Suspicious compassion: On affect and state power in the Dutch asylum procedure

Abstract

This paper offers a glimpse into the affective work inherent in the practices, objects, and institutional design of the Dutch procedure for seeking and granting asylum. In doing so, I develop the concept of suspicious compassion to make sense of the productive tensions and affects generated in the process of subjecting applicants to a meticulously designed procedural itinerary. Along this itinerary, applicants must ‘open up’ to different immigration officers, who gather and interrogate distressing and intimate information, and inscribe such information in the reports that travel to the next stop on the itinerary. While applicants wait, their accounts are scrutinized by officers in the quiet of ‘objective’ decision-making. By following the procedural itinerary and analyzing the affective complex of suspicious compassion, I contribute to scholarship on asylum and suspicion, and to the study of intimacy and affect in state bureaucracies, moving beyond a focus on single emotions and individual feelings.