To fail an asylum seeker: Time, space and legal events

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Main author: Fisher, Dan
Other authors: Gill, Nick
Paszkiewicz, Natalia
Format: Journal Article           
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id eprints-41474
recordtype eprints
institution SOAS, University of London
collection SOAS Research Online
language English
language_search English
description Legal geographers have recently highlighted the importance of attending to the interaction of time and space to understand law and its enactment. We build on these efforts to examine the spatiotemporal influences over the processes by which asylum claim determination procedures in Western industrialised countries seek to reconstruct past events for the purposes of deciding refugee claims. Two ‘common-sense’ beliefs underpin this reconstruction: that the occurrences leading to a fear of persecution can be isolated and that the veracity of an asylum claim is objectively independent from the process of uncovering it. We critically interrogate these assumptions by conceptualising the fears of people seeking asylum as Deleuzian ‘events’. Basing our argument on 41 interviews with people who have previously claimed asylum in the United Kingdom and firsthand accounts of asylum appeals, we explore the folding together of asylum ‘truths’ and the spatiotemporal processes by which they are arrived at, arguing that refused asylum claims are not simply detected by the process – they are produced by it.
format Journal Article
author Fisher, Dan
author_facet Fisher, Dan
Gill, Nick
Paszkiewicz, Natalia
authorStr Fisher, Dan
author_letter Fisher, Dan
author2 Gill, Nick
Paszkiewicz, Natalia
author2Str Gill, Nick
Paszkiewicz, Natalia
title To fail an asylum seeker: Time, space and legal events
publisher Sage
publishDate 2022
url https://eprints.soas.ac.uk/41474/

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