Providing Rights Through Individual Compassion: <i>The ambivalent rights talk within refugee resettlement work</i>

Abstract

The article analyses the social constructions of rights as they come about through Swedish delegations preparing refugees for resettlement in Sweden, under the Cultural Orientation Programme (COP). COPs are analysed as an activity that manifests a need to convey rights. Fieldwork was conducted through video observations of COPs in Kenya and Sudan. Our empirical findings show how the Swedish officials engage in talks about rights through positioning the refugees as unaware of, and incapable of, claiming rights. Rights are also highlighted as obligations with correct ways of realising them. This study manifests the clash between rights as universal and rights tied to citizenship where, during COPs, rights are conveyed as particularly Swedish, positioning the refugees on a receiving end of the conversations. However, the study also shows how the participants do make claims, sometimes resisting the hierarchies during the talks.

Lethal hopelessness: Understanding and responding to asylum seeker distress and mental deterioration

“…; Procter ). The integration of mental health care within a compassionate service culture may necessitate the education of the workforce to enable them to cross traditional demarcations and provide initial care for health symptoms beyond their specialty (Muftee & Lundberg ).…”

The Affective Biopolitics of Migration

“…It may appear as affective bordering in the form of nostalgia and sentimentality as well as hostility and hate in popular culture and everyday life (Danbolt 2017;Haavisto 2014;Loftsdóttir 2017). Or it may take the form of recasting fundamental rights as feelings of individual compassion (Muftee & Lundberg 2016). As a particular form of governmentality (Foucault 1978(Foucault , 1982(Foucault , 2003(Foucault , 2007, we can think of the governing of/through affect as a mode of 'affective citizenship' (Fortier 2010;Gressgård 2016) that 'draws on and targets the affective subject for certain strategies and regulations aimed at designing people's behaviours and attitudes' (Fortier 2010: 20).…”