Bureaucratic and benign? The violent continuum of Home Office reporting in the UK

Abstract

The border, the body, immigration reporting centres, and detention facilities, the violence of border regimes operates across these sites through a continuum, successively steering migrants towards subjugation, destitution and removal. Adopting a feminist framing of violence, which attends to the inherent interconnectedness between different sites and scales of violence, this paper focuses on immigration reporting to examine how its sites and practices enact various forms of violence over migrant bodies. Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with asylum-seekers in Bristol and Salford, I argue that a host of spatiotemporal practices produce various forms of violence which become intimately inflicted and experienced, and yet which are inextricably tethered to the foundational logics of sovereign state politics. How reporting sites and processes function reflect the contemporary means through which violence is both imposed and concealed on those who have been categorised as ‘unwanted’ by the state.