Europe received an unprecedented number of asylum seekers in 2015. This article examines Iraqi asylum seekers who journeyed through Europe in search of an idealized version of Finland, which they had imagined based on word-of-mouth and social media information. Through cognitive migration, the act of pre-experiencing futures in different locations, Finland was seen to offer both subjective hope of personal growth and advancement and objective hope of safety and physical security. This hope motivated them to embark on a journey of 6.000 kilometers to the European North. Based on interview data and relevant studies, the article concludes that hope of a better, imagined future abroad acts as a powerful magnet for persons with poor prospects in their countries of origin. Hope is a kind of critical emotion strongly shaped by beliefs and real-time opportunities; and as such, beliefs are notoriously difficult to change. Imagination should, therefore, not be overlooked when planning and implementing migration policies.

This article analyses the 'European refugee crisis' in the context of Northern Finland, building on the concepts of exceptionality and affect. Conventionally, exceptionality is conceptualised from the perspective of the state that does not enable analysing exceptional situations in their broader social context. A shift in focus is required to understand how people perceive and experience exceptionality and what kinds of affects this involves. Based on participatory engagement and in-depth interviews with asylum-seekers living in reception centres in Northern Finland and local residents in their neighbourhood, our analysis demonstrates that exceptionality gains diverse meanings in different contexts. We propose affective exceptionality as a conceptual tool for analysing affects in transformational situations in which people's sense of the 'normal' becomes disrupted and illustrate how placing emphasis on subjects who experience and embody exceptionality in their everyday lives enables a more nuanced understanding of exceptionality, centralising the people instead of the state.

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