Reimagining Violence: Bureaucracy, destitution and imminent force in the UK asylum system

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Often it is assumed that violence constitutes a spectacular, visible act (Galtung 1969). Following critical scholars of violence, this project instead argues that we must take seriously the mundane, daily and often invisible acts of violence (Amoore and de Goede 2008; Arendt 1970; Nordstrom 2004). In particular, this project explores how bureaucracy functions as a powerfully violent technology that bears down subtly on asylum-seekers' lives often in ways that evade critique, and indeed culpability.Drawing on my doctoral research, this project examines the key bureaucratic sites and practices which constitute the UK asylum system. Despite a significant body of critical scholarship devoted to refugee and asylum studies, relatively little attention has been paid to the bureaucratic processes which characterise the asylum experience in Britain; yet bureaucracy saturates the lives of those applying for asylum. This project specifically examines the bureaucratic practices required in making an asylum claim including the mandatory requirement of regularly reporting to a Home Office reporting centre. Approximately 90,000 migrants, including asylum seekers who are awaiting a decision on their asylum claim, are required to report at regular (weekly or biweekly) intervals to one of 13 Home Office reporting centres across the UK. Due to the remoteness of many of these reporting centres, often located in difficult to access locations far from city centres, enforces asylum seekers to repeatedly engage in arduous journeys in order to comply with the terms of immigration bail, often for years on end. As well, despite its framing as an administrative procedure, another troubling aspect of reporting is the Home Office utilise these sites for targeting potential deportees. In other words, at every appointment individuals are at risk of being, often randomly, targeted for detainment and removal; and yet both immigration bail and income support are conditioned on regularly attending reporting appointments.In my PhD I argued that the seemingly mundane and administrative character of these sites and operations, conceals the ways in which asylum seekers become exposed to multiple modes of violence through them. From the state-enforced bureaucratic tactics which deliberately steer asylum seekers towards destitution, to the structural dynamics that threaten and enforce their detainment and removal, the Home Office pursues a political agenda for making life unliveable for 'unwanted' migrants. By interrogating the parallels between Home Office reporting's specific spatiotemporal features and destitution - inhered within many people's experience of seeking asylum - I map how violence operates through reporting in subtle, drawn out and often concealed ways, and makes individuals successively more vulnerable to detainment and removal. By focusing on the bureaucratic features and sites of seeking asylum, and specifically the site and practice of Home Office reporting, this project explores what altering the lens through which we analyse violence reveals about the lived experience of claiming asylum in the UK. It also explores how these bureaucratic encounters often remain oblique through the dominant conceptions of violence and how it is both administered and experienced in the everyday. The project also explores what modes of resistance are possible within these spaces. In critically examining the notion of violence itself, my work offers a novel approach to understanding bureaucracy, as inextricably tethered to the foundational logics of sovereign state politics and the contemporary means through which violence is both imposed and concealed. The aims of this project are to consolidate and to enhance the impact of my doctoral research, through the delivery of three key outputs: academic publications, a project website and a launch event.