Paper short abstract:

The present paper examines how Sri Lankan Tamils construct their life stories to seek asylum in France. It will focus on how unequal relations between asylum seekers and immigration institutions create both processes of subjection and forms of resistance.

Paper long abstract:

This paper provides a reflection on institutional biographies, namely on the relationship between Sri Lankan Tamil asylum seekers and French asylum courts. It will be mainly based on an ethnographic investigation carried out at an office for the drafting of life narratives for Sri Lankan Tamils seeking asylum in France. Data collected during judicial hearings at the French asylum courts, and interviews with lawyers, judges, immigration officers, physicians and asylum seekers, between 2009 and today, shall also be presented.

How do these asylum seekers turn their life memories - often marked by violent episodes - into judicial accounts, in the attempt to persuade their examiners to grant them political refugee status? What are the "state effects" (Mitchell 1999) of the procedure?

My hypothesis is that asylum claims produce two phenomena. On one hand, a process of subjectivisation is engendered, where refugees are subjected to the state and encouraged to develop self-awareness as subjects of individual stories and rights (Fassin 2000, 2004). On the other hand, forms of resistance to exclusion and to the process of individualization induced by the asylum procedure (which, in Europe, treats every case individually) are also produced. To give more credibility to theirs statements, Tamils often describe events that did not happen to them but to someone whose story they know. A shared knowledge, which asylum seekers may use to complete their judicial account, is therefore created, as a form of resistance to individual treatment, perceived as a negation of their collective history.