Citizenship of Asylum Seekers and the Politics of Exception

The Paper critically analyses the intersection between the politics of citizenship and politics of exception in the context of the "refugee crisis", building on the concept of citizenship defined in a broad sense (e.g. Brubaker) and the concept of the "state of exception" (Schmitt). Empirically, the paper focuses on asylum seekers who arrived in Northern Finland in 2015 from the Middle East and Africa. The paper draws on analysis of two types of research material: firstly, public discussion on the exceptionality of the situation, and secondly, data collected through various forms of engagement and interviews with members of the local asylum seekers' community in the city of Rovaniemi. In discussing these two different types of empirical material together, the paper shows how the concepts of both citizenship and exception as well as their relationship gain different meanings in different contexts. The Paper also considers what practical implications the dynamics between the politics of citizenship and the politics of exception may and already has produced from the perspective of asylum seekers.