung i Bulgarien eller Rumänien. I avhandlingen konstateras att gruppen i den allmänna debatten i mycket hög utsträckning omskrivs som oönskade migranter. Med detta som utgångspunkt ställs således frågan hur kommunala och andra lokala myndigheter i Malmö agerar för att hantera närvaron av ”utsatta EU-medborgare”, och hur detta i sin tur påverkar deras möjligheter att utöva sin ”fria rörlighet”. Avhandlingen gör en ansats att utveckla ett teoretiskt resonemang kring urbana gränspraktiker inom EU. Särskilt undersöks de mekanismer som utgör grunden för urban rörlighetskontroll: hur de fungerar, vilka effekter de medför och vad detta i sin tur innebär för den som blir måltavla för sådana praktiker. Avhandlingen är uppbyggd kring en fallstudie av konflikterna kring det så kallade Sorgenfri-lägret – en provisoriskt byggd bosättning som utgjorde ett hem för en stor andel av Malmös ”utsatta EU-medborgare” under åren 2014–2015. Sorgenfri-lägret revs efter en invecklad och mycket omtvistad process genom ett beslut i Malmö stads miljönämnd. Dessförinnan kom bosättningen som omnämnts som ”Sveriges största slum” att stå i centrum för heta politiska debatter gällande fråg, This thesis traces the local government response to the presence of impoverished and street-homeless so-called vulnerable EU-citizens in Malmö (Sweden’s third largest city) between the years 2014-2016, and develops an analysis about how bordering takes place in cities. “Vulnerable EU-citizens” is an established term in the Swedish context, used by the authorities to refer to citizens of other EU Member States who are staying in Sweden without a right of residence and in situations of extreme poverty and marginality. A majority of those whom are categorised as “vulnerable EU-citizens” are Roma from Bulgaria or Romania. Starting from the observation that “vulnerable EU-citizens” have been pervasively problematised as unwanted migrants, the thesis asks how the municipal- and local authorities in Malmö act to discourage and otherwise manage their mobilities by controlling their conditions of stay. In doing so, it seeks to elaborate on theories about intra-EU bordering practices, and to elucidate some of the mechanisms, effects and implications of urban mobility control practices. Methodologically, the thesis is structured as a case study, centring on the case of the intensely contested Sorgenfri-camp – a makeshift squatter settlement that housed a large proportion of Malmö’s estimated total population of “vulnerable EU-citizens”. The Sorgenfri-camp was established in 2014 and lasted for a year and a half before it was demolished in November 2015 on the order of the City of Malmö’s environmental authorities. Often referred to in the media as “Sweden’s largest slum”, the Sorgenfri-camp was quite literally a central locus of a local and national political “crisis” regarding the growth of unauthorised squatter settlements. As a “critical case”, it offers a vantage point from which to trace the development of policy and government practices towards “vulnerable EU-citizens” and observe how the authorities negotiate the legal ambiguities, moral-political dilemmas, and soci

In this forum piece I argue that the state and municipal authorities in Malmö, Sweden – in the absence of any direct and formal controls on the entry of EU-citizens – have attempted to discourage, regulate and otherwise manage the presence of mobile Roma EU-citizens by regulating their access to social rights, and their access and use of public space. In effect, if not in intention, this is a politics of mobility control through destitution.

Denna presentation problematiserar den historieskrivning som förmedlas genom den pågående debatten rörande närvaron av tiggande EU-medborgare i svenska städer. Något som är utmärkande för denna debatt är de återkommande hänvisningarna till välfärdsstatens tillblivelse. Nyligen meddelades det att regeringen överväger att införa ett tiggeriförbud. Detta för att försvara ’den svenska modellen’. På liknande sätt rättfärdigade politiker i Malmö stad beslutet att utrymma och riva det så kallade Sorgenfrilägret med hänvisning till folkhemspolitikens löfte om ’goda bostäder för alla’. Även de som ställt sig kritiska till dessa åtgärder har åberopat historiskt baserade argument. Många har hävdat att dagens politik är ett uttryck för en historiskt kontinuerlig antiziganism, och att denna politik särskilt påminner om de exkluderande åtgärder som riktades mot romer och resande under 1900-talets första årtionden. Vi frågar oss här vilka föreställningar om det svenska välfärdssamhället och dess historia som åberopas och återskapas genom den så kallade tiggeridebatten. Baserat på vår forskning om det svenska samhällets reaktioner mot närvaron av tiggande EU-medborgare, belyser vi hur dagens debatt många gånger framställer välfärdssamhällets tillblivelse som en enhetlig nationell framgångssaga på ett sätt som osynliggör de kränkningar och övergrepp mot romer och resande som pågick under tidsperioden. Vi visar också på hur dagens tiggande EU-medborgare gång efter annan utpekas som ett hot mot den nationella framgångssagan.

Social conflicts related to Roma – Europe’s most persecuted people – are often mired in discourses of sanitation and framed around garbage, odour, and smoke. What happens when such elements are translated into objects of legal governance? This chapter explores the legal process that led to the expulsion of about two hundred Roma from a squatter settlement in Malmö, Sweden. Highlighting the role of legal tech- nicalities, it suggests that the process hinged on the categorisation of the settlement as trash and on the power of the municipal authorities to supersede private property rights in order to enforce standards of health and sanitation.

Regeringen föreslår nio åtgärder för att hitta och utvisa papperslösa. Det kommer att slå hårt och främst gå ut över redan svaga och jagade människor. Vi uppmanar därför regeringen att ta tillbaka åtgärderna, skriver 43 forskare.

Malmö stad säljer 1 650 av sina allmännyttiga hyreslägenheter till ett nybildat privat aktiebolag i samband med planeringen av prestigeprojektet Culture Casbah i Rosengård. Försäljningen är ett vägskäl i Malmös planerings- och bostadspolitik, menar Maria Persdotter, doktorand i urbana studier vid Malmö högskola., Article, editorial letter

Article, Magazine

Article, Magazine

With the undoing of national borders within the European Union – and specifically within the Schengen Area – the municipal scale, the city scale, has emerged as an important – if not the most important – scale for the regulation of mobility and settlement within the European Union. Following, among others Mariana Valverde, (2011; 2005) this paper argues that the regulation of mobility, settlement, and also citizenship, at the municipal scale tends to rely on rather banal administrative measures – such as, for example social service and environmental administration. The paper present an inquiry into the 2015 eviction of Sorgenfrilägret - an intensely contested informal settlement in Malmö, Sweden in present-day Sweden. Based on primary interviews as well as a close reading of legal and policy documents the paper argues that the eviction of the residents of Sorgenfrilägret is a poignant example of how certain regulatory practices have been mobilised in what seems to me an attempt to safeguard the internal spaces of both Malmö and Sweden – in their material as well as immaterial dimensions – against the intrusion of some of the European Union’s internal others: poor and racialised Eastern European Roma.

Over the last several decades, an approach to critical scholarship and social justice activism has emerged that seeks to interrogate unmarked sites of privilege and power; including whiteness, masculinity and heterosexuality. Some have referred to this turn as the 'politics of privilege'. The growth of whiteness- and masculinity-studies is emblematic of this turn, as is the emphasis on practices of self-reflexivity and the confessing of privilege. This paper seeks to discuss the shortcomings of the politics of privilege in the context of whiteness studies and anti-racist activism, and to reflect on the limits to self-reflexivity as an academic practice and strategy for social and political change. While the politics of privilege is certainly not without merit, this paper argues that they nevertheless serve to reinstall white supremacy and racism in the following ways: 1) by constituting the white subject as the one that is capable of self-reflexivity, while simultaneously positioning the racialized subject as the 'raw-material' for this reflexivity, 2) by (re-)centring conversations about race and racism on the agency of white people, 3) by fixing racialized subjects in a posture of complaint consistent with the so-called 'politics of recognition', and 4) through what Sara Ahmed calls the 'fantasy of transcendence' whereby white people, by declaring an awareness of racism, attempts to position themselves as being immune to its effects. Ultimately then, this papers calls into question the transformative potential of 'good intentions' and underscores the importance of structural change and concrete action.

This thesis is written within the field of family law, covering the problematic area of access right where the court decides that supervised access is going to be used in order to obtain the child’s right to meet and have contact with his or her parents. To obtain an adequate general idea about how supervised access is used, I have chosen to explore a) how the intervention is intended to work in Sweden, b) how the new requirement regarding limited time has changed the applicability regarding supervised access, c) on which occasions the court order the intervention and d) what consequences this brings to the child and parents involved. A child has certain rights in relation to his or her parents, one of them being the right to meet the parents and the right to have good contact with both the mother and the father. Adding to that, the child has a right not to be badly treated when meeting the parents, which involves problems since this is creating a difficult balance between the different rights. Because of this, supervised access is used as help and support at times of access which for some reason should be supervised. The intervention supervised access was subject to a legislative amendment in August 2010, which now means that the court can order the National Board of Health & Welfare to organize and evaluate the access intervention. A time limit of one year was also introduced, which means that if the court does not appreciate that normal access can work within a year, then supervised access should not be used and access therefore should not take place at all. This time limit involves higher requirements and demands from the investigations made by the court and the National Board of Health & Welfare since they have to appreciate how the relationship between the child and parent is going to evolve and develop for a period of time. The National Board of Health & Welfare is also responsible for following-up the access in a careful way, to ascertain that the interventi, Denna uppsats är ett examensarbete i juris kandidatprogrammet. Uppsatsen är skriven inom området familjerätt och behandlar problemområdet riskfyllda umgängen där domstolen förordnar om umgängesstöd för att tillvarata barnets rätt till umgänge. Jag kommer i uppsatsen redogöra för hur de rättigheter som ett barn har i förhållande till sina föräldrar ser ut, däribland rätten till umgänge och rätten till en god kontakt med båda föräldrar. Därtill besitter barnet en rätt att inte fara illa vid umgänge, vilket problematiserar situationen och skapar en svår avvägning mellan de olika rättigheterna. Dessa rättigheter äger barnet både enligt svensk rätt och internationella konventioner, såsom FN:s konvention om barnets rättigheter. Vid ett sakläge där det konstateras att viss risk föreligger kan domstolen förordna om umgängesstöd för att tillgodose barnets rättigheter och agera som ett stöd vid umgänge som av någon anledning bör vara övervakade. För att få en bra överblick av när och hur umgängesstöd används har jag valt att undersöka hur åtgärden umgängesstöd skall fungera i Sverige, hur det nya tidsbegränsningskravet har förändrat tillämpningen av umgängesstöd, vid vilka tillfällen domstolen förordnar om insatsen samt vilka praktiska konsekvenser detta får för de inblandade. Insatsen umgängesstöd var i augusti 2010 föremål för en lagändring som innebar att domstolen nu gavs rätt att ge socialnämnden i uppdrag att anordna och följa upp insatsen. Det infördes även en tidsbegränsning om ett år, vilket innebär att då domstolen inte uppskattar att ett normalt umgänge kan komma till stånd inom ett år, så skall inte umgängesstöd användas och umgänge skall således inte ske. Denna tidsbegränsning ställer högre krav på domstolen och socialtjänstens utredningsarbete då de måste uppskatta hur barnet och förälderns relation och umgänge kan komma att se ut och utvecklas. Socialnämnden skall även följa upp umgänget på ett noggrant sätt för att tillse att insatsen inte varar längre än nödv