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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Sociol.
Sec. Migration and Society
Volume 9 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fsoc.2024.1367517
This article is part of the Research Topic Mobility, Power and the (Re)production of Inequality and Injustice View all 3 articles

Legal mobilization dilemmas in the Nordics -an autoethnographic reflection on the role of scholars in the Asylum Commission

Provisionally accepted
Anna Lundberg Anna Lundberg 1,2*
  • 1 Lund University, Lund, Sweden
  • 2 Department of Sociology of Law, Faculty of Social Sciences, Lund University, Lund, Skane County, Sweden

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    The present article investigates key dilemmas in collective legal mobilization initiatives in the field of asylum and migrants' rights. Focusing on my own experiences from working in the Asylum Commission -a trans-sectional mobilization initiative that ran in Sweden from 2019 to 2022, involving researchers, civil society representatives, and professionals -I analyze two central dilemmas that characterized our work. First, I consider how we collectively struggled for the legal right to asylum and through this struggle also reproduced injustices and potential border control harms which are embedded in asylum regulations. Second, I analyze how the Commission strived to provide a knowledge-based account of the consequences of legislative changes post the long summer of migration in 2015 that would have an impact on future legislation, while simultaneously taking an open stand in solidarity with people who were excluded from the legislative process; i.e., asylum seekers. The article underlines the need for sociolegal research that highlights ways to address dilemmas in legal mobilization work and offers empirical insights from collective mobilization for migrants' rights in a Northern European country.

    Keywords: legal mobilization, Sweden, Migration law, scholarship of hope, Autoethnography, activism

    Received: 08 Jan 2024; Accepted: 12 Jul 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Lundberg. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Anna Lundberg, Lund University, Lund, Sweden

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