Temporal dispossession through migration bureaucracy: on waiting within the asylum process in Sweden

Abstract

This article examines experiences of temporal dispossession within migration bureaucracy in the case of asylum. Drawing on interviews and ethnographic data with officers at the Swedish Migration Agency and people seeking asylum under the ‘new’ asylum law in Sweden, this article makes visible the politics of time inherent in the distribution of life chances in state practices. Examining the temporal governance of asylum, I interrogate how waiting, time, and timing are enacted as means of dispossession in the asylum process, with a particular focus on the effects of neoliberal time structurings. The analysis argues that migration bureaucracy in Sweden invokes temporal dispossession through the use of temporal governance that withholds frames of intelligibility from asylum applicants. Examining how waiting is enacted as a means of dispossession both through slowing and accelerating timeframes, the analysis reveals the negotiations, strategies, and struggles that take place within the realm of migration bureaucracy, and in doing so, stresses the relational character of time as a mechanism of control. Central to my argument is that migration bureaucracy dispossesses both state officials and those seeking asylum, yet with very different effects on the distribution of life chances for each.