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WHY CREDIBILITY?

In the context of ‘Fortress Europe’ national and supra-national borders have been proliferating (Green 2013: 355; Fassin 2011; Belcher, Martin & Tazzioli 2015; Demetriou & Dimova 2018). Current research indicates that asylum systems are largely ineffective and fail to serve the victims of human rights’ violations who seek their protection, resulting in significant legal, moral and socio-economic deficits (Cabot 2014; Garelli et.al., 2018 De Genova 2020;  Darling 2014, 2016; Demetriou 2019; Kirtsoglou and Tsimouris 2018; World Bank 2017). Asylum-seeking structures routinely create bureaucracies that operate as complex, political technologies of power, intensely productive of destitute, vulnerable and precarious lives (cf. Ticktin 2011; Khosravi 2017; Coddington, Conlon & Martin 2020; Bakonyi 2020). An important function at the core of asylum systems in the UK and Europe is judging the validity of received claims. The validity of asylum claims rests on assessing the credibility of the applicant and her/his case (cf. Thomas 2011: 34; Jobe 2020). This is a process that typically involves weighting and triangulating the applicant’s narrative against a body of knowledge termed ‘country of origin information’, collected and collated from sources of differential legitimacy that span from INGO-issued country reports to public media and the internet. It has been suggested that the manner in which such information is read and juxtaposed to the testimony of the applicant largely depends on the adjudicator’s subjective interpretation (cf Sertler 2018; Jobe 2020).  

CREDIBILITY: The aim of the project is to combine the expertise of different disciplines into a scoping research that will cast novel analytical light on the politics of credibility that underpin the reported ineffectiveness of legal structures of refugee protection. Our objectives are: [1] to retrace the process of asylum claim assessments in order to map how pathways of credibility are being constructed and to identify key sites in this process where (in)credibility is being produced; [2] to investigate how credibility is connected to and affected by (a) existing legal and policy categories, (b) processes of knowledge production that form the basis of the ‘country of origin information’, (c) notions of what constitutes ‘evidence’ and patterns of evidence interpretation.