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

Abstract

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 ‘truth’ 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 ‘events’ (Deleuze, 2004). Basing our argument on first-hand accounts of asylum interviews and asylum appeals derived from 41 interviews with former asylum seekers conducted in 2014 and 2015, we explore the folding together of asylum ‘truths’ and the spatiotemporal processes by which they are arrived at, arguing that refused asylum seekers are not simply detected by the process – they are produced by it.