The state riddle: working through messiness alongside a shared deportation apparatus in France and Romania

Funding

I would like to thank the editors of this Special Issue Barak Kalir, Damian Rosset and Christin Acherman for their helpful guidance and valuable comments during the preparation of this article. A special gratitude is extended to the anonymous reviewers for their close reading of earlier drafts and the many brilliant suggestions and engaging comments they provided. This work was supported by the European Research Council [ERC-Starting grant number 336319] ‘The Social Life of State Deportation Regimes: A Comparative Study of the Implementation Interface’. My attempts to access the research field, the deportation apparatus, sheds light on several aspects of the state: it is heterogeneous, it is opaque and defensive, it creates and reproduces structures of oppression, in collaboration with other states it mutually reinforces sovereignty. The relevance of the bilateral police alliance and the web of institutions and their prerogatives in two different countries shaped what was possible in my fieldwork. The ways in which each state, France and Romania, reacted to me by allowing (or denying) my access to different actors mirrored their own position within an international community and its implicit power relations. I attribute my opportunity to access the Romanian state to my perceived identity as an educated white middle-class woman who is a citizen of the state. At the same time, the French state’s strong refusal to grant me access reveals the absolute discretionary power and unaccountability towards a researcher from a Dutch university in a project funded by the EU. However, in the end, the entanglement of ‘neo-colonial’ and patriarchal structures pushed me into the ambiguous situation of gaining access to the French state – I was, after all, perceived as a white middle-class educated woman, a ‘deserving foreigner’. Playing out the same discretionary power through its agents, the French state exhibited an undeniable confidence and strength to ‘let me in’ on its own terms – allowing informal access via the practice of its employees.