Asylum interactions and the lived experience of (in)securitization
Marie Jacobs (Universiteit Gent)
Media and political discourse has a habit of portraying recent migration developments in terms of a “crisis” (Bigo 2002). Accordingly, politicians have developed policies motivated by the idea that the increase of asylum seekers is as a an exceptional and urgent security threat. My presentation focuses on the Belgian context and analyses asylum interactions that unfolded during this so-called crisis. As a response to calls to combine insights from sociolinguistics with theories from international relations studies, the study draws on the framework of “(in)securitization” (Mc Cluskey, Rampton & Charalambous 2021). In doing so, the “official accounts” of the national security policy (Vaughan-Williams & Stevens 2016) are contrasted with the experiences of (in)security as faced by asylum seekers and as observed/audio-recorded during linguistic-ethnographic fieldwork at law firms specialised in asylum cases. The data analysis of the lawyer-client communication as it unfolds during consultations shows how micro-practices of (in)securitization shape the asylum interaction. Mechanisms of suspicion drive an interactional focus on truthfulness and disclosure, while time pressure influences the management of topic control. Additionally, lawyers’ communication about the uncertain and ever-changing nature of the asylum process impacts the relationship with their clients. The presentation concludes by suggesting that calling the current migration situation a “crisis” might indeed be accurate, but one should contextualise this label by highlighting how the problematic situation is manmade: institutionally produced by the system allegedly in place to alleviate just that.
References
Bigo, Didier. (2002) “Security and immigration: Toward a critique of the governmentality of unease.” Alternatives 27(1), 63-92.
Mc Cluskey, E., Rampton, B., & Charalambous, C. (2021). Researching (in) security as a lived experience: Setting the foundations for transdisciplinary dialogue. In Security, Ethnography and Discourse (pp. 13-33). Routledge.
Vaughan-Williams, N., & Stevens, D. (2016). Vernacular theories of everyday (in) security: The disruptive potential of non-elite knowledge. Security Dialogue, 47(1), 40-58.