Moral Bureaucracies: Objects, Values and Affects in a UK Asylum Office

Abstract

ABSTRACT British asylum bureaucracy carries a paradoxical mandate: To allocate humanitarian protection while operating inside a policy regime explicitly designed to deter. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in a Home Office decision‐making office, this article examines how that contradiction is materialized in mundane bureaucratic objects—a whiteboard, a letter and a plastic folder—and how it shapes the moral and emotional work of the staff who handle asylum claims. Each object simultaneously depersonalizes the asylum applicant and serves as a surface on which caseworkers perform a residual ethics of personalization. Against accounts that locate bureaucratic power in emotional detachment, moral distance, or indifference, I argue that the power of asylum bureaucracy lies in its capacity to sustain a promise of care against an institutional architecture of fear and suspicion. The article contributes to anthropological work on asylum paperwork, materiality, and the affective life of the state.