Politics that kill, slowly

Abstract

If deportation prisons represent the direct violence that states may use to control and put pressure on non-deported people, the Danish deportation camps exemplify how such pressure is also applied through indirect violence. The deportation camps are operated by the Danish Prison and Probation Service and the Red Cross in an uneasy alliance, and are meant to pressure non-deported people to leave by subjecting them to injurious conditions of indefinite semi-confinement, isolation, and circumscribed autonomy. Building on ethnographic fieldwork with prison officers in one of Denmark’s three deportation camps and engagements with resident protest movements, the chapter describes how officers navigate their ‘mysterious’ task of symbolically – but rarely practically – performing authority in the camp. Meanwhile, residents experience being ‘left to die, slowly’, at the same time as staying put and waiting out the state becomes a way of contesting deportation. The chapter discusses the necropolitical logic behind slow violence; its lasting, injurious effects; and its contestations.