This research project addressed the contemporary transformations in asylum provision, by using Denmark’s asylum system as a case study. The principle of providing asylum to people in need is an essential part of the modern state system and liberal democracy. However, because of ongoing global refugee crises, the institution of asylum is coming under great pressure. Countries across the world are growing increasingly reluctant to provide asylum to people in need. While asylum remains in force in national and international laws, it is being subverted in practice through a complex web of border enforcement practices and bureaucratic interventions. Scholars have long warned that asylum as an ethical principle is at risk of collapsing entirely. Yet, to date there has been limited knowledge about how states’ receding commitment to refugee protection is re-shaping the asylum procedure itself. More specifically, there is a lack of knowledge about what happens in the spaces where state officials interrogate asylum seekers and assess their claims.
This is an important problem for our society because the institution of asylum ensures that people who escape their country of origin due to war and persecution can obtain protection in another country. Furthermore, a lack of transparency and accountability surrounding the determination of a person’s right
to state protection threatens to undermine the institution of asylum and person’s access to due process.
Responding to this empirical gap, the research project has interrogated the socio-political geographies of the asylum procedure by exploring it as a lived, material space. It did so through an in-depth study of the asylum procedure in Denmark, a country that has long been at the forefront of reducing the EU’s commitment to asylum and the protection of displaced people. It did so by achieving the following Research Objectives (RO):
RO1: To advance a theoretical framework for understanding the first instance of the asylum procedure as a site of juridical border work. Through the feminist lenses of situated knowledges and intersectionality, this project advanced the conceptualization of border work as a lived socio-spatial reality.
RO2: To analyse the socio-political geographies of contemporary refugee governance by mapping the spaces, relations, and materials at work in and produced through the asylum procedure, examining the first instance of the Danish asylum system.
RO3: To provide a detailed empirical account of how different actors (caseworkers, interpreters, and asylum seekers) experience and make sense of the asylum procedure. This helped to locate the juridical border of asylum as a lived reality and contested political space.
RO4: To develop methodological innovation by developing a socio-spatial mapping method that helps to uncover the ways in which juridical borders are materialized and experienced through the situated encounters between different actors as well as the materials involved in the asylum procedure.
RO5: To produce policy recommendations on how the asylum procedure can be carried out in a transparent, accountable, and ethical way consistent with the spirit of asylum.
