Paper short abstract

Hostile bodily gestures by migration agency officers shape suspicion in asylum appeal hearings. These affective practices have the potential to influence credibility assessments and unsettle the room, and they contribute to an understanding of how atmospheres govern asylum adjudication.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how hostile bodily language by litigating officers from the Swedish Migration Agency functions as and becomes a tool of migration governance in asylum appeal hearings in the Swedish Migration Courts. Drawing on ethnographic observations and building on Bens’ concept of the courtroom as an affective arrangement (2018), I explore how atmospheres of suspicion are produced through embodied, affected practices such as chair-rocking, rolling of eyes, tapping of pens, and strategic glances at judges. These gestures, whilst perhaps easily dismissed as isolated or deviant ‘lapses’ in professionalism, can shape the conditions under which appellants must perform credibility, narrowing and unsettling the space for testimony.

I argue that these behavioral displays contradict the purpose of a court hearing: ensuring due process and avoiding making the “wrong mistake” of denying a legitimate asylum claim (Cameron, 2018). Judges’ inaction in the face of these disturbing displays, as well as the lack of public scrutiny due to asylum hearings often happening behind closed doors, signals which actors are punished for expressing themselves freely, and which are not. Obtaining hearing access as a researcher further reveals how credibility is managed affectively: researchers must perform professionalism to be allowed, whilst the migration agency have enormous “leeway”.

These dynamics reflect broader shifts in asylum governance, intensified by pressures to expedite cases. The paper contributes to anthropological debates on atmospheres and affective governance by demonstrating that credibility is shaped not only through testimony but also through the affective environment of suspicion that permeates asylum adjudication.