Asylum Matters

On the Front Line of Administrative Decision-Making

Laura Affolter

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9783030615116
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030615123
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Civil Rights in Law
• Index: Law

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Shaping Administrative Practice: The Institutional Habitus
• 2. Studying Everyday Practice(s) in the SEM
• 3. Asylum Decision-Making in Switzerland
• 4. Knowledge as Practice: Producing Decisional Certainty
• 5. Getting in Line with the Office
• 6. The Good Decision-Maker or Protecting the System
• 7. The Normalisation of Disbelief
• Back Matter