Responsibility and complicity in the UK “hostile environment”

Abstract

Discourses of responsibility and complicity are a central part of the UK asylum and immigration system, with ideas of collective and self-responsibility around asylum claims overlapping with questions about a “hostile environment” that attempts to make a proliferation of people “complicit” in the “illegality” of others – across education, healthcare, housing and public life. People navigating this system regularly articulate and share their own critiques of responsibility and complicity, levelled at non-governmental organizations (NGOs), campaign groups, Home Office representatives, political figures and academic researchers. Based on fieldwork with people going through the asylum system in Glasgow, this chapter investigates how people interpret and act on ideas of responsibility and complicity, within a system that is often opaque. To engage in the asylum system is to form personal strategies of responsibility and complicity in ways that unsettle any clear contrast between “moral tragedy” and “flourishing”, complicating both anthropological and activist assumptions. And yet, such narratives of responsibility and complicity may imply a solidity to the concepts that, in a system that is often very difficult to discern, can be elusive: who are we responsible to, and what are we complicit with?