As a consequence of the so-called ‘paradigm shift’, that defines all refugee protection as temporary, the last decade has seen the focus for refugee administration in Denmark move from ‘integration’ towards ‘repatriation and self-provision’. Through analysis of life stories from people arriving to Denmark as refugees before and after this shift, this presentation will examine how people seeking protection in Denmark experience and make sense of their new reality as refugees within the Danish welfare state.
Drawing on the perspectives of narrativity (Ricoeur 1986, Mattingly, 1994) and hauntology (Gordon 2008) the presentation shows that people living in temporary protection experience being kept waiting in a never-ending present. Uncertain waiting destroys people’s sense of agency and belonging and counteracts their ability to re-orient themselves towards a meaningful future.
 
In this presentation, I address how people with refugee backgrounds experience feelings of home, security and belonging and how these feelings are entangled and subject to the shifting asylum- and foreign policies refugees in Denmark are met with. The analysis draws on the narrative accounts of people who have fled to Denmark at two different periods of time, namely people who fled the war in Bosnia in 1992–1995, who have now become legal Danish citizens; and following this, people arriving around 2015 due to the war in Syria. Characteristic of the latter is that their legal refugee status is subject to the so-called ‘paradigm shift’ within Danish law. Consequently, refugee protection is given only on a temporary basis and can be withdrawn at any time.

The analysis illustrates how similarities in the difficult and at times harmful experiences of waiting are present across both examples. However, due to the different political and administrative conditions around the two periods of time, the life conditions of being a refugee have changed radically. In effect, the precariousness of living in uncertainty while waiting for asylum to be granted has now been prolonged into a permanent form of protracted waiting in uncertainty. The article makes the argument that living in temporal uncertainty, as all legal refugees in Denmark do today, impairs their ability to construct a meaningful life story, and thus to orientate themselves (Ahmed 2005), regain agency and plan for a better future. In this way, living in temporal uncertainty implicates and harms people’s present and future lives.

The article builds on empirical material generated from fifteen in-depth narrative interviews with people who fled to Denmark within the last thirty years. Of these, four of my interlocutors fled Bosnia in 1992 while six left war-torn Syria around 2014–2016. For the sake of simplicity, the analysis will focus on these stories, while the remaining narratives, conveying memories from Somaliland, Iraq and Afghanistan, will serve as secondary background stories in my analytical readings. A unifying factor of the interview participants was that they all expressed a profound wish to contribute to Danish society and to live a stable and secure family life, including pursuing education and independence. As the analysis illustrates, these wishes were however difficult for many to carry out, mainly due to the contradictory, ambiguous objectives, and for many humiliating effects of the Danish ‘integration programme’ (in 2019 replaced by the so-called ‘self-provision and return programme’). All interviews were conducted by the author as part of the research project RESTORE. Most of the interviews were conducted in Danish following the wish of the individuals and were carried out during the autumn, spring and summer 2021/22. The interviews vary in length, with the majority lasting 1.5–2 hours. Each of the participants was thoroughly introduced to my research interest and ethical considerations. After this, the interviews were open-ended, structured around three main points of interest, namely memories of life before the war, events during their journey, and experiences of arriving in Denmark and encountering Danish authorities and welfare institutions.

The analysis shows how losing agency and having to conform to the pace and demands of others are central experiences of displaced people, both at the time of fleeing, but also during the long-term experiences of seeking asylum and living as a refugee within the Danish welfare state (Brøndum 2023; Rytter et al. 2023). Adopting this perspective, strong wishes to act, such as pursuing an education, working and making long-term plans, can be seen as reorientations to regain agency, reimagining home, and freeing oneself from the refugee label. For those of my interlocutors who arrived in Denmark in the 1990s, looking back in time, appeared as important acts of remembrance and narrative emplotment for them to regain agency and authorship. These stories show how past experiences linger as memories of great importance, at times challenging the individuals’ self-understanding, but also enabling narrative integration. By applying a narrative theoretical lens, the analysis thus shows how narrative integration of past, present and future enables individuals to reorientate themselves and regain agency. This was not, however, possible for most of the participants with more recent accounts of fleeing. Rather, I found in these stories that living in ongoing uncertainty, on a material, symbolic and existential level, impeded their present lives and their ability to bridge past, present and future. This adds new nuances to our current knowledge on the temporal injustice and state sanctioned harm the new refugee policies inflict on people in need of protection. This shows how people living with refugee status must navigate several and at times contradictory temporalities and contexts simultaneously, whereby various uncertain and asynchronic futures for themselves and their family members must be anticipated.

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