In his encounter with the archive of power, Michel Foucault (2000) reminds us that ‘real lives were enacted [jouées] in these sentences; by this I don’t mean that they were represented, but that their liberty, their misfortune, often their death, in any case their fate, were actually decided therein, at least in part’. Records of asylum cases and appeals are such an archive of power, where the lives of asylum seekers are enacted on a scene of global politics.

Judges, lawyers, case officers and asylum seekers map and counter-map spaces of power, violence and cruelty. They speculate over the temporalities of (in)security. By combining methods of distant and close reading, the talk reads both along and against the grain of this archive to trace how global politics is enacted in the asylum archives, while simultaneously attending to the traces of wayward politics that is rendered unknowable and unintelligible. 

This session is chaired by Beste İşleyen

ACES Visiting Scholar

Between 9 May-3 June 2022, Claudia Aradau, Professor of International Politics in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London, is ACES visiting scholar. During her visit, Professor Aradau will give a public lecture, lead a workshop for PhD students and early career scholars and be part of a public seminar at ACES. Additionally, a reading group session will discuss what intersections between postcolonialism and postsocialism mean for International Relations.