Necropolitics and the Slow Violence of the Everyday: Asylum Seeker Welfare in the Postcolonial Present

Abstract

This article responds to dual calls for researching and theorising everyday social phenomena in postcolonial studies on the one hand, and serious engagement with the postcolonial within the discipline of sociology on the other. It focuses on the everyday lives of asylum seekers living on asylum seeker welfare support in the UK. Asylum seekers offer a good case study for exploring the postcolonial everyday because they live in poverty and consequently experience daily harms at the hands of the state, despite the UK fulfilling its obligations to them under human rights law. The article proposes a conceptual framework drawing together sociologies of the everyday, necropolitics and slow violence in tracing how hierarchical conceptions of human worth impact on the everyday.

Minimum rights policies targeting people seeking protection in Denmark and Sweden

“…Residents' articulations correspond well with Mbembe's (2003) depiction of the necropolitical condition that exposes certain groups to slow suffering, enforced through neglect and deprivation (Davies et al, 2017;Mayblin et al, 2019). However, when I discussed the deportation centres with state officials and NGO representatives in Denmark, they maintained that 'it could be worse'.…”

“…The authors thus draw attention to how the political production of such abject 'necropolitical' (Mbembe, 2003, p. 21) conditions, where populations are 'kept alive, but in a state of injury', is ultimately rendered possible through the racialized identity of the Other (for example migrant). Beyond the study of Mayblin et al (2019), the analysis of minimum rights approaches to people who migrate as a form of necropolitics has informed several contemporary studies of border and migration regimes in Europe and beyond (Weber and Pickering, 2011;Davies, Isakjee and Dhesi, 2017), which have shown how these policy regimes expose racialized migrant groups to slow suffering, enforced through neglect and deprivation.…”

“…Hence, the subordinate inclusion and infliction of structural violence onto unwanted others is one of the ways in which the welfare state (re)constructs itself and consolidates its borders (Aas, 2013;Barker, 2017). Nevertheless, enforcing policies that inflict slow violence (Mayblin et al, 2019) onto those 'excepted' (Khosravi, 2010) from social, political, and legal membership causes dilemmas for the agents of enforcement within border-oriented welfare bureaucracies. These dilemmas, and the ways in which border bureaucrats make sense of and address them, are explored in the remainder of this chapter.…”

“…As Elmira notes, the regulations that had the most tangible effects on people's lives included the obstacles to family life, the deprivation of autonomy, and everyday degradation in the camps. These stories rarely made the headlines but could be understood as expressions of the indirect or 'slow violence' (Mayblin et al, 2019) of the deterrence regime. Similar to Sweden, not all officials in Denmark were comfortable with imposing this regime.…”

“…In line with findings from research on similar policy measures in other countries, including Germany (Ellermann, 2010), the Netherlands (Kalir and van Schendel, 2017) and Norway (Valenta and Thorshaug, 2011;Johansen, 2013), the minimum rights approaches used in Denmark and Sweden have had counterproductive effects on deportation rates. Yet they have also allowed governments to tacitly ignore the 'slow violence' of destitution, illegalization and degradation that is a direct effect of the deterrence policies (see Canning, 2018;Mayblin et al, 2019). The policies have further enabled state authorities to tacitly ignore (Kalir and van Schendel, 2017) those unwanted on their territory and push the responsibility for their basic social rights either onto civil society actors, or on other European states.…”