The list. On discretion and refusal in the Italian asylum system

Abstract

ABSTRACT Drawing on the ethnographic account of the everyday functioning of an asylum support service in the North of Italy, this article explores contradictory tasks and thorny dilemmas of caseworkers engaged in the assistance to asylum seekers. In the name of the constraints imposed by a system on ‘permanent crisis’, asylum caseworkers find themselves engaged in discretionary processes of aid distribution, embedded in blurred subjective criteria. By doing so, they tacitly accept a burden of responsibility over asylum seekers’ lives that goes far beyond their regular duties. Yet, at times, some caseworkers refuse to comply with some of the directions – implicit or explicit – given by their coordinators. Their critical stance, although restricted by their institutional positioning, holds the potential of shedding light into some of the contradictions of the asylum bureaucratic machine. This scenario offers important insights on the open-ended reconfigurations of the relationships between ‘state power’ and ‘state intermediaries’, as well as on the possibility of producing forms of agency from within the system of state-managed humanitarian aid distribution.