Doctoral Dissertation Research: Standardizing Persecution Narratives in US Asylum Adjudications

博士论文研究：标准化美国庇护裁决中的迫害叙述

• 批准号: 1702602
• 负责人: Ann Orloff
• 金额: $ 1.17万
• 依托单位: Northwestern University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2017
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2017-05-01 至 2019-07-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1702602&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Doctoral; Dissertation; Research; Standardizing; Persecution

Doctoral Dissertation Abstract for NSF: Standardizing Persecution Narratives in US Asylum AdjudicationsAsylum constitutes a core arena for negotiating tensions between the national interests of states and the humanitarian rights of the individuals seeking their protection. The dissertation project examines the ways in which these tensions are negotiated by investigating empirically a significant reconfiguration in the meaning and processing of asylum claims in the United States. The contribution of this study is twofold. First, the project will expand knowledge about the asylum adjudication process. Due to limitations of data, previous studies have yielded a somewhat misleading account of asylum adjudications as inherently inconsistent. In contrast, analyzing newly available data, this research project argues that there is considerable uniformity in how officers frame claims. Applicants are required by the state to align their narratives with the standardized "knowledge" of conflict formed about their country. Deviations from these standardized knowledge often meet resistance. This suggests that a key interpretative stage of asylum adjudications generates heretofore unexpected uniformity and consistency, with direct policy implications for asylum reform. Second, this project addresses theoretical debates concerning the gap between formal commitments to, and compliance with, humanitarianism. Previous studies have approached this question by focusing on the interrelations between humanitarianism and nationalism. This research goes beyond the nationalism-humanitarianism binary and reveals how humanitarianism functions are the organizing principle of an administrative adjudicatory regime. It suggests that the primary challenges of adhering to humanitarian principles in the context of asylum are not only national interests. Rather, it is the diversity of information inherent to the individuation of the adjudication process, which leads asylum officers to rely on default generalizations, obscuring the individual narratives they were supposed to prioritize. The research project addresses current gaps in asylum literature concerning a core stage of the asylum decision-making process, and sets to determine the impact of sheer information overload and ambiguous law, on organizational decision-making, by providing the first mixed method based account of how adjudicators translate individual testimonies of harm into the standardized rubrics of persecution recognized under law. Specifically, it analyzes new and comprehensive data, obtained by filing a Freedom of Information request from the Department of Homeland Security. The data consist of over one million cases adjudicated by the US asylum office between fiscal years 1995 and 2015. This is the first dataset to include such comprehensive information on officers' decisions about applicants' bases of claims. Quantitative analysis of this data is supplemented with participant observations at immigration firms and interviews with asylum officers and immigration attorneys. The findings of this study will shed new light on the workings of the asylum office, one of the largest adjudication systems in the country, and contribute to general sociological understandings of processes of classification and categorization in a constantly changing information environment.

美国国家科学基金会的博士论文摘要：美国庇护裁决中的迫害叙述标准化庇护构成了国家利益和寻求保护的个人的人道主义权利之间的紧张关系谈判的核心竞技场。该论文项目探讨了这些紧张局势的谈判方式，通过实证调查在美国的庇护申请的意义和处理的重大重新配置。这项研究的贡献是双重的。首先，该项目将扩大有关庇护裁决程序的知识。由于数据的限制，以前的研究得出了一种有点误导的说法，认为庇护裁决本身就不一致。相比之下，分析新获得的数据，本研究项目认为，有相当大的一致性，在如何官员框架索赔。国家要求申请人将他们的叙述与关于他们国家的冲突的标准化“知识”保持一致。偏离这些标准化的知识往往会遇到阻力。这表明，庇护裁决的一个关键解释阶段产生了迄今为止意想不到的一致性和连贯性，对庇护改革产生了直接的政策影响。第二，本项目涉及关于对人道主义的正式承诺与遵守之间的差距的理论辩论。以往的研究都是从人道主义和民族主义的相互关系来探讨这一问题的。本研究超越了民族主义与人道主义的二元对立，揭示了人道主义功能如何成为行政审判制度的组织原则。它表明，在庇护方面坚持人道主义原则的主要挑战不仅仅是国家利益。相反，这是裁决过程个性化所固有的信息多样性，导致庇护官员依赖默认的概括，掩盖了他们应该优先考虑的个人陈述。该研究项目解决了目前庇护文献中关于庇护决策过程的核心阶段的空白，并着手确定纯粹的信息过载和模糊的法律对组织决策的影响，方法是提供第一个基于混合方法的解释，说明裁决者如何将个人的伤害证词转化为法律承认的标准化迫害标题。具体而言，它分析了通过向国土安全部提交信息自由请求而获得的新的全面数据。这些数据包括美国庇护办公室在1995年至2015年财政年度期间裁定的100多万起案件。这是第一个包含有关官员对申请人索赔依据的决定的全面信息的数据集。对这些数据的定量分析得到了移民事务所参与者的观察以及与庇护官员和移民律师的访谈的补充。这项研究的结果将揭示新的光庇护办公室的运作，在该国最大的裁决系统之一，并有助于一般的社会学理解的分类和分类过程中不断变化的信息环境。