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

Introduction

In 2015, I followed J for a full working day as she worked for the Dutch Immigration and Naturalization Department (IND). At the end of the day, she shared her feelings about an applicant she had met a few days earlier. She told me that the young woman “went through so much and she shared it all; she spoke of horrible rapes and violence, and she told us that she had such a hard time caring for her baby.” J recalled that both she and the translator had had to hold back tears while this young woman was talking about the events, ‘as if they were normal’. She concluded by telling me that she felt a lot of compassion for applicants when their stories are credible.

During my ethnographic research on the work of the IND in the Dutch asylum-seeking procedure, I found a recurring narrative of the procedure as offering compassion and care to refugees, but only when their stories were ‘credible’. This understanding of the procedure was more readily expressed than were aims of securitization, which surprised me given the context of detention and the ‘clean’ technocratic violence of the state (Rousseau et al., 2004: 1095). And while IND officers described their work as protecting ‘real’ refugees, scholars studying asylum procedures have identified a culture of suspicion and disbelief (Daniel and Knudsen, 1995; Griffiths, 2012; Haas, 2019; Jubany, 2017). Griffiths (2012: 9), for example, describes a culture in which an “institutional emphasis on truthfulness exists along-side an endemic image of asylum seekers as liars and opportunistic cheats.” Suspicion, according to these scholars, forms the context within which states perform what is considered to be their humanitarian obligation to protect refugees (El-Shaarawi, 2019: 44). Building on these insights, I found that while different affects and techniques of suspicion are prominent, they are enmeshed with a heartfelt narrative of compassion and a firm belief in the procedure as a way of caring for the ‘real’ refugee. Observing that a conditional compassion for the ‘real’ refugee became available through suspicion, and that suspicion was often motivated by compassion, I developed the concept of suspicious compassion to capture an affective complex comprising different affects and techniques of ‘testing’ an applicant’s deservingness of refugee status.

Alongside the research on suspicion and disbelief in asylum procedures, there is a body of ethnographic work focused on compassion as the flip-side of state repression in the context of il/legalizing migrants (Fassin, 2005, 2012; Kalir, 2019; Ticktin, 2006, 2011, 2016). In studying France’s asylum procedures, Fassin and Ticktin find compassion to be present exclusively in the (moral) valuation of those who apply for asylum on the basis of suffering physical pain or disease; it is absent in encounters with those applying on the basis of a biography of fear and persecution, as in the procedures I studied. Attributing practitioners’ feelings of compassion to the depoliticized realm of medical expertise and its practices of recognizing physical suffering, Ticktin argues that compassion is contingent and interpersonal, in contrast to the protection of structural rights. Compassion, she maintains, relies on face-to-face interactions between a person (who-is-not-a-file) and a medical expert trained in recognizing ‘severe-enough’ bodily suffering. She concludes that compassion is an erratic and limited emotion as it “chooses a few exceptional individuals and excludes the rest—indeed, by its very definition, compassion is unable to generalize” (Ticktin, 2016: 265).

In Fassin’s and Ticktin’s works, compassion figures as the flip-side of state repression, a characterization challenged by Barak Kalir (2019). Based on his research on Dutch deportation practices, Kalir (2019: 70) argues that feelings of compassion play a key role in performing state repression: “Compassion often helped caseworkers to furnish an emotional comfort zone, a safe space not only for the clients to discharge their emotions but also for the caseworkers to position themselves as empathic beings.” This emotional comfort zone allowed caseworkers to “deflect potentially disruptive affects of the law and move ahead with effectively implementing controversial state policies” (Kalir 2019: 70). Kalir shows that compassion itself makes repression possible. Both Ticktin and Kalir understand compassion as a single emotion, either one that allows state officers to sleep well at night or one that is erratic and, as such, untrustworthy, emerging exclusively in face-to-face encounters. I take a different approach, seeking to move beyond a focus on single encounters or single emotions, into a multiplicity of affective work within the procedural itinerary.

In order to move beyond individual feelings occurring in the realm of emotion, bounded to an ‘individual’ and visible in outward expressions or narratives of feeling (Good, 2004), I turn to the conceptual framework of affect. Theories of affect (Gregg and Seigworth, 2010) explicitly attend to relationality; as Richard and Rudnyckyj (2009: 61) write, they illuminate “the reflexive and reciprocal relationships between subjective experiences and [a] social order.” In the case of my research, the bureaucratic and confined environment of asylum procedures, while the applicant is detained, is the paramount social context. Focusing on affect allows me to analyze the tensions related to how certain affects circulate within this particular environment, and the effects these have. As Richard and Rudnyckyj (2009: 59) put it, affect becomes a medium or atmosphere in which people move and relate to one another, as “particular affects enable certain types of circulation and foreclose others.” This understanding of affect as relational and as integral to composing social environments underscores the importance of taking affect seriously in analyzing how state power operates within the set of practices and sites related to the asylum procedure.

Indeed, in the context of border detention, the state intimately involves itself in the lives and bodies of its suspected others, and it does so through the intensive and affective work of those positioned to actualize its power. Applicants are put on hold (and in the hold of state power), and asked to ‘open up’ about sad events in order to be scrutinized. This understanding of the liminal asylum applicant, caught in between in- and exclusion, reveals an intimate form of state power (Haas and Shuman, 2019: 1) and the forceful ways that “Europe and the West constitute their Others” (El-Shaarawi and Razsa, 2019: 287). So, what is the state in this context of tangible power asymmetries that is called ‘border detention’? Anthropological research shows that the state should not be uniformly characterized as an invisible, abstract and yet totalizing ‘cold monster’ (Fassin et al., 2015), out there somewhere. Scholars have instead turned to examining its margins (Das and Poole, 2004), state effects (Mitchel, 1991), and complex formations and everyday practices of state power (Sharma and Gupta, 2006; Verkaaik, 1994). Indeed, when ethnographers seek to uncover ‘the heart of the state’ (Fassin et al., 2015), state power becomes more diffuse, multiple and relational, as both an abstract and a distinct reality of power relations

Building on these insights, this paper contributes to a growing body of ethnographic work on intimate and emotional states (Jupp et al., 2016; Vollebergh et al., 2021), and in particular to studies foregrounding the affective work of state bureaucracies (Graham, 2002; Van Oorschot, 2014; Wissink and Van Oorschot, 2020). By turning to the affective complex of suspicious compassion, I show that the performance of state power in the asylum procedure depends on affects that transcend individual feelings and are, instead, immanent to the institutional design, practices and objects assembled in and by the procedure. Indeed, the design itself both mobilizes affective encounters and prevents IND officers from forming any ‘unruly bonds’ (Vollebergh et al., 2021) with applicants, by making sure each step in the application process is handled by a different IND officer. Hence, in addition to showing how IND officers are affected by applicants in particular (trained) ways, I also show that, in this context, the affective, intimate work of actualizing state power is done in a highly controlled and limited manner. The procedure’s design allows affects and techniques of suspicious compassion to flourish while simultaneously squashing any ‘unruly bonds’ from influencing the process and threatening the imagined objectivity of the final decision.

Like Wissink and Van Oorschot (2020), I seek an understanding of affective bureaucratic work by moving beyond the Weberian model of ideal-typical state bureaucracies, which is associated with depersonalization and a rationality seen as adverse to personal freedom (Weber, 1946; Herzfeld, 1992; Jubany, 2017). While moments of indifference are part of bureaucrats’ intimate work, “recognizing bureaucratic affects to be mere indifferent is a generalization that does little to shed light on the variety of everyday affective practices of bureaucrats” (Wissink and Van Oorschot, 2020: 1050). Wissink and Van Oorschot demonstrate how affects are made and mobilized within particular bureaucratic practices comprising its situated social reality (2020: 1063). Similarly, I attend to the affective complex I found immanent to the practices, relations, and objects (like the asylum report) assembled in the confined sites of the procedure in detention.

This affective complex, which I call ‘suspicious compassion’, is comprised by a set of specific affects, including doubt, uncertainty, irritation and vexation, trust in the process, and moments of empathy. With this affective complex, IND officers engage in a particularly critical reading of an applicant’s case file, using the techniques of gathering vulnerable information from applicants, interrogating that information, and evaluating it at different stages of the itinerary. By attending to how IND officers are trained and monitored to engage with applicants, I describe the first technique of suspicious compassion: affectively conditioning IND officers. Second, I concentrate on particular affects like doubt, irritation, and empathy, as well as the affective techniques mobilized at the asylum hearing, like maintaining distance, poking for information, not giving the applicant hope, and caring for (creating) the asylum report. In the final section, I turn to the decision-making part of the itinerary where IND officers use yet other affective techniques enabled by the carefully typed-up hearing report. In particular, I focus on the affective atmosphere of quiet, thought to enable a critical and careful ‘reading-for-the-worst’, which is a strategic and intuitive technique imagined to increase the ‘objectivity’ of the decision.

Fieldwork, the Dutch detention regime and the bureaucratic itinerary of the asylum procedure

One of the first times I observed an asylum procedure was when this work was still housed in the old detention center, near Schiphol, the main airport of the Netherlands. Before it was moved to a massive, but still very secluded, detention complex in 2013, asylum procedures took place in a small, plain, greyish building that stood silently among the large and proudly visible buildings of airline companies and pilot schools. Hidden in plain sight, the silence that engulfed the building contradicted the intensity of the atmospheres enclosed within.

An IND officer once told me that he preferred not to talk to people about his position at the IND because that would get him into difficult conversations that he had grown tired of. This silence, among other tense forms of quiet, relate to the difficulty of gaining access to IND’s work, as it has a bad reputation and is protected from too much publicity and outside eyes. While the procedure is designed to question people seeking asylum in the Netherlands, other strangers to the procedure, like myself, are also scrutinized. It took more than 8 months of pursuing a black-boxed decision-making process before I gained access.

However, being granted official access did not end the ethnographic work of accessing, rather it transformed and multiplied the work, as I now needed to gain access from within. First, I had to convince the local managers of the detention center of my research intentions and, especially, the practical consequences for their employees. In addition to needing to gain managers’ approvals, my aim to follow asylum cases meant that asylum applicants, their lawyers, the refugee council and the several IND officers assigned to a case also needed to say ‘yes’.

While it was hard to gain access to the IND, the refugee council, an NGO present at application centers, readily allowed me to observe their work. The council, also located in the detention center where they help refugees with their applications, welcomed me to witness what they consider the state’s harsh ways of scrutinizing people. As I wanted to follow the application process from the first meetings an applicant had with the refugee council to the IND’s final decision, I asked the refugee council to inform me when an application would start. I would then go to the detention center and wait while a refugee council volunteer asked the person applying for preliminary permission (a process repeated by their lawyer and the several IND officers involved in an application). To my surprise, people applying for asylum often agreed to my presence. Some told me that, after two or three meetings with different strangers (a refugee council volunteer, a lawyer, an IND officer), they appreciated seeing a familiar face, which is telling of the tense atmosphere of the procedure. A sense of familiarity developed quickly because the procedure was so demanding, requiring each applicant to share intimate details with multiple strangers, repeatedly, as at different points along the itinerary.

I asked applicants for permission to follow their cases several times, and this included when official reports of the hearings were compiled and when the decision was issued. Although they consented, I changed and fictionalized their personal accounts, both in my fieldnotes and in my writing beyond, by leaving out certain details (like gender, country of origin, or age) and mixing personal details with made-up details or details from other accounts. I justify this both as a way to safeguard anonymity and because my focus has never been the details of their stories: rather I studied how these accounts were gathered, processed, and decided over by the IND.

The IND works in the name of the Ministry of Security and Justice, and has the authority to make decisions regarding the asylum procedure. The Dutch procedure, according to sociologists Huisman and Kootstra (2019), is one of the most severe in Europe, a judgment based on the Netherlands’ consistently high number of rejections and the practice of detaining first-time applicants who arrive at a so-called outer European border. The Dutch state employs the longest list of ‘safe countries’; applicants from these countries will definitely be rejected. Yet, applicants from indisputably unsafe countries, like Afghanistan or Libya, are also relatively often rejected and tried for deportation. In 2018, only 34% of Afghani applicants were granted a refugee status in the Netherlands; in contrast, France accepted 67%, Italy 88%, and Switzerland 99% of Afghani applicants (Huisman and Kootstra, 2019).

The detention of migrants—both inside and outside the asylum procedure—has been legal for more than 35 years in the Netherlands. However, while detention was an exceptional measure until the 1980s, it has become quite common today (Van Kalmthout, 2007). It is defined as ‘administrative detention’, a form of detention imposed in the interest of ‘public order and national safety’, understood “as a non-punitive, bureaucratic measure that is meant to enable the enactment of border control” (Leerkes and Broeders, 2010: 830–831). Not all applicants are detained; most go through the procedure at other—less sequestered—sites. Detentions occur when a person arrives at a Dutch border that is also an ‘outer EU border’. People who arrive by plane or boat are stopped either when trying to board a connecting flight or when they declare themselves to be asylum applicants, and then are transferred to a detention center. While detained, applicants are subjected to a procedural itinerary involving different unfamiliar authorities and many tense moments of waiting.

In the following sections, I concentrate on the two most important moments of the procedural itinerary. But, first, a brief overview of the overall process: the itinerary, which is the same today as it was when I finished my fieldwork in 2017, entails two separate asylum hearings. In the first, an IND officer reviews the applicant’s country of ‘origin’, their route of travel, and how they came to choose the Netherlands. The second hearing, often taking a full (working) day, is conducted by a different IND officer, who focuses on the applicant’s reasons for seeking asylum. Both of these IND officers must also type all of their questions and the applicant’s answers down into official asylum reports. These reports are the main documents IND decision-makers, at the end of the itinerary, use to evaluate the application and decide whether to grant the applicant refugee status. These decision-makers do not meet applicants in person, but rather engage only with the officers’ reports. This final stage of the itinerary takes 4 days and involves two separate decision-makers who evaluate the now textualized applicant, a practice discussed in the final section of this paper.

Feeling like a state: Learning to be affected by suspicious compassion

Didier Fassin (2015: 5) argues that understanding state power requires paying attention to those state agents who put policies and laws into practice, as in these moments ‘the state reveals itself’. Through both the work of state agents and their institutional networks, state power endures and lasts. And while state agents develop personal styles and are granted the discretionary ‘freedom’ to make on-the-spot decisions in order to enact laws and policies (Lipsky, 1980; Hoag and Hull, 2017), they do so from within “networks of meaning and action that are inscribed within the institutions” (Fassin et al., 2015: 7). Here, I highlight some of the ways that IND officers are affectively conditioned, or even policed, in order to critically engage with the gruesome details that applicants (are made to) share. I seek to show that both their sense of self as IND officers and their discretionary—or on-the-spot—decisions (what to ask next, how to respond to emotions) relate to having learned to be moved by, and within the affective complex of suspicious compassion

I would like to start by reflecting on my field notes from the summer of 2015, which demonstrate some of the struggles newly hired IND officers faced while learning how to be affected by an applicant like an IND officer should be affected, that is, how they learned the affective hermeneutics belonging to suspicious compassion. Each newly hired IND officer is supervised by a mentor who talks the junior officer through the asylum hearing and, during breaks, checks the unfinished report of the hearing. In the excerpt below, I describe a conversation between a new IND officer (T) and a more experienced IND officer (J) who is not T’s mentor:

J asks why T did not pose more questions about the applicant’s traditional wedding. T tells her that she would have liked to do so because she had such fun conversations with applicants who cheerfully expand on the wedding. However, T explains that her supervisor always draws big red crosses at the margins of those parts [of the report she is typing up]. He tells her that these weddings really do not matter and that he finds it a true waste of time. J, the other IND officer, passionately opposes this view by explaining that these questions could matter at a later stage. She emphasizes that they are crucial when an applicant applies for family reunification.

Both the supervisor’s big red crosses and J’s fervent opposition to her (absent) colleague’s stance demonstrate how invested IND officers are in their jobs; further, they show how senior officers differently seek to teach a junior officer how to be affected by applicants in specific ways. The example makes clear that there are different ways for officers to engage with applicants and the information they give. While T might experience an (embodied) sense of relief at having a lighter, even cheerful, topic in a procedure otherwise dense with sadness and suspicion, the difference of opinion reveals other forms of care for, or precision in, the application process. J focuses on the potentiality of another procedure (family reunification) aimed at testing the applicant further, while T’s mentor argues that such information adds little to the credibility test within the procedure at hand, which makes it a waste of precious time.

The red crosses illustrate the vulnerability of newer IND officers and their position in relation to the more experienced ones. While experienced officers get to build on their own personal approaches, sensitivities, and knowledges of the procedure without supervision, for newer officers, coming of age precisely means not expressing too much of personal voice. Instead, they are, in a sense, policed by senior officers, as they aim to learn how to be affected by applicants like an IND officer should be. I draw on the same field notes to illustrate the awkward situation of being supervised to affectively act and engage with an applicant like a ‘real’ IND officer:

T tells me that it is quite hard to deal with such different opinions of the IND officers ranked higher than her. She gives me another example, of how she prefers to always kindly say [to an applicant], “Welcome! How are you doing today?” She used to also write this down into the report because, so she tells me, the report needs to reflect the full conversation. Her supervisor told her, “Gee, you do not need to be this nice, you know.” She decided to still say ‘welcome’ but to exclude it from the report and hide it from her supervisor. But soon after she stopped writing it down another colleague told her in astonishment, “You are allowed to be bit kinder, you know? It wouldn’t do much harm if you’d just say ‘welcome’ and ask the person how they are doing.”

Different moments, experiences, and (small) decisions become visible here, from extending kindness to applicants, to hiding acts of kindness from the supervisor, to being chided by another colleague for being unwelcoming. These movements, however big or small, show how the procedure draws on affective encounters between differently positioned people, and how they use several (personal) techniques to engage with applicants who are asked to share their accounts of suffering. Caton and Zacka (2010) argue that the bureaucratic process within state and security apparatuses appropriates initiative and creativity. We can see such initiative in the example of the junior officer insisting on saying ‘Welcome’, and first adding it to the asylum report and then removing it. And while creativity might diminish with experience, an officer’s autonomy (freedom from supervision) grows the more experienced an officer becomes in asking precisely the kind of questions the state power requires in this particular setting. This example is a first step in illustrating that IND officers need to learn to intimately and strategically engage with applicants in order to gather the kind of information a final decision-maker needs in order to perform ‘objective’ decision-making. So, rather than seeing bureaucrats as mere cogs in a state machine, the ‘machine’ itself runs through, and feeds on, the personalities and trained sensitivities of those asked to participate in the asylum process.

To further the argument that IND officers need to feel and affectively act in intimate and strategic ways to perform affective techniques of suspicious compassion, I turn to the experiences of K, one of the many IND officers I followed and interviewed. I observed K as he elaborately interviewed a man who said that he was Palestinian, that he was suffering from grief, and that he had recently seen his house go up in flames due to an Israeli bombing. He also spoke of fearing more violence as a Palestinian if he were to be deported. After the hearing, K told me that he did not believe the applicant because he gave ‘peculiar’ and ‘vague’ answers. K emphasized that it vexed him when a ‘fake’ applicant managed to gain refugee status, and that he was pleased to have potentially stopped a person who he believed was faking his story. This feeling of vexation, so K explained, sometimes raised a sense of uncertainty, causing K to wonder whether he had been fooled by the applicant. K made sure to immediately add that he was fine with people receiving refugee status when they had actually suffered and feared for their lives upon return. The example shows that K is already affectively conditioned to be firmly critical of applicants and to receive stories of suffering with suspicion. As IND officers told me, this suspicion allows only real sufferers to gain refugee status. Hence, compassion for the ‘real’ refugee becomes available through suspicion and suspicion itself is often motivated by a more general compassion, seen in K’s hasty assurance that he was ‘fine’ with ‘real’ refugees being granted refugee status.

Haas (2019: 122), in her work on immigration officers in the United States, notes that these officers “readily owned their decisions to grant asylum”; however, “they would often distance themselves from cases that they denied, thus demonstrating an ambivalent relationship to their own authority and power.” I found the opposite to be true with IND officers. K felt doubt and hesitated to accept an applicant’s claims, especially when he decided in favor of the applicant; he trusted his decision to reject applicants more readily, given the potentiality of ‘deception’. Doubt and uncertainty belong to suspicious compassion: IND officers learned to feel, and not easily let go of, the potential for deceit while always also accounting for the possibility of ‘real’ suffering. These feelings produced a distance between K and the applicant, as the applicant told their story of grief and war. As I show in the next section, feeling and maintaining distance are crucial affective positionings when gathering and interrogating distressing information from applicants and, as such, gaining the kind of access the state needs in order to make and legitimize decisions regarding in- and exclusion.

Another IND officer, who I call N, expressed a stronger commitment to the belief that the procedure offers care and compassion to ‘real’ refugees. For example, N said that, “whatever the exact [national] policies are, I can always cling onto the Geneva Convention,” as that is, according to N, what the procedure is intended to do: protect refugees. In the same conversation, she expressed discomfort and irritation when reading media reports on the work of the IND, especially since she can never publicly defend her work because the procedure is set in a sphere of silence and secrecy. Whenever N read something along the lines of ‘the refugee was denied and detained’, she explained, her first response was to think, “Well, this person is clearly not a refugee because he has been tested on that and was rejected; he is an asylum seeker.” Her statement showed that she trusts that the procedure is accurate in its decisions; those who are rejected are therefore not ‘real’ refugees and should not be framed as such. Her feelings of trusting the system helped her feel that the system functions well to offer care and protection to refugees, but also to sort ‘true’ from ‘fake’ refugees, and that her job supported this system. This form of trust also illustrates how IND officers move with and within the affective complex of suspicious compassion. With their focused and engaged work of putting applicants to tests of suspicion, compassion is made available only to those that ‘deserve’ it.

IND officers (learn to) work and feel with the conditions of who ‘deserves’ and who does not ‘deserve’ refugee status. They, in that sense, need to form specific sensitivities, and, as such, to feel with the logics of un/deservingness. The tension between perceived lies and real stories of suffering, and the ever-present question of “Is this person really sad and afraid, or are they lying?”, mobilizes and affects IND officers in different ways, as I show in the following sections. Next, I delve further into the work of ‘finding bogusness’ and the affective technique of ‘poking’, in which officers sharply observed and responded to applicants’ verbal and non-verbal signs at a hearing in order to test credibility.

Distance and neutrality as affective techniques of suspicious compassion

Three people are seated around a large table. The IND officer is ready to type, looking up while her fingers hover above the keys. The person in front of her, the applicant, starts to talk to the person at the head of the table – a translator – and cries. Immediately the IND officer pushes a box with tissues toward the applicant who takes a tissue and wipes his face while speaking on. The translator lifts her hand briefly and the applicant immediately stops talking. Now the translator looks at the IND officer and speaks in Dutch. She says, “I saw how they killed my mother…” At once the IND officer starts to type and the familiar bureaucratic sound of concentrated typing fills the hearing room. (Field notes, 2016)

This excerpt illustrates the readiness of an IND officer to type the words spoken by the translator into a standard file on her computer screen, and to thus do her job well and produce a report of the asylum hearing. While the IND officer may or may not have noted the applicant’s tears in the report—a decision she made in the moment—she certainly had an object, a box of tissues, that helped her respond to those tears. Tears incite different movements than words, but they belong together in the procedure’s focus on sadness. Tissues and the sound of typing are telling of a procedure in which texts are produced and emotions dealt with. The box of tissues and the IND officer’s readiness to type each word illustrate a process where intimate details need to be gathered, shared, and transformed into an object, a text, that gets to travel to the next stop in the itinerary, where another IND officer, one who did not witness tears, tone of voice, hesitancy or silence, gets to make a decision over the account and its ‘truthfulness’. Asylum hearings are crucial moments of inscribing the applicant into a set of official documents and, as such, transforming the affective atmosphere in which an IND officer engages with the applicant to evaluate their ‘un/deservingness’.

Unlike Vollebergh, De Koning and Marchesi (2021: 749), who show how social welfare bureaucrats ‘underperform’ the state in order to intimately engage with their publics, I found that IND officers engage in an asymmetrical kind of intimacy that is made clear to all who participate. At times, this rather felt like an ‘overperformance’ of state-ness, as IND officers need to be on the side of the decision, meaning they keep an affective distance in order to remain critical and ‘neutral’. Moreover, while Vollebergh and colleagues (2021) show the potential unruliness of intimacy, which rests on long-term investments on the side of bureaucrats, the IND’s procedural design prevents officers from forming long-term bonds. In IND hearings, any intimacy is brief and asymmetrical, as officers swiftly move in and out of an application process, enabling the kind of distance the hearing needs in order to critically gather information.

In addition to the setting of the hearing and the unfamiliarity between the IND officer and the applicant, an IND officer is also trained to affectively perform distance, which was sometimes explained to me as professionalism or neutrality, as the following quote illustrates:

Yeah, my starting position is zero, like, “We are just going to have a conversation and, of course, I have prepared for it, I read your history so far [the applicant’s history within the procedure] but we are just going to have a conversation: this is zero and I’ll assume that what you are saying is correct.” That is my starting position. (IND officer, 2017, my emphasis)

The quote shows that neutrality is imagined to equate to zero-ness: there is, as the IND officer presents it, nothing yet between the IND officer and this particular applicant, and such nothingness allowed the IND officer to temporarily trust the applicant. Neutrality in this conceptualization relates to a trained sensitivity for truth or credibility because when information is gathered, suspicion unfolds from a so-called position of neutrality. Information in itself is not neutral, as it is not ‘zero’, it is rather seen as something to be scrutinized with affects of suspicious compassion, including caution, doubt, hesitation, or distanced empathy, expressed by taking a break or offering a drink when an applicant cries. The following quote further illustrates how IND officers understand their role and how they seek to perform distance in proximity, which I see as an affective position belonging to suspicious compassion:

In the end, you are a professional slash neutral person, and I do not help him [the applicant] when I start crying along, and, by the way, by crying along you might arouse hope, he might think like “Oh, she empathizes, now I might get a permit.” (IND officer, 2015)

Neutrality, here, is characterized by an affective conditioning of proximity: the person is seen up close and sensed, but an IND officer should not ‘cry along’ or ‘arouse hope’, as doing so would share a non-neutral message, one of situatedness. Again, neutrality appears as an affective work toward blandness, toward not taking a position. In this way, neutrality provides an active absence as it becomes an affective effort to refrain and to try to not give an applicant a clue about the decision that will indeed be made by another and on grounds other than the encounter itself. IND officers thus manage an atmosphere that should neither be overly suspicious nor compassionate.

These are the affective positions—performing distance, observing emotions, performing professionalism, being cautious about what to believe and what not, and making sure not to be too ‘kind’ or to ‘cry along’ in order not to give hope—of suspicious compassion. Together, they compose an atmosphere for the hearing as one of a tense distance, with a focus on sadness and suffering.

In what follows, I share fieldwork fragments from one asylum hearing, and describe how these moments were selectively inscribed into the asylum report, in order to illustrate the work of gathering information from applicants and producing the asylum report. This is the case of N, who told the IND officer (P) that she fled China due to forced prostitution:

P: “Do I understand correctly that your mother was beaten to death?” The translator says ‘yes’ without translating P’s remark. P types it down. [P is typing with two fingers, extraordinarily loudly]. N: “So I was alone in the brothel then, until recently I hadn’t gotten an opportunity to flee.” After a brief moment of silence the translator adds: “Miss N wishes not to share too many details about it.” P: “Well, yes, but that’s exactly the point: we need to know your story in detail.” N shakes her head. P: “You’re refusing?” Translator confirms. P: “Madame [he raises his voice], I have to urge you that if you do not tell your story [he does not finish his sentence] … it is up to you to share everything of importance. Do you understand?” (Field notes, 2015)

The preparation of the report interfered with the hearing: the loud sound of typing and the IND officer’s full focus on his computer screen broke up the questioning, and although the loudness was specific to this particular IND officer’s style, the presence of the computer screen and the interruptions for typing and translation are characteristic of the atmosphere of the hearing. Sometimes, the tense moments of interruption and the distance between an IND officer and an applicant were aided by the focus on typing up a report. N and the translator needed to carefully keep up with P’s rhythm of typing, which illustrates once more the asymmetry at the hearing, where the IND officer is in charge of the conversation:

P: “Miss, did we get the full story now, is this all you want to bring in?” N: “I was taken to a shelter.” P raises his voice: “But that is not what I’m asking, what I want to know is if we’ve got the full account now?” N: “I feel I am getting less freedom here.” P: “Yes, but that was not my question, did you tell your full story now?” The translator says: “She is not happy with her life.” P: “But is this all!?” Translator: “She hopes to escape her miserable life.” P: “Yes, yes, but did you say everything you need to say?” (Field notes, 2015)

While N was moved to (guardedly) ‘open up’ in order to stand a chance at inclusion, P was moved in another way. During a break, P told me that he was certain that N was ‘making it all up’, and recalled a lesbian couple from Russia and how strongly he felt that they truly ‘deserved’ refugee status as they were ‘genuine’. His compassion for this couple invigorated the irritation he expressed for N’s claim. Differently put, the IND officer listened to N in relation to other applicants whose stories he had heard. His suspicion, and the affects that belong to it—like irritation and disbelief—and his particular style relate to, or are intensified by, his feelings about applicants he felt truly ‘deserved’ both refugee status and his attention. The IND officer’s belief that a ‘deceptive’ applicant took up the space exclusively reserved for the ‘real’ refugee, affected his manner of interrogating N and contingently produced what I experienced to be a chillingly unkind atmosphere.

In order to show how only a carefully selected part of the asylum hearing circulates to the next node of the procedural itinerary, I quote from the section of the report that presented the above moment in the hearing to demonstrate how P transformed—and absented—his expressions of disbelief into the report:

You will now be given the opportunity to recall in your own words the direct reasons for having left your country of origin. I would like to ask you to keep to the chronological order of your account, and where possible to add names, locations and dates.

After this sentence, the report presented an extensive and quite literal paragraph of most of what N had stated in a slightly different order, but absenting and thus institutionally forgetting many sentences and tense silences. While affective movements were crucial in how P gathered this account, the report is a device of actively forgetting those and foregrounding text alone. As such, the applicant is foregrounded, enabling decision-makers to rather forget about the practice of reporting; as Kristin (Drybread, 2022: 110) puts it, the “individual’s file [is taken] to be an accurate representation of his character.” The first time P appeared again, after the extensive paragraph, is in the following sentence in the report:

I need to stress that it is up to you to reveal everything of importance in relation to the reasons for having left your country. Do you understand that?

The IND officer’s irritated tone was absented from the report, so much so that one could have read empathy into the edited formulation of his questions. But P’s tone of voice is not taken out altogether; rather, it is altered and seems to be (and could potentially be read as) rather encouraging. The IND officer’s representation of the hearing allowed for a different understanding of the conversation. It may seem that the IND officer was more passive than he was, which allowed the reader to focus on the applicant’s answers. Absence in this work of transformation was generative in another way: it produced an affective potential in a decision-maker who was unaware of P’s irritation and thus was able to read a different tone of voice into the sentences. Hence, P’s tone of voice, his loud and increasingly aggressive typing, and the ways he sought to challenge N into giving specific answers disappeared, and the report presented a smooth conversation that foregrounded N’s words.

While various affects and affective modes of engaging with the applicant took center stage at the hearing, they disappeared in the report, hidden underneath sentences purposefully rid of this specific affective context. This is an important technique belonging to suspicious compassion, as the procedure is designed in such a way that IND officers only see an applicant once, before moving on to another application process. The trained affective position, that of neutral distance as discussed in the previous sections, gets to flourish over potentially unruly affects that might ensue if IND officers formed a more enduring relation with the applicant. The state thus needs affective engagement, but never too much, and always in the controlled and productive setting of the asylum hearing.

Something is gained and lost in the bureaucratic work of transforming the person applying for asylum into a text that is personal yet standardized, and silent about the reporting practices and context. While distance is crafted, the affective contingencies of the hearing are purposefully elided, which means that the reader of the report cannot but read (and trust) an incomplete presentation of the hearing as if it were the full and active account of the person applying. The entextualized applicant thereby becomes the subject of evaluation, as the context of its making is invisibilized. This silent constancy of the report, by doing away with what is seen as the necessary ‘noise’ of the hearing, becomes a method for granting a compassion that is achieved through suspicion.

In the quiet of ‘objective’ suspicious compassion

A hearing is unlike any other kind of conversation. It is really very intensive, and when you have been conducting hearings for three days in a row [for different applications] … well, then I’m very happy to be able to make a decision in a quiet room. Obviously, that is not an easy job at all but there is no interaction needed to make a decision. (IND officer, 2016)

While some IND officers told me they find decision-making boring, as they prefer ‘human contact’ and/or feel it is too much of a responsibility, others expressed a strong preference for the quiet that grants them the freedom of ‘puzzling’ over the account. These preferences show once more that decision-making and conducting an asylum hearing are almost opposed IND practices situated within a single application. While interacting with a person who will be subjected to a decision can be experienced as emotionally draining, the practice of decision-making composes another affective atmosphere, one of quiet, face-to-file interaction (cf. Van Oorschot, 2014). This particular affective mode of engaging with the report is imagined to increase the ‘objectivity’ of the decision.

The decision-maker’s job is to critically dissect the account of suffering, and it is the quiet of a familiar kind of text—they are, unlike applicants themselves, all alike—that helps the officer to focus on the details that matter and that match norms of ‘un/deservingness’. This particular practice of detaching the decision-maker from the applicant in person is aimed at what Bergman Blix and Wettergren (2019) recognize in Swedish immigration courts as a form of ‘positivist objectivity’. This is an objectivity imagined to be “a ‘point zero’ position in which people, by the use of instrumental or pure rationality, free themselves from all physical and social affiliations and acquire knowledge through independent empirical observations and evidence” (Bergman Blix and Wettergren, 2019: 4–5). In this section, I explore how the itinerary is designed to produce a specific atmosphere of quiet ‘objectivity work’ (Bergman Blix and Wettergren, 2019: 5), an affective mode that allows for a specific and precise reading-for-the-worst to flourish.

While this section, like the former, cannot fully do justice to the complexity of the practice of decision-making, for the purposes of this paper I focus on two accounts of IND officers that relate how they reached their decisions, in order to demonstrate their critically (re-)reading of the applicant. The first account came from an experienced IND officer who had worked for the IND for about 20 years. He rejected the applicant (Q) who said that he fled his country due to the threat of blood revenge. While he read the reports, the IND officer listened to classical music and wrote a note on a separate piece of paper whenever he noticed something he deemed important. When I arrived, he showed me a book about blood revenge in the US South many decades ago and told me that the book had stimulated his ability to imagine and empathize with the situation of blood revenge in general. This was a contingent decision he made, to read the book and to be creative with his imagination.

Although this sparking of the imagination affected the IND officer’s understanding of Q’s case, it was not (and it did not have to be) recorded in the report. His methods thus went unseen, which again reveals how the itinerary works: a decision is made and made possible by different people, all of whom make choices based on their trained affective understanding of how to ‘read’ and interpret applicants; these choices, at least in part, become active absences in the report and decision. This practice is also part of the itinerary’s work toward making what are seen to be ‘objective’ decisions over subjective accounts of sadness and suffering, pursued in detaching decision-makers from applicants in person and attaching them to applicants in text, allowing IND officers their own rhythms and rituals of reading, evaluating, and deciding over a person’s life. The IND officer explained how he started making his decision:

Alright, I always begin by reading the first hearing and the second hearing. I have just finished reading the second hearing [report]. I scanned it, and so I also already learned that he really didn’t have any problems and that it will quite likely be a rejection. When I am reading the second hearing again, I am looking at whether or not I’m going to find everything non-credible… the whole story… because it all seems rather vague. But maybe there are elements [storylines, details] that might be true. (IND officer, 2015)

This officer’s comments reveal a sense of certainty and conviction in rejecting the credibility of the applicant, which is an intuitive and affective reading of the textualized applicant, related to the officer’s expertise within the procedure and to how he has been trained to think and feel like an IND officer. He learned to quickly scan a report and notice details that, to his trained vision, appeared as ‘vague’. Both his focus on non-credibility, a kind of reading-for-the-worst (a search for reasons to cause doubt), and his experience as a decision-maker enabled him to swiftly surmise that the account was likely not credible.

As shown in the previous section, the decision is not the first time the IND takes charge of the account, as the itinerary has already molded the applicant’s account by subjecting them to the critical questions posed earlier by different IND hearing officers, who may have considered certain aspects crucial in relation to others. The decision-maker reads the report ‘fresh’, and consequently mobilizes his own knowledge and (embodied) experiences that belong to making decisions. This following statement by the same IND officer further illustrates this:

In the way in which he speaks about it… there is not much that makes me think, “Hey but this is true” … So actually, I don’t believe any of these elements to be credible, I mean that nothing in his account really convinces me in the way that… ehm. Well! For example: I find this really very implausible, that he tried to leave [country of origin] so many times, fifty times! Because… well, he could have just left [country of origin].

The IND officer could not believe that the applicant had tried to flee ‘so many times’. While I myself might not have noticed this statement, the IND officer immediately saw this and recognized it as an ‘implausible’ detail, showing once more how IND officers are trained to be cautious and to be affected by specific details that may un/make the credibility of an account. In his trained reading, the number ‘fifty’ stood out, but the IND officer never heard it emphasized; instead, he read it as if it was emphasized. Whether either the hearing officer or the applicant meant that specific detail to stand out does not matter so much as the case was now fully subjected to the decision-maker’s vision and sense of ‘un/truth’. The point is not to question if the IND officer was right to consider the number (or the many-ness) of attempts made, but to show that the text in its quietness allowed the decision-maker to read emphasis or tone into the silenced account.

The quiet of his office, filled with his choice of classical music, resonates with other kinds of relative quiet or tense silences that I observed during my time in the procedure: the quiet intensity of the detention center, so closed-off to outsiders, and the quiet of IND officers who never publicly shared the details of their work. So too, ‘objective’ decision-making takes place in a kind of quiet that shapes objectivity work in the procedure. This affective atmosphere of quiet, a contrast to the atmosphere at the hearing, allows for a careful reviewing and reading-for-the-worst. With this next excerpt, I further illustrate how reading-for-the-worst can also lead to inclusion and acceptance, as it is the intertwinement of suspicion and compassion that mobilizes IND officers to critically scrutinize applicants and to find ‘deservingness’ by undoing suspicion. The following IND officer decided to believe that C, who applied for asylum on the basis of being gay, was telling the truth:

Look, she stated that she made a video of her and her second partner in [country], that was something that made me think, “Well, she is taking a big risk with that in a place like [country],” something she was well aware of because she had been caught before. So, I thought that was a bit vague but it would not ground a full rejection because well, I do believe that she is a lesbian.

The quotes reveal that a ‘truthful’ account of violence and persecution becomes visible in the absence of ‘reasons to doubt’ it. While, in his close reading, the IND officer did find aspects he considered vague, he did not find details and storylines disputing the applicant’s main claim for inclusion, which is sexuality. This positive evaluation also was based on a reading-for-the-worst, in the sense that the officer was cautious and on the lookout for gaps and inconsistencies. As gaps and inconsistencies are assigned to the applicant (and not, or at least not regularly, to the hearing itself), the lack thereof is also assigned to the applicant. Consequently, the applicant appeared credible because of the IND officer’s search for such gaps and inconsistencies. In other words, his reading-for-the-worst led to a positive decision in the absence of doubt.

The objective decision, like objectivity beyond decisions as Daston and Galison (2007) also show, operates through distance-making. Distance is produced via the textualization of the applicant. The itinerary is staged in such a way that the applicant is included in the tense first half of the application process, the hearings, but then excluded in the second part when the report, as a tool toward objectivity, performs distance in its circulation. The quiet of the report allows for the careful and systematic abstraction of relevant details and the relations between these elements, always in relation to the conditions of ‘un/deservingness’. In particular, these decision-makers demonstrate that the reported account of suffering was fully subjected to their authoritative reading-for-the-worst, resulting, in the last example, in a positive decision. As such, the report allows for a creative refolding of storylines into decision arguments. The report is meant to ensure that the IND officer’s view is as unbiased as possible: a strong but ‘unbiased’ reading-for-the-worst is valued as the more objective position, a sharper form of IND subjectivity through which decisions over ‘un/deservingness’ can be made and justified.

Conclusion

I have developed the concept of suspicious compassion by studying IND subjectivities—how they learned to see and feel like an IND officer—and the institutional environment that shapes the tense practices and affective techniques of the procedure. By turning to embodied experiences, affective techniques and relations, I argue that, in this context, state power is actualized in and with the different affective modes comprising the affective complex of suspicious compassion. State power is forceful in how it parasitically inhabits the vision, intuition and the sensitivities of its bureaucrats, shaping the gatherings and encounters through which applicants are routinely, swiftly, and contingently moved to a final decision. By bringing together scholarship on suspicion and compassion in contexts of asylum as well as research on intimate states and affective bureaucracies, I endeavored to move beyond a single focus on uniform (and erratic) emotions and into multiple affective relations staged along an itinerary that seeks to both mobilize specific affects and rule out ‘unruly’ effects of affective governance.

My own intimate nearness to the practices of the procedure allowed me to observe how IND officers’ bodies were included and affectively mobilized, showing how state power controls and draws on and, as such, repeatedly comes into being through trained affects and the relations staged between applicants and IND officers. IND officers and their personalities light up in encounters staged along the procedural itinerary, only to be dimmed again at the next stop when another officer takes over. The separation of hearing and decision-making—done under the heading of neutrality and objectivity—illustrates how state power relies on contingent and affective work and encounters (face-to-face and face-to-file), in a highly controlled, regulated and swift manner in order to prevent intimate or personal relations to unfold. Here, a Weberian detached, indifferent bureaucracy melds with Vollebergh and colleagues’ (2022) unruly, intimate bureaucracy, in a peculiar move that draws on both intimacy and detachment in performing life-altering decisions over in- and exclusion.