Gatekeeping the Nation: Deportation at Finnish Borderscapes from the Cold War to Europeanisation, 12th October 2022

In this seminar, Miika Tervonen will present the project: Gatekeeping the Nation: Deportation at Finnish Borderscapes from the Cold War to Europeanisation (GATE, 2022-2026). Deportations are taking place on an unprecedented level in Finland and other countries of the Global North. However, there is a lack of transparency and long-term understanding of deportations as societal practice. From this starting point, the project undertakes the first systematic analysis of changing deportation policy in the Nordic context. It utilizes archival materials and interviews with migrants and ‘gatekeepers’ to examine changing laws, practices and actors involved in the forced removals. Rather than approaching deportations as a ‘natural’ response to increasing immigration, the project seeks to historicize and 'denaturalize' it as a key site in which the boundaries of modern state power are drawn and contested.

Miika Tervonen is a Senior Research Fellow at the Migration Institute of Finland, and a docent of Nordic Studies at the University of Helsinki. His research centres on issues of migration, borders, minorities and nationalism. He is the chair of the Nordic Migration Research network and leads the Academy of Finland -funded project Gatekeeping the Nation: Deportation at Finnish Borderscapes from the Cold War to Europeanisation (GATE, 2022-2026). He is currently also writing a monograph with the working title Writing the Past White: Nation, Race and Coloniality in Finnish National Histories, examining the construction of national narratives through inclusions, exclusions and silences.