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Laust Lund Elbek: Sniffing Out Trouble? What and how the ‘Police Nose’ Smells

Image 1: Police officer in residential area. Photo by Rigspolitiet

Suspicion appears to sit largely in the nose: we might say that something ‘stinks,’ ‘smells off,’ that we ‘smell a rat,’ or perhaps ‘something fishy.’ Such suspicious smells may, in turn, compel us to ‘sniff out trouble’—at least until we ‘lose the scent.’

While these metaphors can seem curious or quirky at first sight, they do map onto two domains of meaning directly related to suspicion: universal perceptions of danger (decay or spoiled food) and images of searching and tracking (a dog on a trail). The association between the sense of smell and suspicion is further reflected in the olfactory system’s function as a bodily warning system triggered by smoke, bad food, leaking gas, and so on (Ramšak 2024).

It is from this general metaphorical terrain of olfactory suspicion that I take my cue. Based on fieldwork with Danish police officers, I reflect on what is colloquially known as the police nose (“politinæse”)—a ubiquitous term in Danish police lingo that refers to officers’ ostensible unique ability to “catch a whiff” of something suspicious on their beats.

I suggest that while the police nose can be understood as a particular kind of ‘craft’ rooted in accumulated sensory experience, it also connects to wider public and scholarly debates regarding the dilemmas of the police’s discretionary powers. To anchor these thoughts,I begin with a brief ethnographic trip to Hill Park, a marginalized housing project in the suburbs of Copenhagen, to take a closer look at one specific police nose in practice.

‘The Nose’ In Action

In the early spring of 2024, I joined Detective Jensen, a calm and friendly man in his early forties, on a routine patrol around the estate. Around 10 am, the skies on the fringes of the city were as grey as the concrete blocks themselves. The estate, which is home to roughly 5,000 residents, most of whom come from immigrant and/or working-class backgrounds, had not quite awoken from its winter slumber yet.

As we rolled slowly past a kindergarten, Jensen smoothly brought the patrol car to a halt. “What’s that over there?” he said, narrowing his eyes. He had spotted an inconspicuous, grey car parked partly out of sight behind a shrubbery. “It’s just, you know, why is it parked there?” he asked, staring firmly in the direction of the vehicle. He motioned for me to follow him as he opened the door, got out, and walked toward the grey car. When I caught up, he explained: “After a while, you develop a police nose, you know, a kind of sixth sense. When you’ve pulled over so many cars or seen them parked in funny places, it triggers your attention. Why is it parked here? Has it been deliberately hidden? Has it been stolen? What’s up with it?” “Have you seen that car before?” I asked. “No,” Jensen said, walking around the car and reaching for a door handle to check if it had been left unlocked. “I haven’t seen it before, and we know the area well. So, I’m just having a look around now, you know—checking what’s on the ground, what’s on the floor, is it unlocked, does it have something to do with some of the familiar kids from the estate, yes, no…”

Jensen reached for his phone to scan the car’s license plate. “I’m just checking who owns the car,” he explained. “And then I’ll check what we know about that person. It’s 10 o’clock now, right? Is it someone who lives in the area, or someone who comes from the outside? That’s the sort of thing I want to know. Right now, things look peaceful enough, sure. But we always take a look around.”

He took another inspection round and then got down on one knee to have a look underneath the car. “What do we have here? Is that an unpaid parking ticket? And this right here definitely looks like a mixing tray of some kind,” he said in a slightly triumphant tone. Pointing to the shrubbery surrounding the car, he said, “If it had been dark out, this place would have been completely out of sight, right?”

The ‘Police Nose’ as Embodied Skill

Jensen’s discovery of drug paraphernalia in Hill Park was itself an unspectacular event, yet his explanation of the process behind it—that he had followed his police nose—opens an ethnographic window onto the importance of sensory inference and the ability to detect subtle environmental cues in everyday policing.

Indeed, the notion of the ‘police nose’ is no idiosyncrasy of Jensen’s, but a familiar phenomenon among Danish police officers that has also been noted by other ethnographers (e.g. Sausdal 2018). Police representatives themselves also assert that “everyone in the Danish police knows what the police nose is.” In the British context, a direct parallel exists in the form of the copper’s nose, which refers to officers’ allegedly unique ability “to sense when something doesn’t feel right” (Quin 2025, 11–12). Related sensory idioms of police officers acting on gut feelings or a ‘sixth sense’ (a term that Jensen also used) abound across the world.

Now, because of its vague and arguably somewhat self-elevating character, one could be tempted to dismiss talk of a unique ‘police nose’ as mere occupational folklore and mystique. I suggest, however, that it also points to a rather less arcane skill; namely, a developed capacity for decoding environments in a distinctly ‘police-like’ way. As Jensen put it, the police nose materialises once “you’ve pulled over so many cars, or seen them parked in funny places”—an observation that also implicitly invokes the well-known ability of smells to awaken past experiences(Ramšak 2024). And certainly, to an outside observer such as myself, the car parked in Hill Park would, if registered at all, probably index “someone left their car here.” But to Detective Jensen, it also indexed the possibility that “someone tried to hide their vehicle—let’s investigate.”

From this perspective, the idea of the police nose (like its various cognates) invokes what Tim Ingold has referred to as a process of enskilment, which denotes the gradual and practical “embodiment of capacities of awareness and response by environmentally situated agents” (2002, 5). Not at all unlike the Arctic hunters that originally inspired Ingold’s concept—hunters whose “perceptual system […] is attuned to picking up information, critical to the practical conduct of [their] hunting, to which the unskilled observer simply fails to attend” (Ingold 2002, 55)—Jensen and his colleagues gradually learn to sense subtle cues in their surroundings that may, or may not, refer to something of police interest. The police nose, from this perspective, could be understood not as a mysterious ability magically conferred by the badge or uniform, but as an occupational shorthand for an ‘enskilled’semiotic process of quickly scanning the environment for signs.

Pride and Prejudice?

The police nose, however, is more than just a skill; it is also a source of professional pride and identity. As Jensen’s remarks on its development also seemed to suggest, ‘having a nose’ for detecting trouble is closely tied to understandings of what it means to be a good officer. From this perspective, the semantic link between ‘smelling’ and ‘suspicion’ speaks not only to a generalized imagery of danger and detection, but also to a vocational ideology among police officers that values intuition, fine-tuned senses, and personal experience. Yet, the reading and interpretation of signs and cues in one’s surroundings—arguably the key ‘task’ of the police nose—is never a neutral endeavour but is always-already embedded in social-political contexts (Eco 1979). To illustrate this, let us briefly return to Hill Park and the car half-concealed by a shrubbery.

As Jensen finished his inspection of the vehicle and its surroundings, we got back into the police car, and he continued his reflections: “It’s broad daylight now, of course. And early in the morning. So, the person in question may be asleep, or perhaps at work or something.” “It’s not that early, though, is it?” I said (it was approaching 11 am by now). “Yes, yes, to some it is, it depends on who you ask. To you and me, it’s not very early, of course,” Jensen replied. “But to some of the citizens we encounter often, 11 o’clock is very, very early. These are people we typically only see after 3 pm. If they don’t have anything to do—no school, work, or education—then we see them in the streets at 3, and then they’re probably awake until, I don’t know, 1, 2, or 3 am, no matter what day it is.”

Jensen’s remarks reveal an acute awareness of the temporal and social rhythms of the neighbourhood, which is part of his regular beat, as well as of those well-known residents he deems to be of immediate ‘interest.’ And while it is precisely such contextual familiarity that renders the police nose useful in practice, it also follows that its inferences are often situated in a social field shaped by unequal relations of power. Put somewhat bluntly, to most police officers, a car parked in an affluent neighbourhood would be unlikely to index the same thing as it would in Hill Park. And so, regardless of its accuracy in specific situations, the ‘police nose’ thus also speaks to long-standing debates concerning the classed nature of suspicion and its broader implications regarding the trade-offs between discretion and accountability in policing.

I should interject here that this is not to suggest that Detective Jensen or any of his colleagues operate on prejudice—I have no indication to that effect whatsoever. My intention here is simply to leverage Jensen’s reflections to illustrate how what the police nose ‘smells’ is inevitably embedded both within broader structures of meaning and power as well as individual officers’ accumulated sensory experiences.

This tension has not gone unnoticed in Danish public debate, either. During the 2011 Roskilde Festival, for example, police requested that 25 Romani individuals identify themselves, and when questioned critically by a newspaper journalist, the on-duty officer explained: “It is our police nose that compels us to check up on the Roma bunch.” The reportage does not mention whether officers managed to ‘sniff out’ any illegal behaviour, but it stands to reason that few ethnic stereotypes are more tenacious than the one linking ‘Gypsies’ to petty crime and delinquency.

Eleven years later, Amnesty International explicitly flagged the possible association between the ‘police nose’ and the phenomenon of ‘ethnic profiling’ in Danish cities (Amnesty International Denmark 2022), following a publication documenting that “the risk of being charged without a subsequent conviction is 27% higher for immigrants than people of Danish origin. For descendants of immigrants, the risk of being charged without a subsequent conviction is 45% higher than it is for people of Danish origin” (Søndergaard and Hussein 2022, 3). The publication also led to this potential ‘dark side’ of the police nose being discussed by national politicians and police chiefs at the high-profile political festival on the island of Bornholm.

The smell of (ir)rational bureaucracy?

References to a ‘police nose’—or what is variously referred to in other contexts as a “sixth sense,” “gut feelings,” “hunches,” or even “intuition”—circulate among police officers as a shorthand for an almost instinctive ability to read and respond to subtle environmental cues in a distinctly ‘police-like’ way. The olfactory character of the metaphor, in turn, does not appear semantically incidental, as it evokes suspicion, vigilance, and an intuitive mode of noticing that something is ‘off’ before it is consciously articulated as such. This contrasts with visual and auditory metaphors, which often seem to signal rational processes—“I see” can mean “I understand,” for example—and resonates with the idea that “the sense of smell has fewer and less deep metaphorical connections with the mental domain” (Sweetser 1990, 43). The ‘police nose,’ indeed, seems to denote a pre-reflective rather than purely rationalistic mode of knowing and engaging with the world.

On the one hand, the ability to act on a fleeting je-ne-sais-quoi is a crucial part of the craft of everyday policing and is a skill that officers hone in practice as they immerse themselves in the rhythms, histories, and social makeup of their daily beats. On the other hand, the police nose is clearly not a neutral bureaucratic instrument, but rather a visceral pattern recognition tool that operates within structures of power and experience that co-condition what counts as ‘suspicious’ in the first place. As public and scholarly debate has highlighted, references to a police nose may thus run the risk of concealing implicit bias in discretionary policing behind a linguistic veil of vaguely defined expertise.

The police nose thus presents itself as a double-edged sword. As a professional ideal and sensory skill, it highlights the real importance of officers’ heightened situational awareness and responsiveness. At the same time, some contexts may be automatically assumed to “smell” more than others—and what smells, and to whom, is to a considerable extent shaped by a politics of inequality. And while no obvious silver bullet is available for resolving this tension, it remains something to be mindful of, as even the sharpest nose may lead us down a path that does not quite pass the sniff test.

Laust Lund Elbek is assistant professor at the University of Southern Denmark. His research lies at the intersection of social anthropology and political science, with a focus on state-citizen relations in highly securitized contexts.

References

Amnesty International Denmark. 2022. ”Det er jo en offentlig gabestok, og jeg ved godt, hvad Hr. og Fru Jensen, der kører forbi, tænker”. Copenhagen.

Eco, Umberto. 1979. A Theory of Semiotics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Ingold, Tim. 2002. The perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. London: Routledge.

Quin, Emily. 2025. ‘The Copper’s Nose’: A Grounded Theory of a Policing Phenomenon, Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge.

Ramšak, Mojca. 2024. The Anthropology of Smell. New York: Springer.

Sausdal, David. 2018. Everyday Deficiencies of Police Surveillance: A Quotidian Approach to Surveillance Studies. Policing and Society 30(4):462-478.

Sweetser, Eve. 1990. From Etymology to Pragmatics. Metaphorical and CulturalAspects of Semantic Structure. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Søndergaard, Jeppe Kirkelund, and Tarek Hussein. 2022. Etnisk Profilering: Hovedresultater fra tre undersøgelser. Danish Institute for Human Rights.

Cite as: Elbek, L. L. 2025. “Sniffing Out Trouble? What and how the ‘Police Nose’ Smells” Focaalblog December 24. https://www.focaalblog.com/2025/12/24/laust-lund-elbek-sniffing-out-trouble-what-and-how-the-police-nose-smells/

Art and Visual Anthropology, AVA General Posts, Blog

Görkem Akgöz: “The Sad Truth” Then and Now: Pasts and Presents of Danish Refugee Policy

This text was originally published in Swedish in Arbetar Historia (No.191-192, 2024). Special thanks to the editors for granting permission to republish.

In 2015, during the peak of what became known as the “refugee crisis,” global attention turned towards an unexpected actor: Denmark. Long regarded as a liberal refuge and one of the first signatories of the 1951 United Nations Refugee Convention, Denmark experienced a significant policy shift under the ruling Social Democrats. i The country implemented some of the world’s strictest refugee policies, becoming the first nation to mandate that even resettled refugees must eventually return to their home countries.

Sjælsmark and Kærshovedgård, two semi-open “departure centres” established in 2013 to process rejected asylum-seekers, paradoxically became temporary residences for refugees who had already been granted permission to remain in Denmark. These deportation centres, which subject non-deported individuals to indefinite waits under conditions that verge on de facto incarceration, have become pivotal sites in Denmark’s deportation-focused asylum policy.

Danish migration scholar and documentary director Helle Stenum’s latest documentary, The Sad Truth (2023), takes viewers through the gates of these camps while situating them within Denmark’s broader historical context. The film focuses on young Syrian women confined to these camps, grappling with a harsh ultimatum: return to their war-torn homeland or remain indefinitely in a state of uncertainty. By interweaving their struggles with historical accounts of Danish deportation practices—such as the expulsion of Jews in the 1930s and the treatment of German war refugees between 1945-47—Stenum raises profound questions about historical memory: who gets to tell these stories, who is remembered, and who is forgotten? At its heart, the documentary interrogates the concept of agency, connecting past and present experiences.

Image 1: Screenshot from the Vimeo website for “The Sad Truth”; where the movie can be rented for viewing (see: https://vimeo.com/ondemand/thesadtruth)

This interrogation of agency plays out in several layers throughout the film, both in the personal experiences of the refugees and the broader political discourse. At the highest political levels, Danish prime ministers invoke refugee issues in their New Year messages, reducing complex human experiences to numbers in debates about national challenges. Next, these numbers gain a face. We meet the young refugee women awaiting their fate in prison-like deportation camps, their circumstances shaped by constraints that limit their agency. Yet, through their stories of resilience and hope, we see the enduring power of personal narratives to illuminate the human cost of political decisions. White Danish activists represent another form of agency, using their privilege to amplify marginalized voices and challenge dominant narratives. Among the refugees, Rahima Abdullah’s journey reflects a dynamic and evolving agency. Initially impressed by Denmark’s commitment to the rule of law, her disillusionment grows as she witnesses its violations first-hand.

Finally, the film highlights the agency of two older female historians, Kirsten Lylloff and Lone Rünitz, who wrestle with the challenges of confronting uncomfortable historical truths.ii One of them poignantly reflects on the backlash that arises when challenging a nation’s self-image, saying, “A bird does not shit in its own nest.” This sentiment about the difficulty of critiquing one’s own country echoes a broader public discomfort with such discussions. A recent Washington Post opinion piece captures this shift in Danish politics, titled “How Progressive Denmark Became the Face of the Anti-Migration Left.”iii The article chronicles Denmark’s dramatic turn in refugee politics, noting, “Denmark was not always like this. Thirty years ago, the country was relatively open and welcoming, with strong protections for asylum seekers and refugees. But that started to change in the 1990s, as the anti-immigrant rhetoric of the far-right Danish People’s Party proved politically potent.”

To this, our two historians might reply in present-day social media jargon: “Hold my beer! We need to go much further back than that to understand what’s happening now!” This is where the film’s second storyline comes in—the research of Lylloff and Rünitz on Denmark’s treatment of Jews in the 1930s and German war refugees between 1945-47, which provides crucial historical context to the contemporary refugee debate.

When the historians speak in the documentary, their presence closely aligns with what is often called the expository documentary format.iv This style typically features an authoritative voice-over or a historian presenting directly to the camera, acting as both narrator and objective assessor of evidence. However, Lylloff and Rünitz offer more than just authoritative voices. Their involvement goes beyond simply providing historical facts; they bring personal and professional insights into the conversation, adding depth and complexity to the film’s exploration of Denmark’s current refugee policies.

We first see these two women casually sitting on a bench, engaged in conversation with each other, sharing the personal and professional costs of their academic research. This intimate exchange adds a layer of depth to their authoritative roles, making them more relatable and humanized. In addition, another historian makes her presence felt in the film, though her face remains unseen—Helle Stenum herself. Through her academic writing and documentaries, including those that address the legacies of Danish colonialism, Stenum exposes her country’s troubling historical and contemporary record.v

In “The Sad Truth,” Stenum undertakes a challenging task—a diachronic historical comparison—that many historians are usually hesitant to pursue given the clear and significant structural and contextual differences between the late 1930s and the mid-2010s. Academically, the contemporary European (so-called) refugee crisis has not received sufficient historical contextualization. Historical analyses have been slow to integrate into refugee studies, a relatively new field dominated by social scientists with largely presentist concerns.vi However, outside academia, such comparisons have been made in public and political debates. 

A notable example comes from Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, the former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, who, in the autumn of 2015, during the height of the so-called refugee crisis, warned of the dangers of “amnesia.” In an interview with The Guardian, Al Hussein argued that contemporary public rhetoric about refugees echoed that used by Western leaders in the late 1930s.vii It is this amnesia that the two Danish historians are trying to confront by telling the stories of Jewish and German war refugees. “Both politicians and ordinary Danes have incredibly short-term memories,” says one of them. As I watched, I found myself answering back, “Well, which nation doesn’t?” But it is not only public forgetting or historical amnesia at stake here. A Danish retiree affiliated with Grandparents for Asylum, a coalition of activists who support refugees, offers another perspective. She notes that many Danes she encounters remain unaware—or unwilling to acknowledge—what is happening. “When I tell them what we are doing, people don’t believe me,” she says. “They say, ‘But we Danes don’t treat people like that.’” viii So, what we’re dealing with is not just public forgetting of the past, but also a wilful ignorance of the present.

But where lies the distinction between the two? How do these two forces intertwine in the everyday lives of those affected by them? The documentary poignantly links two refugees from different time periods through a powerful scene: Syrian refugee Rahima touching the Stolpersteine, the stumbling stone marking the home of German Jew Ruth Niedrig, who was handed over to the Gestapo by Danish authorities. This gesture made me wonder: Did Stenum have the chance to show this scene to Rahima and other Syrian refugees? If so, how did they react? What was Rahima’s understanding of this history? Given her initial view of Denmark as a bastion of the rule of law, how did she respond to the historical context unfolding before her?

Though both Ruth and Rahima have grappled with profound uncertainties during their time in Denmark—navigating what can be described as the Danish limbo—their experiences are rooted in vastly different historical contexts, both politically and economically. In 1930s Denmark, amid post-Depression economic hardship and widespread unemployment, concerns about refugees draining social policy resources were widespread. By contrast, Rahima and her fellow Syrian refugees arrived during a period of economic prosperity, within the context of a strong welfare state. Yet, how did a country with a tradition of social solidarity gradually adopt an anti-refugee stance? How did this tradition evolve into a protectionist and xenophobic form of welfare-state patriotism? The film starkly illustrates this shift, particularly when the Danish Minister of Migration proudly references the Danish welfare state tradition in defence of the new refugee policy at the European Parliament.

The discourse of welfare-state patriotism transcends racial, religious, and cultural boundaries, feeding into broader debates about immigrant integration into Danish society. Central to these discussions are concerns about immigrants’ socioeconomic status, their employment in low-pay jobs, and their reliance on social benefits. Refugees are often depicted within this narrative as a burden—requiring substantial long-term investment from the state, while struggling to enter the labour market effectively. As such, the aim of the current Danish refugee and asylum policyseems twofold: to pressure those already in the country into accepting voluntary return, while simultaneously sending a loud and clear message: “Don’t think about coming to Denmark.” But, then, who is this message truly directed at?

The influx of largely extra-European refugees raised concerns about the potential long-term impact of mostly young Middle Eastern males on the social stability of European democracies. In 2012, sociologist Sara Farris coined the term “femonationalism” to describe the alignment between nationalist ideologies and certain feminist ideas, particularly when driven by xenophobic motivations.ix Farris documents how some European right-wing parties and self-identified feminists exploit women’s rights and gender equality principles to justify discriminatory practices against Muslim and non-Western immigrants.

I raise this concept here for two reasons. First, femonationalism is particularly relevant to Stenum’s documentary, which selectively portrays only female refugees, despite Denmark’s ostensibly non-gender-discriminatory refugee policy. This selective portrayal invites an exploration of its implications within the context of femonationalism and the institutionalization of gendered integration policies. Second, in 2019, the Danish prime minister declared a goal of “zero asylum seekers.” However, following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Denmark accepted Ukrainian refugees. Danish authorities and NGOs actively assisted these refugees, ensuring their integration into Danish society. What does this shift reveal about the political and societal consequences of categorizing, labelling, and stereotyping refugees?

As we continue to witness devastating acts of state-induced violence, most recently in Palestine, which flagrantly breach international law, the questions raised by Stenum’s documentary take on even greater urgency. Her work forces us to reckon not only with the memory of historical injustices but also with the present moment—where the way we treat refugees is inextricably tied to political ideologies, societal perceptions, and economic realities. This film serves as both a reminder and a challenge, asking us to confront the uncomfortable truths about how we view those who seek refuge, particularly when their needs clash with the dominant narratives of national identity and security. As Walter Benjamin wrote, “Every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably.” x Stenum’s documentary pushes us to recognize these images, to reckon with the past, and to engage with the present in ways that are both reflective and responsive to the demands of justice and humanity.

i During the Nazi occupation of Denmark, many Danish people played a crucial role in one of the largest and most exceptional rescue operations of the Holocaust, famously saving the lives of the vast majority of Jews living in Denmark, including several hundred German and “stateless Jews,” by helping them escape to Sweden. Levine, Paul A. 2011. “Sweden’s Complicated Neutrality and the Rescue of Danish Jewry.” In The Routledge History of the Holocaust, edited by Jonathan C. Friedman, 305-314. New York: Routledge.

ii See, for example, Lylloff, Kirsten. “Dødsårsager for tyske flygtningebørn i 1945 [Causes of death of German refugee children in 1945].” Ugeskr Laeger, vol. 162, no. 9, 2000; Rünitz, Lone. “Denmark’s Response to the Nazi Expulsion Policy, 1938-39.” Holocaust Studies, vol. 11, no. 3, 2005.

iii Rauhala, Emily. “How Progressive Denmark Became the Face of the Anti-Migration Left.” Washington Post, April 6, 2023. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/04/06/denmark-zero-asylum-refugees/. Accessed June 20, 2024. It is important to note that in this context, “the left” specifically refers to the Social Democratic Party. However, two parties to the left of the Social Democrats, which currently hold 24 out of 179 seats in parliament, are highly critical of the Social Democrats’ position on this issue. These parties advocate for a more “humanistic” approach to refugee policy and are poised to gain significant support, according to recent polls. Special thanks to Lars Kjølhede Christensen for bringing this point to my attention.

iv Bell, Desmond. “Documentary Film and the Poetics of History.” Journal of Media Practice, vol. 12, no. 1, 2011, p. 9.

v Stenum’s award-winning documentary “We Carry It Within Us” (2017) examines Denmark’s role in the transatlantic slave trade and explores how the colonial past continues to shape contemporary media, art, museums, education, and wealth distribution, alongside various practices of remembering and forgetting.

vi Ahonen, Pertti. “Europe and Refugees: 1938 and 2015-16.” Patterns of Prejudice, vol. 52, no. 2-3, 2018, p. 137.

vii Jones, Sam. “Refugee Rhetoric Echoes 1938 Summit Before Holocaust, UN Official Warns.” The Guardian, October 14, 2015. https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2015/oct/14/refugee-rhetoric-echoes-1938-summit-before-holocaust-un-official-warns. Accessed June 20, 2024.

viii Rauhala, “How Progressive Denmark.”

ix Farris, Sara. In the Name of Women’s Rights: The Rise of Femonationalism. Duke University Press, 2017.

x Benjamin, Walter. “On the Concept of History.” Selected Writings, Volume 4: 1938–1940, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, 2003, p. 391.

Görkem Akgöz is a research fellow at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam. Her main research interests are global labour history, political economy, and women and gender history. She is the author of In the Shadow of War and Empire: Industrialisation, Nation-Building, and Working-Class Politics in Turkey(Brill, 2024). She is the co-chair of the Labour Network of the European Social Science History Conference, the co-coordinator of the Workplaces: Pasts and Presents working group of the European Labour History Network, and a member of the Editorial Committee of the International Review of Social History. More information can be found at www.gorkemakgoz.com.

Cite as: Akgöz, Görkem 2025. “’The Sad Truth’ Then and Now: Pasts and Presents of Danish Refugee Policy” Focaalblog 8 January. https://www.focaalblog.com/2025/01/08/gorkem-akgoz-the-sad-truth-then-and-now-pasts-and-presents-of-danish-refugee-policy/