Necropolitics and the slow violence of the everyday: Asylum seeker welfare in the postcolonial present

This article responds to dual calls for researching and theorising everyday social phenomena in postcolonial studies on the one hand, and serious engagement with the postcolonial within the discipline of sociology on the other. It focuses on the everyday lives of asylum seekers living on asylum seeker welfare support in the UK. Asylum seekers offer a good case study for exploring the postcolonial everyday because they live in poverty and consequently experience daily harms at the hands of the state, despite the UK fulfilling its obligations to them under human rights law. The article proposes a conceptual framework drawing together sociologies of the everyday, necropolitics and slow violence in tracing how hierarchical conceptions of human worth impact on the everyday

Imagining asylum, governing asylum seekers : complexity reduction and policy making in the UK home office

Drawing on elite interviews with UK asylum policymakers, this article entails a detailed elaboration of how policy programmes are produced by particular ways of imagining asylum seeking in an effort to reduce the complexity of the phenomenon and thus devise policy responses to it. The article explores how such processes can lead to the curtailment of the economic rights of asylum seekers with specific reference the UK policy of severely restricting labour market access for asylum seekers. The policy imaginary—the story which is utilized in reducing the complexity of irregular migration in this context—is the idea of the ‘economic pull factor’. That is that disingenuous asylum seekers (economic migrants in disguise) are ‘pulled’ to particular countries by economic opportunities. This construal of what drives irregular migration for asylum is not natural or inevitable, it is the outcome of institutionally embedded ways of viewing the world and Britain’s place within it. This discussion brings insights from critical policy studies to bear on asylum policy making, offering new ways of understanding the practices and processes of policy making in this field

Complexity reduction and policy consensus: asylum seekers, the right to work, and the ‘pull factor’ thesis in the UK context

Since the early 2000s, asylum policy in Western states has become increasingly dominated by the concept of the ‘pull factor’—the idea that the economic rights afforded to asylum seekers can act as a migratory pull, and will have a bearing on the numbers of asylum applications received. The pull factor thesis has been widely discredited by researchers but remains powerful among policymakers. Through an analysis of the pull factor in the UK context, and drawing on insights from Cultural Political Economy, this article argues that the hegemony of the pull factor thesis is best understood as a ‘policy imaginary’ which has become sedimented through both discursive and extra-discursive practices and processes. The article offers a means of understanding how a common sense assumption—which is challenged by a large body of evidence—has come to dominate policymaking in a key area of concern for politicians and policymakers

Channel crossings: offshoring asylum and the afterlife of empire in the Dover Strait

In 2020, over 8,400 people made their way from France to the UK coast using small vessels. They did so principally in order to claim asylum in the United Kingdom (UK). Much like in other border-zones, the UK state has portrayed irregular Channel crossings as an invading threat and has deployed a militarized response. While there is burgeoning scholarship focusing on informal migrant camps in the Calais area, there has been little analysis of state responses to irregular Channel crossings. This article begins to address this gap, situating contemporary British responses to irregular Channel crossers within the context of colonial histories and maritime legacies. We focus particularly on the enduring appeal of “the offshore” as a place where undesirable racialized populations can be placed. Our aim is to offer a historicized perspective on this phenomenon which seeks to respond to calls to embed colonial histories in analyses of the present

Small boats, big contracts: extracting value from the UK's post‐Brexit asylum ‘crisis’

This article discusses post-Brexit asylum policy in the UK. On the surface, Brexit had little impact on asylum, but Brexit, combined with the new phenomenon of small boat Channel crossings, created the conditions for a new and extreme UK policy agenda. It explains how politicians have sought to deliver border sovereignty performatively after Brexit by introducing extreme measures, ostensibly—though not practically—to stop small boat Channel crossings, and how private actors have sought to profit from people seeking asylum within this policy regime. These interrelated political and financial interests are pursued irrespective of the fact that none of the policies being advanced will ‘stop the boats’

Moral economy from above and below: contesting contraction of migrant rights in austerity Britain

In 2010, Britain’s newly elected Coalition government ushered in a ‘moral mission’ of welfare reform. This paper considers its extension to the management of non-EEA migration and asylum, viewed here in the context of Fassin’s conception of moral economy and related debate. The paper argues that the ensuing policy regime can be analysed as a moral economy ‘from above’, in terms of its underlying objectives and rationale, which is then challenged and contested ‘from below’ through the intervention of civic activists. Such contestation is framed in terms of a three-pronged critique of the welfare/migration complex, based on rationality, legality and morality, and examined in three key areas of welfare-related policy change – family life, maintenance provision for asylum seekers, and support for those without status. Policy in each area is considered alongside corresponding critique and with summary comment on key points for moral economy analysis. A fourth section sets these developments in the context of an emergent system of total control, and the conclusion reflects on broader implications for our understanding and usage of the notion of moral economy

Music-making and forced migrants’ affective practices of diasporic belonging

Amid the normalisation of xenophobic narratives surrounding migration, and an overarching ‘hostile environment’ regulating asylum in Britain, this paper explores music-making as a unique lens to highlight the negotiation of belonging, uncertainty and marginality amongst a group of fifty forced migrants in Bristol. Through a focus addressing the nexus between power, affect and the everyday, this paper discusses how the dehumanising processes that characterise the British asylum regime operate in and through the spaces, bodies and objects constituting its ‘ordinary’ materiality. Concurrently, this paper addresses how the entanglement of bodies, ‘things’ and sounds emerging from the co-creation of weekly music groups enabled the group participants to negotiate pleasure, expression and sociality in a context of enforced marginality and uncertainty. Consequently, this paper discusses the music-making sessions as affective practices of diasporic belonging: relationalities arising from multiple forms of displacement that enabled momentary, but productive domains of sociability, co-presence and solidarity beyond ethnic, national, gendered and religious lines. The conclusions consider the contributions of theoretical approaches enabling researchers (and potentially advocates and community organisers) to recognise the stakes and significance of forced migrants’ (in)visible forms of sociality that take place beside the discursive and institutional frames of State and humanitarian interventions