A stage of limbo: A meta-synthesis of refugees' liminality

The asylum regime encloses tens of millions of applicants for international protection in camps and different types of reception centres, to wait even decades for their cases to be resolved. Simultaneously both within and outside the nation state, asylum seekers and refugees occupy a social space outside the natural order of things, a stage of limbo. By incorporating the classical anthropological concepts of limbo and liminality to the methodological possibilities of meta-ethnography, we conducted to our knowledge the first meta-synthesis of 17 scientific peer-reviewed articles with the aims of defining what constitutes the concept of a stage of limbo and investigating refugees' and asylum seekers' agency as they cope when navigating in it. By dissecting detailed descriptions of forced migrants' experiences of liminality, our synthesis identified four key concepts involved in negotiations of agency in a stage of limbo: process of eligibility, spatial-temporal inconsistency, ontological insecurity and actions.