Drawing on unique sources from the Swedish Migration Agency Archive, this article examines how Afghan asylum seekers and refugees fared in their encounter with Swedish internal and external controls of people seeking protection from persecution during the Cold War. Within a theoretical framework that draws on the concept of statist logic, the history of refugeehood, interactionist sociology and critical legal studies, two key findings are presented and discussed. First, Afghan refugees and asylum seekers encountered multidirectional restrictive control measures despite Sweden’s strong support of Afghan refugees in Pakistan, and despite the low numbers of Afghan asylum applicants in Sweden. Second, a focus on how immigration controls affected one specific national group reveals a broader pattern of how internal and external controls of asylum seekers in the 1980s, under the aegis of the Swedish state, were distributed between state, non-state and international organizations. The article provides a critical history that sheds new light on the situation following the ‘refugee crisis’ of 2015–16, when over 40,000 Afghan asylum seekers entered Sweden. In doing so, the article ties in to a burgeoning development within refugee studies that seeks to include a historical perspective, since such an inclusion is necessary to identify continuities and changes that remain highly relevant for understanding, assessing and offering real alternatives to today’s dominant approaches to refugee governance, policy, experiences, social and political practices and discourses.

中文翻译：

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国家的长臂和短臂：冷战期间瑞典对阿富汗寻求庇护者的多向控制

本文利用瑞典移民局档案中的独特资料，探讨了在冷战期间，阿富汗寻求庇护者和难民在遇到瑞典对寻求保护免遭迫害的人的内部和外部控制时的表现。在利用国家主义逻辑概念、难民历史、互动社会学和批判性法律研究的理论框架内，提出并讨论了两个关键发现。首先，尽管瑞典大力支持在巴基斯坦的阿富汗难民，尽管瑞典的阿富汗难民申请人数很少，但阿富汗难民和寻求庇护者仍遭遇多方面的限制性控制措施。第二，对移民控制如何影响一个特定民族群体的关注揭示了 1980 年代在瑞典国家支持下对寻求庇护者的内部和外部控制如何在国家、非国家和国际组织之间分配的更广泛模式。这篇文章提供了一段重要的历史，揭示了 2015-16 年“难民危机”之后的情况，当时有超过 40,000 名阿富汗寻求庇护者进入瑞典。在此过程中，该文章与难民研究中寻求包含历史视角的新兴发展相联系，因为这种包含对于识别与理解、评估和提供当今主流方法的真正替代方案仍然高度相关的连续性和变化是必要的难民治理、政策、经验、