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

暴力通常被认为是一种壮观的、可见的行为（Galtung 1969）。该项目遵循暴力批判学者的观点，认为我们必须认真对待平凡的、日常的、经常是看不见的暴力行为（Amoore and de Goede 2008; Arendt 1970; Nordstrom 2004）。特别是，这个项目探讨了官僚主义是如何作为一种强大的暴力技术，以逃避批评和罪责的方式微妙地影响寻求庇护者的生活的。借鉴我的博士研究，这个项目考察了构成英国庇护制度的关键官僚机构和做法。尽管对难民和庇护研究有大量的批判性学术研究，但对英国庇护经历的官僚程序的关注相对较少；然而，官僚主义充斥着那些申请庇护者的生活。该项目具体审查了提出庇护申请所需的官僚做法，包括定期向内政部报告中心报告的强制性要求。大约9万名移民，包括正在等待庇护申请决定的寻求庇护者，被要求定期（每周或每两周）向英国13个内政部报告中心之一报告。由于许多这些报告中心地处偏远，往往位于远离市中心难以进入的地点，寻求庇护者被迫多次进行艰苦的旅行，以遵守移民保释条件，往往连续数年。此外，尽管这是一项行政程序，但报告的另一个令人不安的方面是，内政部利用这些网站来瞄准潜在的被驱逐者。换句话说，在每次任命时，个人都有可能成为拘留和驱逐的目标，往往是随机的；然而，移民保释金和收入支持都是以定期参加报告预约为条件的。在我的博士论文中，我认为，这些网站和运作看似平凡和行政的特点，掩盖了寻求庇护者通过它们暴露于多种暴力模式的方式。从故意引导寻求庇护者走向贫困的国家强制官僚策略，到威胁和强制拘留和驱逐他们的结构性动态，内政部追求的是使“不受欢迎的”移民无法生存的政治议程。通过探究内政部报告的特定时空特征与贫困之间的相似之处——许多人寻求庇护的经历中固有的——我描绘了暴力是如何通过微妙的、冗长的、往往是隐藏的方式在报告中起作用的，并使个人更容易被拘留和驱逐。通过关注寻求庇护的官僚主义特征和地点，特别是内政部报告的地点和实践，该项目探讨了如何改变我们分析暴力的镜头，揭示了在英国申请庇护的生活经历。它还探讨了这些官僚遭遇如何经常通过暴力的主导概念保持倾斜，以及它是如何在日常中管理和体验的。该项目还探索了在这些空间中可能存在的抵抗模式。在批判性地审视暴力本身的概念时，我的作品提供了一种理解官僚主义的新方法，官僚主义与主权国家政治的基本逻辑以及强加和隐藏暴力的当代手段密不可分。这个项目的目的是巩固和提高我的博士研究的影响，通过提供三个关键产出：学术出版物，一个项目网站和一个启动活动。

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.