Paper short abstract:

/

Paper long abstract:

As response to a "crisis" of asylum in Europe - its reconfiguration through the intersection of migration management and security issues - human rights organizations have strongly argued for the need to improve safeguards for asylum applicants. Currently, within the development of a Common European Asylum System, the identification of victim-survivors of torture has emerged as important for enabling access to health care, as well as better information for the asylum procedure. In this paper I address medico-legal and psychological documentation of torture as a particular technology that seeks to make the aftermath of violence susceptible to administrative control. I will discuss some ambiguities that emerge when NGO and state representatives negotiate the inclusion or exclusion of different categories of migrants and I will relate multisited ethnography (Ireland and Spain) to perspectives from governmentality studies.