Intensities of the State : An ethnography of intimacy and suspicion in Dutch asylum procedures

This anthropological dissertation investigates how state power mobilizes different bodies, those of immigration officials and asylum lawyers, in order to transform other bodies, those of asylum applicants, into official documents that get to ground ‘objective’ decisions over suffering, ‘deservingness’ and in- or exclusion. Based on an extensive ethnography, which was conducted between 2014 and 2017, the dissertation takes a reader along into a routinized and contingent time-pressured asylum application process. Within this process, conceptualized as an itinerary, different professionals engage... Mehr ...