Paper short abstract:

My paper looks at the tactics of identity refusal among West African nationals in face of the German migration/asylum/deportation regime that forces them into the asylum system and predestines them for rejection and thus for immediate deportation as soon as they have the necessary travel documents.

Paper long abstract:

One of the characteristics of the modern-colonial nation-state is the appropriation and monopolization of legitimate means of movement in form of passports and other documents regulating citizens and non-citizens mobility (Torpey 2000). My paper looks at the comparatively vicious control exercised by the German state towards non-citizens within the asylum system, and the strategies, or rather, tactics of non-citizens to evade control and reclaim some of their mobility rights. Drawing from interviews done during my field work with West African asylum seekers in Germany, related to my ongoing PhD-research, I look at the non-passport, asylum fraud and identity refusal as exemplary tactics of faking in order to survive in face of deportation or other state violence, and to open a possible access to social rights. Following recent scholarship in legal anthropology (Abarca / Coutin 2018; Horton 2015), I seek to understand these as rational options to act in face of seemingly arbitrary state obstruction of (legal) entry and stay, in the context of a mobility segregation within the EU and its externalised "border zones", ever deepening with the management of the "refugee crisis" since 2015. These tactics appear as faking only so far as the state has also monopolized the means of producing truth, often expressed in the language of legality.