Based on young Afghans' experiences of multiple rejections in Sweden, this paper will discuss “administrative violence” as a form a neo-colonial power performance to exclude unwanted and “othered” people from the Swedish welfare state. The paper will address experiences of different acts of administrative violence, from asylum rejections and loss of residential care accommodation to rejections on applications for economic support performed by the social services. For some project participants, having escaped from violence and deaths by weapons in the country they once left, the signature of a Swedish administrator’s pen becomes just as violent and life-threatening as the situation they left behind. For Swedish society, the administrative signatures become a means to neutralise and legitimise politics of exclusion and turn racist discourses into bureaucratic practice.

This paper draws on two ethnographic research projects in asylum reception contexts. One project focuses on the social dimensions of hope among people who wait to have their cases assessed while the other addresses the significance of local civil networks for coping with and resisting ongoing politics of exclusion. Twenty youngsters, initially having sought asylum in Sweden, have been followed through participant observations and recurrent interviews for more than two years. While some of them remain in Sweden, others have opted for re-escaping to the migrant ‘quarantines’ of Europe, joining a growing ‘deportspora’ of people having been made ‘deportable’ through signatures and pen strokes.