Asylum, Borders, and the Politics of Violence: From Suspicion to Cruelty

Abstract

Critical scholarship in international relations, border, and migration studies has analyzed the cultures of suspicion that underpin border practices and have increasingly reshaped the politics of asylum globally. They have highlighted either the generalization of suspicion through the securitization of asylum or racialized and gendered continuities of colonial violence. We propose to understand the entanglements of continuity and discontinuity in the politics of asylum through “technologies of cruelty.” To conceptualize technologies of cruelty, we draw on Etienne Balibar's “topographies of cruelty” and Rita Laura Segato's “pedagogies of cruelty.” Empirically, the article argues that technologies of cruelty minimize, erase, undo, splinter, and devalue asylum seekers’ claims for protection in ways that objectify and dehumanize them. Methodologically, the argument is developed through an analysis of a corpus of asylum appeal decisions in the United Kingdom. Asylum appeals are a particularly important archive for the diagnosis of cruelty internationally, as they are both inscriptions of dominant knowledge and contestations over knowledge and claims to protection. They also allow us to trace how the politics of asylum is situated within global topographies of cruelty, shaped by technologies of cruelty and the deactivation of empathy.

Los estudios críticos sobre relaciones internacionales, fronteras y migraciones han analizado las culturas de la sospecha que sustentan las prácticas fronterizas y que han redefinido progresivamente la política de asilo a nivel mundial. Han destacado la generalización de la sospecha a través de la segurización del asilo o la continuidad racializada y de género de la violencia colonial. Proponemos entender los enredos de la continuidad y discontinuidad en la política de asilo a través de las “tecnologías de la crueldad.” A fin de conceptualizar las tecnologías de la crueldad, nos basamos en las “topografías de la crueldad” de Etienne Balibar y en las “pedagogías de la crueldad” de Rita Laura Segato. Desde el punto de vista empírico, el artículo sostiene que las tecnologías de la crueldad minimizan, borran, deshacen, escinden y devalúan las solicitudes de protección de quienes piden asilo de maneras que los cosifican y deshumanizan. Metodológicamente, el argumento se desarrolla mediante el análisis de un corpus de decisiones de apelación de asilo en el Reino Unido. Las apelaciones de asilo son un recurso particularmente importante para detectar la crueldad a nivel internacional, ya que son constancias del conocimiento dominante e impugnaciones en torno al conocimiento y las solicitudes de protección. También nos permiten entender cómo la política de asilo se sitúa dentro de la topografía global de la crueldad, configurada por las tecnologías de la crueldad y la desactivación de la empatía.

En tant que recherches critiques en relations internationales, les études des frontières et de la migration ont analysé les cultures de la suspicion qui sous-tendent les pratiques frontalières et ont de plus en plus remodelé les politiques d'asile du monde entier. Elles ont mis en évidence soit la généralisation de la suspicion par le biais de la sécuritisation de l'asile, soit des continuités racialisées et genrées de la violence coloniale. Nous proposons de comprendre les enchevêtrements de la continuité et de la discontinuité des politiques d'asile en nous basant sur les « technologies de la cruauté ». Pour conceptualiser les technologies de la cruauté, nous nous appuyons sur les « topographies de la cruauté » d’Étienne Balibar et sur les « pédagogies de la cruauté » de Rita Laura Segato. Sur le plan empirique, cet article soutient que les technologies de la cruauté minimisent, éliminent, annulent, morcellent et dévaluent les demandes de protection des demandeurs d'asile de manières qui les traitent comme des objets et les déshumanisent. D'un point de vue méthodologique, l'argument est développé par le biais d'une analyse d'un corpus de décisions de recours en matière d'asile rendues au Royaume-Uni. Les recours en matière d'asile constituent une archive particulièrement importante pour le diagnostic de la cruauté au niveau international, car ils sont à la fois des inscriptions des connaissances dominantes et des contestations des connaissances et des demandes de protection. Ils nous permettent également de retracer la manière dont la politique d'asile s'inscrit dans les topographies mondiales de la cruauté, qui sont façonnées par les technologies de la cruauté et la désactivation de l'empathie.

Introduction

The appellant has given vague evidence that is lacking in detail, which he could reasonably be expected to have provided regarding how his journey out of Syria to Europe has been funded, how he has supported himself on that journey, and how his family have supported themselves since being displaced from their home village. […] I would have expected him to have been able to provide evidence that was detailed and coherent in answer to clear and open questions that were put to him (PA/09818/2019, §2).

This quote from a First-tier Tribunal (FtT) decision in an asylum appeal in the United Kingdom concerns the case of an Iraqi asylum seeker whose application for asylum is rejected as his account is deemed to lack credibility. In the appeal before the Upper Tribunal, it emerges that the details that the judge deemed absent had been provided by the applicant:

He had given the date of his departure details of his journey by foot and by car, the countries through which he travelled and the funding arrangements provided by his father and maternal uncle. The interviewer had asked why the appellant had failed to mention travelling to France and the appellant replied that he had ‘forgotten' [Q134]. He went on to explain how he had remained in the so-called ‘Jungle' which I understand is in Calais (PA/09818/2019, §3).

The politics of asylum relies on and enacts epistemic distinctions between “real” refugees who are worthy of protection and migrants deemed to be “bogus” refugees whose claims are to be rejected.¹ Asylum determination is suffused with the language of evidence, credibility, consistency, and plausibility. Forgetting a detail of a journey, mis-remembering the date of entering a country, not recording exact trajectories, or simply ambiguous recollections draw the boundary between a refugee and a rejected asylum seeker.

This obsession with consistency, exact detail, objectivity, and photographic memory is hardly surprising to scholars working on borders, migration, and asylum (e.g., Noll 2005; Gyulai et al. 2013; Magalhães 2016). As Bridget Haas and Amy Schuman argue, it is symptomatic of a transformation of asylum politics by the “rise of an ethos or culture of suspicion as a defining characteristic of asylum regimes” (Haas and Shuman 2019, 3). Suspicion transforms narratives, documentation, and embodied encounters between refugees and case workers, interpreters, social workers, psychologists, and judges. Alongside suspicion, international relations (IR) scholars have examined how the politics of asylum has been transformed by securitization (Huysmans 2006; Squire 2009). Another body of scholarship has highlighted continuities of colonial violence and racism (e.g., Mayblin 2017; Davies and Isakjee 2019).

This article proposes to attend to the imbrication of continuities and discontinuities in asylum politics by analyzing how cruelty has become a technology of governing asylum seekers and their claims. To this purpose, we draw on Étienne Balibar's conceptualization of “topographies of cruelty” (Balibar 2015) and Rita Laura Segato's “pedagogies of cruelty” (Segato 2016b). Political philosopher Balibar has conceptualized cruelty as encompassing “those forms of extreme violence, either intentional or systemic, physical or moral,” which appear to be “worse than death” (Balibar 2001). Feminist anthropologist Segato has formulated “pedagogies of cruelty,” particularly through her analysis of feminicide in Latin America and patriarchal capitalism. Her work helps us understand how technologies of cruelty do not just “turn life into objects” but how they “deactivate our channels of empathy” (Segato 2016a, 2016b) and can account for both the continuities of patriarchal capitalism and the intensification of violence today. Balibar's topographies of cruelty make it possible to extend cruelty beyond its physical forms to encompass institutional and epistemic cruelty.

Our coinage of “technologies of cruelty” indicates that cruelty is not an excess, the “other” of power, but it has become a technology of governing asylum. Methodologically, we draw on a selection of asylum appeal decisions by the Upper Tribunal Immigration and Asylum Chamber (UTIAC) in the United Kingdom. We argue that technologies of cruelty minimize, erase, undo, splinter, and devalue asylum seekers’ claims for protection in ways that objectify and dehumanize them.

To develop this argument, we proceed in four steps. First, we analyze different diagnoses of transformation in the governance of asylum as securitization and suspicion or violence and cruelty. Second, we conceptualize cruelty drawing on the joint reading of Balibar and Segato. Third, we discuss the paper's methodology of reading asylum appeals to finally unpack how cruelty has become a technology of governing asylum.

Governing asylum: suspicion, security, violence

Scholarship on asylum across IR, anthropology, law, and human geography has shown that asylum governance has been increasingly transformed from an orientation to human rights and protection toward suspicion and securitization. Another strand of interdisciplinary scholarship has seen the politics of asylum as embodying colonial legacies and their racialized violence rather than having been recently securitized. We discuss some of the main contributions in these different strands of critical literature to show how security and violence have been mobilized as separate analytical concepts. In order to hold together key concerns in these literatures, we propose to understand the transformation of asylum from “technologies of suspicion” to “technologies of cruelty.”

Much of the literature diagnosing the transformation of asylum politics has focused on the role of suspicion. Suspicion is deeply entangled with bureaucratic practices of asylum determination so that the whole asylum process is underpinned by a “meta-message of disbelief and denial” (Jubany 2017, 6). Anthropologist Didier Fassin (2013) has argued that the mistrust of refugee narratives and search for objectivity have led to the production of “truth from the body,” a truth that emerges through expert medical and psychiatric certificates. In response to his analysis, Haas has added that psychiatric “truth from the body” does not necessarily lead to more eligibility, because “the perceived subjective nature of psychological evaluations and psychiatric diagnoses offer as evidence, inconsistencies in asylum seekers’ interviews or hearings […] seemed to trump psychiatric evidence” (Haas 2019, 121). Indeed, generalized suspicion underpins all knowledge production and questions of credibility in the asylum process. As Lisa Marie Borrelli has recently argued, suspicion infuses all interactions that border, police, and other street-level bureaucrats have with migrants. Suspicion is understood here as a “prevailing feeling,” which shapes ideas about “deserving migrants” (Borrelli 2020, 10).

The relation between knowledge and suspicion is often represented as one in which suspicion distorts and taints the knowledge produced about and by migrants. It does so in the wider social and political context of securitization and criminalization. These diagnoses of the generalization and normalization of suspicion are underpinned by an understanding of the securitization and criminalization of migration and asylum as key factors of transformation over the past couple of decades (Huysmans 2006; Squire 2009; Bosworth and Turnbull 2017). IR scholars have unpacked the processes of constructing others as dangerous or “bogus” asylum seekers, of weaving an (in)security continuum of terrorism, (organized) crime, and migration. They have also shown how these threat constructions are simultaneously masculinist and racializing (Gray and Franck 2019). Legal scholars Bohmer and Shuman highlight that “[a]sylum law […] has turned into a discourse about protecting the receiving country from potentially dangerous migrants” (Bohmer and Shuman 2017, 6). According to them, this discourse has led to a “culture of suspicion” that turns asylum seekers from victims of atrocities into the accused. The culture of suspicion does not simply reproduce discourses of threat, but it has given rise to “routinised and largely unthinking actions, particularly in the ways in which asylum interviews are carried out,” as decision-makers are trained to be suspicious of asylum seekers (Affolter 2021, 20).

Anthropologist Roberto Beneduce has pushed the question of suspicion further by arguing that the asylum process renders indiscernible the relation between truth and falsehood (Beneduce 2015, 562). He situates his analysis in the continuity of the colonial condition, where suspicion toward the colonized framed all social interactions, while attending to migrant agency and tactics in conditions of domination. Indeed, lying, faking, inventing, dissimulating, and counterfeiting have long been analyzed as “tactics” of the dominated, and they can be expressive of migrant agency against a system that itself lies and abuses (see, e.g., Scheel 2019). These analyses diagnose the power relations that become manifest through the asylum process, the importance of credibility assessment, and the dispossession of asylum seekers of knowledge and worth. Martina Tazzioli (2019) has argued that we need to understand these processes of forced verbalization as “knowledge extraction.” Indeed, asylum seekers are subjected to multiple extractive processes—from the extraction of data, knowledge, and even few possessions they might have.

Another strand of literature that has situated asylum politics in the continuity of colonial legacies has centered on the concept and the constitutive role of violence rather than securitization and suspicion. Since the 2015 “refugee crisis” in Europe, numerous accounts of violence have focused on incarceration and the role of carceral capitalism in the reproduction of violence. Violence is often understood here as physical and connected with particular locations on the margins of democratic politics or with the undoing of democratic politics under increasingly right-wing governments. Rather than the dominant rendition of violence being in the places that asylum seekers flee, they find violence in the places where they arrive (Jones 2016; Davies et al. 2017; Isakjee et al. 2020). This is not extra-state or extreme right violence, but it is the violence of carcerality, dehumanization, and precarization. This scholarship pays close attention to the “enduring legacies of colonial violence in the present, which are constitutive of contemporary borders and the postcolonial reconfiguration of the boundaries of membership” (De Genova et al. 2021, 10). It maps the hidden or less visible forms of violence that underpin different asylum systems in Europe. Asylum is intimately entangled with both the spectacular and the more mundane governance of “violent borders” (Jones 2016). The asylum process in the United Kingdom has been entwined with different forms of violence—structural violence and everyday violence through destitution, detention, and deportation (Canning 2017); “slow violence” in relation to destitution and precarity (Mayblin 2017); or the violence of “prolonged limbo in crossing and detention” (Mountz 2020, 31).

Resonating with these diagnoses of transformation and even “death of asylum” (Mountz 2020), recent public and academic interventions have mobilized vocabularies of cruelty to signify the intensification of violence in the politics of asylum. In the United Kingdom, the plans on asylum and migration proposed by the Home Secretary Priti Patel have been labeled in the media as “cruel and unfair” (Bulman 2021). Human Rights First (2021) also describes the Trump administration's asylum record as “cruel.” When cruelty is used in public debates or the media, it is limited to particular locations, such as camps in Greece; policy changes, by the former Trump administration in the United States or the Johnson government in the United Kingdom; or private companies such as G4S. Cruelty here is rendered not just as excessive but exceptional and, therefore, temporary. As mentioned above, the mobilization of the vocabulary of “cruelty” aims to diagnose the intensification of violence and suffering underpinning the contemporary politics of asylum in Europe. Malcolm James (2019, 2472) conceptualizes Europe's approach to refugees in Greece as “racial cruelty,” where cruelty is “a form of violence that causes excessive harm or pain to another, for which the perpetrator feels no culpability.” Monish Bhatia (2020) shows how, for street-level asylum bureaucrats, suspicion, denial, and racism have amounted to a “permission to be cruel” toward asylum seekers.

The two strands of literature explored in this section can be seen as anchored in the concepts of “securitization/(in)security” and “violence,” respectively. On the one hand, securitization orients the analysis to the transformation in practices, routines, and policies through emergency and other exceptional measures (Ilgit and Klotz 2018). On the other hand, the concept of violence enables an analysis of continuities, origins, and roots of asylum policies and practices. Yet, how do we attend to both continuity and intensification? We argue that by moving away from an exceptionalist understanding of securitization, as Jef Huysmans has proposed, we can hold together analyses of (in)security and violence, of intensification and continuity.

According to Huysmans (2014), there are two modes of securitizing: exceptionalist securitizing and diffuse securitizing. If the former works through friend/enemy distinctions and extraordinary measures, the latter needs to be understood as “assembling suspicion.” Suspicion is here a “technological mode of connecting insecurities and governing social and political relations” (Huysmans 2014, 7). Suspicion is not a feeling, which can be understood as supplementing fear, but a mode of governing. As Huysmans explains in relation to border security, “Suspicion is here not in the first instance a psychological phenomenon but a mode of connecting passports, the passenger at the border desk, computer databases, the queuing travellers waiting to be checked and border guards; it is a mode of relating” (Huysmans 2014, 103–104). As a technology of governing, suspicion produces particular forms of knowledge and is entangled with power relations so that it also comes to enact democratic limits. In that sense, suspicion can shed light on the insidious transformations of asylum regimes.

We argue that a similar move needs to be made in relation to violence. In the next section, we conceptualize “technologies of cruelty” as a mode of organizing social relations in governing asylum seekers and their claims.

Conceptualizing cruelty

In this section, we propose to place Étienne Balibar's and Laura Rita Segato's conceptualizations of cruelty in conversation. Balibar and Segato have developed their conceptualizations from different perspectives and in different contexts: Balibar from a post-Marxist perspective in Europe and Segato from a feminist perspective in Latin America. However, there are many commonalities in their approaches in relation to capitalism, the state, the law as well as in bringing together philosophy and anthropology.

Balibar has returned to the concept of violence over several decades of writing about capitalism and globalization (Balibar 1994, 2001, 2015, 2020). For him, cruelty names forms of “extreme” violence. The language of “extreme” violence is indicative of a limit to or threshold of violence, when violence is qualitatively transformed into cruelty. However, it is also violence that challenges the limits that politics institutionalizes against violence. This limit, however, is not pre-given and it cannot be turned into a definition or taxonomy of violence. Hence, we need to read violence and cruelty as situated explorations of how a qualitative change is enacted. The limit or threshold that configures the distinction between violence and cruelty is a methodological orientation to the heterogeneity of practices. As Balibar (2020, 387) puts it, what counts as cruelty needs to be interpreted in relation to “patterns of situations in which human beings are deprived of the conditions under which they can individually and collectively resist, act, and handle their own life.”

This methodological orientation to the heterogeneity and ambiguity of where a threshold lies is supplemented by what we can call an ontological orientation to subjectivity. Cruelty is a limit to the resisting subject and to the representation of humanity. Cruelty, thus, names a particular undoing of subjects able to resist, defend themselves, or otherwise act against violence. Resisting violence is not only about the preservation of life but equally about “the capacity to imagine the future” (Balibar 2020, 387). Cruelty undoes the mechanisms of self-defense and destroys the possibility of political subjectivity.

The volume on Violence and Civility brings together these reflections on violence over the years. The undoing of subjectivity—through the possibility of resistance and of being human—can be approached through the analytical distinction between what Balibar calls ultra-objective and ultra-subjective cruelty: “the first kind of cruelty calls for treating masses of human beings as things or useless remnants while the second requires that individuals and groups be represented as incarnations of evil, diabolical powers that threaten the subject from within and have to be eliminated as all costs …” (Balibar 2015, 52). “Treating people like things” is the ultra-objective violence of capitalism, which creates “disposable populations”, if not limited by struggles over work conditions, rights, and democratic participation. Ultra-objective violence emerges from what Balibar calls elsewhere “the penetration of the inhuman into the human” (Balibar 2015, xviii). This heuristic “topography of cruelty” does not map separate or isolated manifestations of cruelty but it orients us to the multiple forms that cruelty can take, as it oscillates between anonymous forms that depersonalize both the cause and the object of violence and ultra-subjective forms that represent “the Other as a mortal threat operating from inside the community” (Balibar 2015, 69). Cruelty can oscillate between these forms, which at times can be indistinguishable in practice. Racism, for instance, presupposes both forms of violence and their intertwinement.

The topography of cruelty is grounded in an analysis of capitalist globalization. It is also situated temporally in the violent conflicts of the 1990s in Europe. In his later reflections on violence, Balibar adds fragmentary thoughts on other transformations of cruelty. For instance, he draws attention to “the banalization and universal extension of cruelty,” including forms of “institutional cruelty” (Balibar 2015, 20). The formulation of “institutional cruelty” is particularly relevant for contemporary politics, as it challenges the binary state/extra-state, legal/illegal, and violence/cruelty, where cruelty is associated with what goes beyond institutionalized frameworks, be those of law, state, morality, and so on. It alerts us to the fact that cruelty can be part of institutional and legal arrangements; it can become a “technology” in the sense in which technologies of power and suspicion are deployed for the purposes of governing. Cruelty does not emerge only at the limits of the law but also within the law. It is not enacted only by extra-state actors (or even actors of the second state as with Segato) but by state institutions.

Segato develops a feminist reading of patriarchal capitalism absent from Balibar's engagement with cruelty. Balibar acknowledges that the subordination of women entails “extreme violence in the indefinite repetition of certain forms of habitual domination that are, at the limit, invisible or unidentifiable as violence because they would appear to be part of the very foundations of society and culture” (Balibar 2015, 29). However, as the feminist scholar Zeynep Direk (2015) has aptly noted, this conceptualization is not put to the test [mis à l'épreuve] in his analysis. Segato's notion of “pedagogy of cruelty” is rooted in her work on gender relations and gender violence and her attempt to explain the rise and increasingly public nature of feminicides² in Latin America. Segato calls pedagogies of cruelty “all acts and practices that teach, accustom and programme people to turn life into objects” (Segato 2018, 13).

Segato is particularly interested in the banalization of cruelty. How can we account for cruelty that is not perceivable as such? What kinds of regimes of violence make this cruelty banal? In what Segato calls the “historical project of capital,” gender-based violence is closely related to capitalist economic structures, and the reduction of people to the status of commodities is linked to the precarious nature of employment and the reemergence and expansion of servile, semi-slave, and slave labor. This paradigm of exploitation is dependent upon a lack of empathy between people, which is supported by the prioritization of things over bonds. This is why Segato also calls the pedagogy of cruelty a “pedagogy of things”:

Only on detached, isolated, and weak subjects can the claim of the world of things impose itself: the lessons of things, nature as thing, the body as thing, persons as things, and the pedagogy of cruelty that continues to impose a psychopathic structure, marked by a drive that is not relational but instrumental, as the prototypical personality of our time (Segato and McGlazer 2018, 209).

Segato's analysis of cruelty to the body as thing in capitalism resonates with Balibar's reflection on the undoing of the human and political subjectivity. Yet, Segato emphasizes the central role of gender relations and patriarchy in the “pedagogy of cruelty.” She argues that masculinity is more prone to cruelty than femininity due to its historical affinity with war, estrangement, and low empathy as well as what she terms the “the mandate of masculinity” (Segato 2018, 40). The mandate of masculinity requires men to constantly display and renew their masculine “status” by “extracting a tribute” from the feminine position (Segato 2018, 41). Hence, Segato (2018) understands violence as expressive of power relations, as communication inscribed on women's bodies, rather than utilitarian.

In different ways, Segato and Balibar help us understand cruelty in the continuity of patriarchy, colonialism, and capitalism. While Segato has formulated pedagogies of cruelty, particularly through her analysis of feminicide in Latin America and patriarchal capitalism, Balibar's topographies of cruelty make it possible to extend cruelty to encompass epistemic cruelty. Segato's work helps us understand how technologies of cruelty do not just “turn life into objects,” but “deactivate our channels of empathy” (Segato 2016a, 2016b). She suggests that the repetition of these forms of violence normalizes a landscape of cruelty whereby people become desensitized: they learn not to feel, not to recognize their own suffering and that of others. For Segato, pedagogies of cruelty are both continuations and intensifications of patriarchal capitalism.

Balibar and Segato also envisage different modalities of responding to cruelty. For Balibar, this is a politics of anti-violence or civility, as opposed to either nonviolence or counterviolence. For Segato, what we need is a “counter-pedagogy of cruelty.” Such a counter-pedagogy, she proposes, should be one of capillary disobediences: “a path of infractions, of malpractices, of slipping out of order and of constant errors with which we can erode hierarchies” (Segato 2018, 62).

We supplement topographies and pedagogies of cruelty with “technologies of cruelty” to render how cruelty mediates social relations, how it is deployed to govern asylum seekers, and how it undoes subjectivity and political capacities. While Balibar (2015, 57) argues that cruelty is at the antipode of power relations conceived as reversible by Foucault, “technologies of cruelty” render the banalization of cruelty and its deployment for governing purposes. In the next section, we detail our methods of reading a selection of asylum appeal decisions to trace how technologies of cruelty are deployed in the asylum process.

Reading the politics of asylum in a legal archive

This article draws on a selection of cases from a digital archive of asylum appeals in the United Kingdom.³ The archive contains more than thirty-three thousand asylum appeal decisions by the UTIAC. Asylum appeals are a particularly interesting archive, as they reassemble practices of border control and bring together data to decide what counts as evidence and draw the boundary between qualifying claims to asylum and disqualifying ones. Appeals to the UTIAC follow in the wake of a negative decision by a Home Office case officer and a negative decision by the FtT (Immigration and Asylum Chamber). While FtT decisions are not made public, the UTIAC appeals allow us to trace the trajectories of asylum decisions. Asylum appeals are partial in that they render fragments of voices, data, and documents as selected for the purpose of reaching a decision. Rather than aiming for a complete or an exhaustive story, we take this partiality as productive of asylum governance as a site of global inscriptions of violence and cruelty.

We approach these archives as “sites of knowledge production” (Stoler 2002, 87) and “intricated technologies of rule in themselves” (Stoler 2010, 20). Following Ann Laura Stoler, we want to inquire into what kind of “technologies of rule” are dispersed and reproduced through the asylum archive. We propose to attend more specifically to “technologies of cruelty” as a mode of governing asylum and claims for international protection. “Technologies of cruelty” emerge at the intersection of knowledge production about an asylum claim and a judgment of the credibility of different subjects summoned before the courts— government officials, experts, lawyers, witnesses, and asylum seekers themselves. Technologies are deployed to govern social and political relations and are productive of subjectivities.

In approaching the asylum archive as a site where governing people's lives becomes a matter of contestation, where certain forms of knowledge are rendered unintelligible and others appear common-sensical, we also mobilize the method of “thin description.” The opposition thin/thick has been established in anthropology, and recent engagements with ethnographic methods and anthropological theory in IR have proposed “thick description” as a method for researching practices of (in)security (see McCluskey 2019). However, more recently, anthropologists have started to challenge the thick/thin hierarchy and particularly the negative connotation of “thin sensibility.” For anthropologist John L. Jackson (2013, 13), reclaiming “thin description” is a response to a “certain kind of overconfidence in anthropology, an arrogance borne of the powers of ‘thick description’.” While thick description aims to decipher the meaning of practices and behaviors, thin description is attuned to uncertainty, incompleteness, and non-knowledge in the archive.

Moreover, as Ruha Benjamin (2019, 46) has recently pointed out in the context of digital technologies and surveillance, thin description is also “a method of respecting certain kinds of boundaries.” Rather than amassing more and more data, ever more intimate details that echo endless surveillance, “thin description” can be a method of “discretion, pushing back against the all-knowing, extractive, monopolizing practices of coded inequality” (Benjamin 2019, 46). We use “thin description” methodologically to combine discretion and non-intrusiveness with the incompleteness of the archival lens. Methods oriented to “thin description” are not envisaged as a replacement of “thick description” but as a way of reclaiming the multiplicity of critical methods in IR (Aradau and Huysmans 2014). Through thin description, we propose to attend to the incompleteness of the archive and what is rendered knowable and unknowable as well as the normative value of non-intrusiveness in certain research contexts.

Our selected corpus consists of fifty-eight cases connected to the keyword “Calais.” Of these, ten were not related to asylum claims, leaving us with forty-eight relevant cases—twenty-three of which resulted in adverse decisions for asylum seekers. We have read these judgments alongside Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) and activist reports on the politics of asylum in the United Kingdom and Europe, supplemented by guidelines provided by the Home Office for the conduct of interviews and assessment of evidence. Calais stands for a node in the bordering practice of Europe, where asylum seekers wait, live, and attempt to make their way to the United Kingdom across the channel from France. Asylum seekers that come via Calais often need to take perilous routes to reach the United Kingdom—either via lorries or, more recently, in small boats in the wake of Brexit and COVID-19 reductions in traffic as well as increased surveillance technologies and fencing in Calais. While asylum politics is entwined with bordering practices, “Calais” introduces an additional question of violence, as it has been a place of continued and intensified violence (Davies et al. 2017, 2021; Ibrahim and Howarth 2018; de Vries and Guild 2019; Aradau and Tazzioli 2020).

Even though many migrants make their way to the United Kingdom via Calais, one limitation of our corpus is that “Calais” is not always identified as such in the cases. Another limitation is that many asylum seekers transiting through Calais will have returned to another country where their first claim of asylum was recorded. Finally, searching the archive of asylum appeals for “Calais” is itself an incomplete lens as appeals at the UTIAC can be lodged based on an error of law or insufficient evidence (UK Government 2021). Thus, even if asylum seekers’ journeys might have been through Calais, “Calais” is only mentioned in the appeal decisions when it is deemed of relevance to arguments challenging FtT decisions.

However, by choosing to select a corpus based on a “node” of asylum trajectories, we have claims that cover sixteen different countries, thereby avoiding the focus on a single country of origin. The countries covered are Afghanistan, Albania, Algeria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Guinea, Iran, Iraq, Ivory Coast, Palestine, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Turkey. We also discuss cases that encompass a variety of claims, where gender violence, state violence, and political activism are entwined. The ensuing section is structured around three main themes that emerged from the analysis of asylum appeals.

Asylum and technologies of cruelty

Minimizing and erasing violence

The appeal decisions are replete with stories of violence and cruelty. Asylum relies on the evidencing of violence and cruelty that asylum seekers have experienced in the past or are likely to experience if deported to countries of origin. In its connections with excessive violence and pain, cruelty was set at a distance from liberal states and relegated to the refugees’ experience in their countries of origin—torture, sexual violence, imprisonment under conditions akin to torture. Indeed, global legislative articulations of cruelty associate it with the intensification of violence and “cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment” is listed next to torture, even though not equivalent to torture (OHCHR 1984). Under Article 3 of the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR), asylum seekers cannot be returned to a country where they risk being “subjected to torture or to inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment” (Council of Europe 1950).

However, decisions often minimize these forms of violence. For instance, an asylum seeker argues that he fears both the Taliban and the authorities if deported to Afghanistan—the former as they could consider him a spy after having fled Kunduz, a Taliban-run area, and the latter for being associated with the Taliban. Yet, he is deemed deportable to Kabul. As the FtT judge summarizes:

For reasons given below I do not accept that A is at risk of persecution from the authorities in Kabul. First, A is not a member of the Taliban and has never worked for them. It may be that (as A's expert contends) as a failed asylum seeker A might be interviewed by the authorities at the airport at Kabul and if he destroyed his passport and or left Afghanistan illegally he will be prosecuted (quoted in PA/12763/2018, §8).

The judge transforms expert statements into simply a future possibility. The Afghanistan expert evidence noted that “If he destroyed his passport and or left Afghanistan illegally he will be prosecuted. The authorities might assume that he worked for the Taliban because of his family connections” (emphasis added). Yet, more disturbingly, the judge continues this counterfactual reasoning in saying that “it has not been established that such a prosecution would lead to imprisonment.” Moreover, the judge approvingly cites the Country Information Guidance on Afghanistan: “In general prison conditions in Afghanistan are not so systematically inhuman and degrading or life-threatening as to meet the threshold of Article 3 of the ECHR [European Convention on Human Rights]” (quoted in PA/12763/2018, §8).

Being wrongfully imprisoned is not a concern for the UK law, as long as conditions do not amount to torture, cruel and degrading treatment and, therefore, do not activate human rights responsibilities. Yet, the Country Guidance on Afghanistan also notes that “security forces and officials regularly accused Afghan returnees of having betrayed their country by fleeing, or that they were infidels or converts” (Home Office 2021). At the same time, the judge ignores the expert statement noting that “the cost of living is high in Kabul and he [the appellant] would risk destitution” (Giustozzi in PA/12763/2018, §8).

Asylum cases retrace a trajectory between countries of origin, transit countries, and the country where the asylum application is lodged. These trajectories articulate potential futures of “return”—more or less forced—for asylum seekers. In so doing, violent border zones and the cruelties of migration are erased from the story of asylum. In the cases we have selected, Calais is not just a border zone inflecting migrants’ journeys but a place of intense violence. Yet, no violence is ever recorded about migrants’ time in Calais and any violence of migration trajectories is excluded from consideration. With Segato, we can say that cruelty has become banalized. This is the case even as migration trajectories are convoluted and drawn out, as in the case of a Sudanese asylum seeker:

The appellant's appeal is based on his claimed fear of return to Sudan. He claims to have left Sudan for Egypt in 2009 and from there he flew to Turkey on 5th May, 2009. On 25th December 2009 he travelled to Greece where he remained for nineteen months. He then travelled back to Turkey on 1st July 2011 and stayed there until February 2015. He then went to Greece where he stayed until June 2015 and then, travelling through various European countries, he arrived in the United Kingdom by train from Calais on 29th July 2015 and claimed asylum on the same day (PA/11624/2018, §3).

The appeal was decided nine years after the appellant had left Sudan and three years after he arrived in the United Kingdom. As the decision was to return the case to the FtT given previous errors of law, the case was effectively restarting again as a “fresh claim,” adding an unknown number of years to almost a decade of violence and uncertainty. Neither time nor trajectory has any bearing upon the assessment of asylum claims. Usually, trajectories are recounted as “travels,” “journeys,” and “arrivals.” Of an Afghan asylum seeker, the judge recounts that “He travelled to Calais via Iran and Turkey. This journey lasted about 2 years. He then remained in Calais for 2 years before he arrived in the UK” (PA/12763/2018, §2). Judgments offer sanitized versions of travel, even in a case where the appellant is a victim of trafficking.

An Ethiopian asylum seeker, HG, was recognized as a victim of trafficking. All we know about her transfer from Calais to the United Kingdom is that “she was brought to the UK from Calais” (PA/10947/2018, §2). Although the initial decision had many errors, the appeal judge rejects the case based on a minor detail: at the time of the appeal, she is no longer a child. The judge points out this cruel spatiotemporal limitation of violence: “I accept that this country information might have been highly relevant if there was any question of returning the appellant to Ethiopia as a minor but there is none. Any risk to the appellant of forced marriage as a child, if it ever existed, has gone” (PA/10947/2018, §16). The violence experienced by women who seek asylum is rendered as a one-off event rather than as “trajectories of violence” to be understood across time and space (Canning 2017, 30). This spatiotemporal limitation means that the cruel treatment that HG suffered as a victim of trafficking is confined to countries other than Ethiopia, thereby opening the path to her future deportation: “The abuse she suffered was not in her home country but in Sudan and Lebanon and, finally, in France. The issue in her appeal, however, was whether she is currently at risk of persecution or serious harm in Ethiopia” (PA/10947/2018, §19).

In another case of an asylum seeker from Afghanistan, the UTIAC judge recounts the dismissal of credibility due to inconsistencies, discrepancies, inability to provide detail, and lack of evidence. Mrs K claimed asylum on the basis of her husband's activities, as he had worked for the Afghan government in intelligence, informing on the Taliban (AA/04272/2015, §2). We can see that the lens of suspicion is insufficient to render the politics that plays out in the case. The case outlines a topography of violence, where certain forms of violence are acknowledged, but minimized, while others are erased by being rendered unknowable or invisible. For instance, “She [the judge] accepted that in a patriarchal society the appellant would not have had any in-depth knowledge of her husband's work but said she had not explained how the village people discovered that her husband was working in intelligence or came to understand that he was spying, before she did” (AA/04272/2015, §4). The FtT judge had also found that internal relocation—that is, deportation to Kabul rather than to the village that was controlled by the Taliban—was a “reasonable option” as “she had close family there including her father and brothers on whom she could rely to support her and her children and protect her from her in-laws should she come to their attention” (AA/04272/2015, §7).

As we will see further down, this representation of bonds in the countries of origin is contrasted with the minimization of violence. At the Upper Tribunal, it becomes clear that the FfT had ignored evidence about the situation of women in Afghanistan, particularly that “a widow was considered the property of her deceased husband's family and the authorities often actively collaborated with families to return women” (AA/04272/2015, §10). The Upper Tribunal judge highlights the situations of violence Mrs K would face if deported to Afghanistan: “if he [the husband] were dead or assumed to be dead then she faced the risk from his family and if deemed to be alive or actually alive then risk from the Taliban and the government” (AA/04272/2015, §13). If in this case, the initial judgment is reversed, the appeal contours global topographies of cruelty and how technologies of cruelty are deployed to govern asylum seekers by minimizing ultra-subjective violence and erasing ultra-objective violence.

(Un)binding bonds

Asylum seekers are summoned to provide endless details and evidence about their lives, bodies, and relations. Relationships and bonds are often associated with intimate forms of violence and cruelty perpetuated in asylum seekers’ countries of origin: gender violence, forced marriage, or honor killings. Yet, bonds are also important elements in asylum seekers’ narratives and claims. In order to give proof of their identity and origins, asylum seekers are often required to provide details of their family members. More importantly, family bonds are often factored into judges’ decisions concerning asylum and repatriation. Indeed, the presence or presumed presence of family members in the country of origin can be used to justify a negative asylum decision, for it is assumed to signify a deeper connection with the state of origin than with that of destination, as well as an easy route to reintegration. For example, in the case of an Egyptian asylum seeker who first arrived in the United Kingdom as a minor, the judge “[was not] prepared to accept that the appellant has no family to return to in Egypt […] the judge found that it was not credible that the appellant's family would have simply accepted that the appellant has left Egypt without any further trace and have lost all contact” (PA/03219/2017, §26).

Assumptions regarding the presence of family connections in asylum seekers’ countries of origin are not uncommon in asylum cases. Despite the volatile context of these countries and the protracted temporality of the asylum process, family bonds are presumed to remain static. Even when, as in the case above, relatives are not traced by the Red Cross, there is a tendency to assume that they are still where they used to be when asylum seekers left, in other words, that both people and relationships have remained unchanged. Such a tendency is imbued with Orientalist stereotypes about non-Western societies, which are seen as monolithic, fixed, and “traditional”—as opposed to “progressive” and “dynamic” Western societies.

The fixedness and enduring relevance attributed to bonds in countries of origin contrast starkly with the disregard frequently shown for relationships in the United Kingdom. Across many of the cases, asylum seekers’ bonds in the United Kingdom are questioned, devalued, and undone by asylum decisions. Let us consider the case of ID, an asylum seeker from Guinea who at the time of his hearing was in a relationship with Ms F, who had refugee status in the United Kingdom. ID and Ms F were childhood friends who had been reunited in Calais in 2015. They had their first child in 2016, and Ms F was pregnant with ID's second child at the time of the hearing. ID's claim was based on his fear of Ms F's husband and father, who had threatened to beat him to death after he assisted his partner's escape from Guinea. As the Upper Tribunal judge summarizes,

the appellant could not meet the requirements of the Immigration Rules principally because he did not meet the definition of partner in relation to the financial requirements […] All require the couple to have been living together in a relationship akin to a marriage or a civil partnership for two years or more. Whilst the relationship between the couple in this case is of longstanding, according to their own evidence, it only became a sexual relationship in August 2015 (PA/12119/2016, §28–29).

Despite accepting the evidence that ID and Ms F had known each other since 2008, the Tribunal arbitrarily dated the beginning of their relationship to 2015, when they were reunited in Calais. In doing so, the Tribunal erased and rewrote their personal histories and experiences, rejecting the importance of their bond prior to having sexual relations and denying the existence of a “genuine and subsisting relationship” (PA/12119/2016, §31).

This undoing of bonds is also apparent in the Tribunal's “evaluation” of ID's relationship with his children. The FtT recognized that if ID were to be removed from the United Kingdom, contact between him and his family would effectively break down, for Ms F did not have the financial means to travel to Guinea and would be in danger if she did. Yet, the Tribunal rejected ID's claim on the basis of a “balance sheet exercise” (PA/12119/2016, §16). Furthermore, in relation to one of the children, the judge stated:

C is the appellant's natural child. We accept that he has formed a bond with his father and the appellant shares equally with Ms F in C's upbringing. C is very young, aged under one year old, and if the appellant was to be removed his emotional needs would not be substantially affected because C is too young to really recognise his father (quoted in PA/12119/2016, §13).

The “balance sheet exercise” carried out by the FtT can be read as a pedagogy of cruelty, the act of “capturing […] life and replacing it with the inertia and sterility of things” (Segato 2018, 11). Indeed, through this “exercise,” the Tribunal turned ID's family life into something that can be measured and evaluated vis-à-vis his prospects of reintegration in Guinea. Furthermore, the suggestion that a one-year-old would not suffer from the absence of his father captures the cruel devaluation and undoing of asylum seekers’ bonds and the deactivation of empathy that enables it (Segato 2018).

Asylum seekers’ bonds are also undone through the constant questioning of their family relations in the United Kingdom, as in several cases of unaccompanied children whose claims were considered by the United Kingdom after the dismantling of the Calais “Jungle.” In 2016, approximately two thousand children were identified by the Home Office as candidates for possible transfer to the United Kingdom from Calais. Their claims were analyzed through an “expedited Dublin process” implemented as part of a UK/French joint policy which came to an end in October 2017. At that point, according to a Home Office representative, 300 unaccompanied children had been transferred to the United Kingdom, while 1,850 remained dispersed in ad hoc reception centers across France. Among the latter, a number of children had their transfer to the United Kingdom rejected on the grounds of “family link not accepted” ([2017] UKUT 00262).

AM, a sixteen-year-old citizen of Eritrea, had his request to join his uncle in Manchester rejected “because there were a number of inconsistencies between the family details provided by OA [the uncle] in the UK and the applicant in France.” One such inconsistency related to the different spellings of the uncle's second name, which was spelt “Ababakar” in AM's statements and the Home Office records and “Abubakar” in OA's witness statement and UK residence permit. The second was based on OA's alleged inability to name AM's older brother, which prompted the official who interviewed him to state that he was “not convinced that this relative is a true relative” and reject the case ([2017] UKUT 00262 (IAC), §39).

OA vehemently denied not being able to name AM's brother. He also pointed to the unsatisfactory circumstances in which his phone interview was conducted: the lack of prior notice, linguistic and communication difficulties, and the absence of any opportunity to consider and certify the record of the interview. Similar issues emerged in relation to AM, who was not properly informed about the interview process and also reported having communication issues. Despite the inadequate circumstances in which information relating to AM's family was obtained, the Home Office repeatedly refused to reexamine his case and consider new evidence. On the contrary, the discrepancies emerging from AM's and OA's flawed interviews became the lynchpin of the Home Office case, gaining primacy over evidence in support of their relationship—including a photograph picturing them together, identification documents belonging to AM's maternal grandmother, and OA's residence permit. Crucially, the perceived inconsistencies of AM's and OA's testimonies were attributed more weight than AM's vulnerability as an unaccompanied child and his mental and physical well-being. AM was found to suffer from major depressive disorder and displayed considerable PTSD symptoms. His psychiatrist wrote:

It is clear that [the processes] have had a detrimental impact on his mental state, as seen as his increased suicidality with plan on how he would act. This shows his state of desperation and hopelessness … [He] is at risk of becoming actively suicidal if prompt reunification does not occur as his mental state will deteriorate further ([2017] UKUT 00262 (IAC), §12).

The asylum archive is rife with examples of unaccompanied asylum-seeking children whose traumatic experiences have been downplayed and ignored by the Home Office. In a case similar to that of AM, the Home Office acknowledged that the trauma and violence experienced by children warranted urgency in the handling of their cases but suggested that “this factor while important cannot outweigh other equally as pressing consideration such as the need for appropriate case management” ([2017] UKUT 00168 IAC). The equation of “case management” with vulnerable children's well-being is perhaps the most striking manifestation of the technologies of cruelty governing the asylum process. In particular, it captures how technologies of cruelty are enabled by the “functional reduction of empathy” in social relations (Segato 2018).

Stretching time

Asylum seekers have often emphasized the uncertainties of the asylum process, its prolonged duration, and the difficulties of waiting. Shahram Khosravi speaks of the “stolen time” that migrants and asylum seekers experience through the indefinite horizon of deportability, as “[a] life in circulation is an indefinite position of not becoming in what is supposed to a ‘normal life course’” (Khosravi 2018, 41).

The time that convoluted migration trajectories take is extended by long periods of waiting in the asylum process. The case of an asylum seeker from the DRC stretches over almost two decades, as he first entered the United Kingdom in 1997 and the latest refusal of his appeal was decided in 2016 (IA/08329/2012). NGO reports and testimonies of asylum seekers reinforce that the stretched temporality of waiting and extended periods of uncertainty have become normalized. A recent report by the Refugee Council (2021) sheds light on the rise in the backlog of asylum cases over recent years. Drawing on data obtained from Freedom of Information requests, the report reveals that at the end of March 2021, there were 66,185 people waiting for an initial decision on their asylum claim, over three-quarters of which had been waiting for more than six months. This represents almost a ten-fold increase from 2010 (Refugee Council 2021, 7).

The Refugee Council describes the repeated delays asylum seekers are subjected to as a “cruel wait.” The stretching of time is a punctuated one, as it is marked by many deadlines required by processes of “legal quickening” (Hambly and Gill 2020). While they are waiting for a decision to be made, asylum seekers are trapped in a liminal space (Hodgkison et al. 2014) or “existential limbo” (Haas 2017) characterized by uncertainty and immobility. Meanwhile, they are asked to continuously provide and repeat details about their lives, their journeys, and their traumas. As Gillian McFayden (2019, 168) points out, “gaining refuge rests upon the telling of a story and having that story be believed.” This involves being able to accurately and consistently relay the same details over time. As we have seen in the previous section, discrepancies in asylum seekers’ testimonies often result in individuals being deemed unreliable and lacking credibility. In the case of MK, an asylum seeker whose asylum process lasted between 2007 and 2014, the FtT judge observed:

This appellant's account changes with each recital. It takes a different permutation and new form of tortures and weapons of torture feature. I find these variations of permutations are as a result of the appellant manufacturing [a] false basis on which to build an asylum claim. The appellant is not a creditworthy witness. I reject his entire asylum account. It is a figment of his imagination and has no basis in reality (AA/09268/2013, §10).

The UTIAC judge who analyzed MK's appeal concurred with this statement, noting that the four witness statements he provided since the beginning of the asylum process presented some important differences and were not consistent with the initial screening interview that took place upon his arrival in 2007. For example, MK was unable to recount the exact time he left Gaza (2006 or 2003) and how long he spent in Italy and France. As a consequence, “each time the appellant [was] questioned, his credibility [was] further undermined rather than salvaged” (AA/09268/2013, §61).

These observations assume that migration trajectories and traumatic events are committed to memory indefinitely and that any inconsistencies should be taken as evidence of fabrication (Herlihy and Turner 2007). However, trauma and situated knowledge production do not “lend themselves to coherent narratives” (Bohmer and Shuman 2017, 136). Furthermore, the negative assessment of MK's credibility failed to consider the time and events that occurred between statements and the mental and physical states of the appellant at the time of the interviews. MK highlighted that, at the time of his screening interview, he had been in a cell for a few days and was very distressed because someone had told him that he would be returned to Gaza. A subsequent statement was collected from him during Ramadan, when he was fasting and found it difficult to focus. Importantly, MK also reported suffering from severe mental health issues during the asylum process. A discharge summary from 2013 confirms these:

[MK] had been admitted to Topaz Ward after trying to jump under a train. He had been feeling depressed and suicidal for some weeks, with auditory hallucinations telling him to end his life. He had been of no fixed abode after a failed asylum-seeking request made some years ago. He had come to the UK from Gaza five years ago after being tortured approximately ten years ago by Israeli secret police as he was acquainted with individuals involved in anti-Israeli activities. He had moved to London two years ago from Glasgow and had been of no fixed abode since due to concerns that he would be deported (AA/09268/2013, §57).

In addition to providing some harrowing details about MK's condition and life, the above excerpt draws attention to the very tangible consequences of the extended temporality of asylum claims. Indeed, MK's doctors suggested that the protracted separation from his family and continued fear of being persecuted if returned to Gaza, coupled with his difficult circumstances in the United Kingdom, were likely perpetuating factors for his depression. As we see in MK's case, the stretching of time can be read as a technology of cruelty that keeps undoing asylum seekers’ possibilities of building a future and sustaining bonds.

Conclusion

This article has contributed to discussions on the transformations of the politics of asylum by proposing the analytical lens of “technologies of cruelty” to understand continuities and discontinuities in how asylum seekers and their claims are governed. We have developed “technologies of cruelty” supplementing Balibar's “topography of cruelty” and Segato's “pedagogy of cruelty.” This combined reading has allowed us to account for continuities of cruelty in erasing and minimizing violence in global politics while also attending to the banalization of cruelty toward asylum seekers today.

Through the analysis of a selected corpus of asylum appeals, we have unpacked three recurring technologies of cruelty: first, we have shown how cruelty emerges through the minimization of violence that asylum seekers have experienced in the past or could experience in the future. At the same time, the violence that asylum seekers encounter in Europe is sanitized and erased: violence is restricted to specific spatiotemporal moments located elsewhere, at a distance. Second, technologies of cruelty work through the differential (un)binding of bonds in countries of origin and destination. While bonds in countries of origin are assumed to remain unchanged over time, asylum seekers’ bonds in the United Kingdom are routinely questioned and undone. Technologies of cruelty are mapped upon an Orientalist imaginary of global politics. Finally, cruelty occurs through the stretching of time, trapping people in “a damaging, cruel, and unjust limbo” characterized by a sense of immobility and uncertainty over their future (Refugee Council 2021, 14). In this limbo, cruelty is an undoing of subjectivity and political capacity.

As technologies of cruelty minimize, erase, undo, splinter, and devalue asylum seekers’ claims and subjectivity, there remains a question about how to respond and how to counter their effects. While we cannot embark on this discussion in the space of this article, we suggest that the combined reading of topographies, pedagogies, and technologies of cruelty can help multiply ways of countering cruelty. For Balibar, this entails forms of solidarity and collective action, while for Segato counter-pedagogy of cruelty works through slippages, small interruptions, and interferences of hierarchy and domination. Additionally, counter-technologies of cruelty would generate different mediations of social and political relations.

Footnotes

1

Given that we analyze legal cases, we use the category of “asylum seeker” for someone who has made a claim for asylum and “refugee” for someone who has the legal status. We use the overarching category of migrants for people who have not registered a claim for asylum or had a claim rejected.

2

Coined by Mexican anthropologist Marcela Lagarde, “feminicide” emphasizes that killings and other crimes against women are perpetrated for gender reasons. Unlike “femicide,” “feminicide” encompasses not only gender violence but also the state and juridical structures that enable and normalize gender violence.

3

The archive is available at https://tribunalsdecisions.service.gov.uk/utiac.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the journal editors and the two anonymous reviewers for their generous comments, their suggestions for revisions and a very enjoyable review processes.

Funding

This work was supported by funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (SECURITY FLOWS, grant agreement No 819213).