Asylum as a Form of Life: The Politics and Experience of Indeterminacy in South Africa

Abstract

According to the United Nations, in 2003 South Africa had the highest number of asylum seekers worldwide. This situation resulted from the combination of two factors: considerable migration flows from neighboring African countries and ineffective assessment procedures by the South African administration. Based on interviews with applicants or former applicants to refugee status as well as officials, adjudicators, and activists, our research focuses on the experience of existential indeterminacy endured by claimants and the signification of the ambivalent policies implemented by the state. We propose to analyze asylum as a form of life, rather than as bare life, not disambiguating the two meanings in tension in Wittgenstein’s reflections: a particular shared world and a universal human condition. We emphasize how this form of life is shaped by the law, according to Agamben’s analysis, although in an equivocal way, as individuals alternatively adapt to it or resist it. Beyond the South African case, we argu...