Asylum Matters

This open access book examines everyday practices in an asylum administration. Asylum decisions are often criticised as being ‘subjective’ or ‘arbitrary’. Asylum Matters turns this claim on its head. Through the ethnographic study of asylum decision-making in the Swiss Secretariat for Migration, the book shows how regularities in administrative practice and ‘socialised subjectivity’ are produced. It argues that asylum caseworkers acquire an institutional habitus through their socialisation on the job, making them ‘carriers’ of routine practices. The different chapters of the book deal with what it means to methodologically study administrative practice: with how asylum proceedings work in Switzerland and with the role different types of knowledge play in overcoming the uncertainties inherent in refugee status and credibility determination. It sheds light on organisational socialisation processes and on the professional norms and values at the heart of administrative work. By doing so, it shows how disbelief becomes normalised in the office. This book speaks to legal scholars, sociologists, anthropologists, human geographers and political scientists interested in bureaucracy, asylum law, migration studies and socio-legal studies, and to NGOs working in the field of asylum

Über die Deterritorialisierung von Recht: Rezension zu "Wie uns das Recht der Natur näher bringt" von Sacha Bourgeois-Gironde

Sacha Bourgeois-Gironde: Wie uns das Recht der Natur näher bringt. Fröhliche Wissenschaft, Bd. 222. Berlin: Matthes & Seitz 2023. ISBN 978-3-751-80568-

Asylum Matters: On the Front Line of Administrative Decision-Making

This open access book examines everyday practices in an asylum administration. Asylum decisions are often criticised as being ‘subjective’ or ‘arbitrary’. Asylum Matters turns this claim on its head. Through the ethnographic study of asylum decision-making in the Swiss Secretariat for Migration, the book shows how regularities in administrative practice and ‘socialised subjectivity’ are produced. It argues that asylum caseworkers acquire an institutional habitus through their socialisation on the job, making them ‘carriers’ of routine practices. The different chapters of the book deal with what it means to methodologically study administrative practice: with how asylum proceedings work in Switzerland and with the role different types of knowledge play in overcoming the uncertainties inherent in refugee status and credibility determination. It sheds light on organisational socialisation processes and on the professional norms and values at the heart of administrative work. By doing so, it shows how disbelief becomes normalised in the office. This book speaks to legal scholars, sociologists, anthropologists, human geographers and political scientists interested in bureaucracy, asylum law, migration studies and socio-legal studies, and to NGOs working in the field of asylum

The Responsibility to Prevent Future Harm: Anti-Mining Struggles, the State, and Constitutional Lawsuits in Ecuador

Through the example of legal resistance to mining in Ecuador, this article explores the shift towards suing states rather than corporations. Key to ongoing resistance struggles is the allocation of preventive responsibility to ‘the state’ through the filing of constitutional lawsuits. I show how both the shift from the ‘politics of space’ to a ‘politics of time’ and a shift in the imaginary of the state contribute to claims of responsibility being increasingly directed at states. The article inquires into the effects of the temporal reversal from assessing past harm (and ruling retrospectively) to assessing the likelihood of future scenarios in order to prevent future harm. Finally, I address the limits of such allocation of responsibility, showing that while constitutional lawsuits are political attempts to challenge the government's economic programme and disrupt the logic of global capitalism, many powerful policy-shaping actors remain beyond the law's reach

Regular Matters: Credibility Determination and the Institutional Habitus in a Swiss Asylum Office

This article seeks to understand a common and regular feature of asylum decision-making, namely, that the majority of asylum claims are rejected, mostly on the basis of non-credibility. It draws on a bottom-up, qualitative study of an administration in which asylum decision-making takes place: the Swiss Secretariat for Migration. By adopting a practice-theoretical approach to administrative work, it advocates paying attention to caseworkers’ routinised, self-evident and largely unquestioned behaviours, not only in terms of what they do, but also of what they think, feel and know. Building on Bourdieu, it introduces the concept of institutional habitus, which refers to the dispositions caseworkers develop on the job. On the basis of a specific decision-making practice termed ‘digging deep’, the article shows how these dispositions are structured and how, through the practices institutional habitus generates, these ‘structuring structures’ are continuously reaffirmed, leading to the relatively stable outcomes of administrative decision-making that can be observed from the outside. The article argues against the assumption that regularities of administrative work should be understood as the outcome of strict rule-following, top-down orders and political instrumentalism. At the same time, it challenges the individualist quality sometimes ascribed to discretionary practices in street-level bureaucracy literature and in critiques of credibility assessment practices in asylum adjudication