‘Be Honest, They Are More Like Us’: Moral Dimensions of Crisis and Forms of Resistance in Norwegian Refugee Services

New regulations have created an intense debate in Norway regarding discriminatory practices in refugee politics, and over refugee settlements in Norwegian municipalities. In this article we ask: how do employees in refugee services experience discriminatory regulations and practices and how do they negotiate and manoeuvre these in their everyday work with refugees? We discuss discriminatory practices in refugee services, based on interviews with employees in refugee services in three Norwegian municipalities. Our findings indicate that employees in refugee services engage in acts of resistance towards what they experience as discriminatory regulations and practices. We rely on insights from institutional ethnography and resistance studies in our analyses of these acts, and show how employees in refugee services are embedded in accountability circuits, a ‘form of coordination [which] brings front-line work into alignment with institutional objectives through the activation of texts’ (Smith 2005; Johnson and Bagatell 2019), and how they develop strategies for handling the moral dilemmas they face in their everyday interactions with people seeking state protection as refugees. The strategies they employ are subtle forms of everyday resistance, where employees engage in critical talk and silent manoeuvring of regulations (Sørensen, Nilsen and Lund 2019) to contest ruling regulations. Our analysis reveals that employees experience what we refer to as a double disjuncture, as actors outside the service—collaborating services, voluntary and civil actors—rely on the same logic embedded in the regulations to discriminate between different groups of refugees. Employees engage in more direct and oppositional forms of resistance in their negotiations with actors they collaborate with over the moral dilemmas triggered by regulations they are asked to enforce and oppose.