Waiting, Entrapment and Slow Violence in the UK Asylum System

In the UK, the asylum dispersal and support system is privatised and separate from the mainstream welfare system. Low levels of support and a system designed to yield profit for private contractors leave those seeking asylum housed in deprived areas and reliant on support from the third sector, often for protracted periods. In this context of limbo and entrapment, state / non-state boundaries are opaque and blurred (Giudici 2021), and third sector advocates are increasingly drawn in to ‘fill the gaps’ (Mayblin and James 2019).

Drawing on participatory ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Yorkshire in the North of England during the COVID-19 pandemic, this paper examines ‘welfare micropublic’ (Berg et al. 2019) encounters between people seeking asylum, the state and its private contractors, and third sector advocates. Using asylum housing as a lens, we focus on how the complex asylum dispersal system subjects those caught in its web to slow violence and exhaustion (Darling 2022) while they wait for an outcome on their asylum claim.

We examine how solidarities are formed and fractured at the micro level, arguing that (inter)mediation and contingency are key to understanding everyday asylum governance and its myopic (Whyte 2011) and dehumanising bureaucratic logic. Focusing especially on dynamics of un/seeing and un/hearing, we foreground lived experiences of slow violence (Nixon 2013), and ask what they tell us about the nation as an imagined ‘community of value’ (Anderson 2013) in hostile times. We conclude with reflections on hope and how to change the narrative.