Self-Care, Experiences of Protection and Continuous Crisis in the Everyday of Refugees in Norway and Switzerland

Author(s) : Carolin Fischer, Manuel Insberg

Source : https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2025.2464143

Abstract:

“In recent years, activists and scholars from different disciplines have criticised the tightening asylum governance and the limits of the right to asylum in Europe. This paper shifts the focus to those asylum seekers who successfully accessed European grounds and were granted legal protection. It explores how their lives unfold once they have reached a legal safe haven. What are everyday meanings and experiences of legal protection? And how do they engage with these experiences? To address these questions, we draw on ethnographic research conducted among persons who received refugee status in Norway and Switzerland. Vigh’s concept of navigation combined with theoretical approaches to self-care help us explore how these persons experience and act upon the forces shaping different dimensions and implications of asylum as an everyday condition. Our findings show that the way asylum is governed at the everyday level promotes a situation of continuous crisis rather than facilitating experiences of encompassing protection. Much of what we identify as driving this crisis is closely related to the principles of refugee governance and the emphasis placed on integration requirements. As a result, these refugees remain stuck in the position of a perpetual other with few possibilities to build on their capacities to aspire. At the same time, we find that they navigate conditions of crisis in different ways to evade imminent constraints and restrictions while also trying to generate moments of recovery and self-care. We argue that there is a need to reconsider the self-image of liberal states as safe havens and to work towards lasting transformations of the structures and associated power relations that create and uphold the identified limitations of legal protection and that turn asylum into a condition of continuous struggle.”