Sovereign Power, Abject Spaces and Resistance: Contending Accounts of Asylum

Abstract

Thus far this book has told the story of an exclusionary politics of asylum that becomes caught in a self-fulfilling cycle; a cycle in which asylum seekers are interdicted and punished on the ‘grounds’ of their ‘threatening culpability’. Thus, we have seen how a discourse in which asylum is constructed as a ‘threat’ or a ‘problem’ has emerged at both the domestic and the European levels (Chapter 3), and we have seen how this criminalising and securitising discourse has become increasingly dominant across the mainstream political spectrum (Chapter 4). Indeed, we have seen how this discourse is also extended at a more diffuse technical level, thus entailing a range of restrictive policies and deterrent technologies that often produce or aggravate the very policy ‘problems’ and societal ‘threats’ that they are designed to resolve (Chapters 5 and 6). In this respect, the analysis has entailed a two-way consideration both of the way in which the logic of selective opposition is embedded in the technical practices of professionals who work across the broad field of migration control and also of the way in which such a logic is embedded in political and popular debate. In so doing, it has shown how punitive and interdictive controls consolidate the exclusionary narratives that legitimise such technologies in the first place. The analysis might thus be read as showing how asylum seekers have become the victims of an exclusionary discourse that becomes caught in a self-fulfilling cycle, the effects of which are that the institution of asylum becomes practically eroded (Chapter 5) while the reception of asylum seekers becomes an increasingly hostile and exploitative affair (Chapter 6).