Disciplining Asylum Seekers through Infrastructure: Everyday-Power Effects Of Enforced Paralysation and Activation in Switzerland

Abstract

Based on ethnographic research, this article offers a study of how asylum seekers are governed throughout their stay in asylum camps in Switzerland. It uses street-level narratives to first answer the question of how they are disciplined and why, revealing categories of exclusion, embedded in discriminatory structures. Second, it shows how the highly paradoxical regime of asylum reception has created an architecture of mundane, but no less global and significant violence. Deeply embedded in and facilitated by the material and spatio-temporal infrastructure of arrival, it regulates, orders, controls, disciplines, and seeks to educate individuals “in waiting”, placed in a state of forced paralysis of indeterminate duration, while setting high neoliberal expectations for productivity and integration. Finally, it traces the street-level workers’ perception of the migrant to notice potential changes throughout the procedure. This reveals how social categories are created and structural inequalities reflected in the biopolitical regulation applied.

Keywords: activation; asylum reception; biopolitical; disciplining; ethnography; infrastructure; paralysation; Switzerland