This article examines the regulation and rights of refugees and other foreigners in
independent, overseas and other not fully sovereign territories. It analyses two Nordic
cases, Greenland and Svalbard. Greenland is an autonomous territory within the
Kingdom of Denmark, and Svalbard an unincorporated area subject to Norwegian
sovereignty through the 1920 Spitsbergen Treaty. Unlike their parent states, both
territories remain outside the Schengen Area. As this article highlights, both territories
are subject to distinct regulatory frameworks in respect to asylum-seekers and refugees.
While the number of asylum-seekers or refugees in each place is so far very
limited, the regulatory differences nonetheless raise principled questions both
from a rights-based perspective and at the more theoretical level. As this article
argues, Greenland and Svalbard both exemplify how international law and late
sovereign constructions may themselves provide for an unmooring of asylum
and refugee rights within the ordinary statist framework. The effects in each case
are multi-directional. On the one hand, the legal frameworks pertaining to these
arctic territories provide for significantly more liberal rules in terms of access to
asylum and immigration control. On the other hand, these legal bifurcations serve
to upend the ordinary Nordic social contract and welfare rights owed to refugees
and other aliens.