Impoverishment and Asylum: Social Policy as Slow Violence(Routledge Advances in Sociology)

Impoverishment and Asylum argues that a shift has taken place in recent decades towards construing asylum as primarily a political and/or humanitarian phenomenon, to construing it as primarily an economic phenomenon, and that this shift has had led to the purposeful impoverishment, by the state, of people seeking asylum in the UK. This shift has far-reaching consequences for people seeking asylum, who have been systematically impoverished as part of the effort to strip out any possibility of an economic pull factor leading to more arrivals, but also for those administering their support system, and for civil society organisations and groups who seek to ameliorate the worst effects of the resulting asylum regimes. This book argues that within this context asylum support policies in the UK which are meant to help and protect, in fact do serious harm to their recipients. It argues that the shift from construing asylum seekers as economically, rather than politically, motivated migrants across the West, is part of a much broader set of historical and philosophical worldviews than has previously been articulated. The book offers a rigorously researched and richly theorised analysis drawing on postcolonial and decolonial perspectives in making sense of the purposeful impoverishment by the state of a particular group of people, and why this continues to be tolerated in the fourth richest country in the world.

Table of Contents:
1. Introduction; 2. Economic Rights and Seeking Asylum; 3. Historicising and Theorising Impoverishment and Asylum; 4. Producing Slow Violence: Imagining Asylum as Economic Migration; 5. Ameliorating Slow Violence: Civil Society as Gap Filler; 6. Slow Violence: Everyday Life on Asylum Support; 7. Conclusion: Impoverishment and Asylum.

About the Author :
Lucy Mayblin is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Sheffield. She is the author of numerous publications in the field of refugee and migration studies, including the book Asylum After Empire: Colonial Legacies in the Politics of Asylum Seeking (2017), which won the Philip Abrams Memorial Prize from the British Sociological Association.

Review :
"Unlike the slow violence that pervades this book, any reader concerned with social injustice will be moved to devour this searing text at a fast pace. In a theoretically sophisticated and empirically rich account, Lucy Mayblin shines a light on the logics of differential humanity and purposeful impoverishment that lie at the centre of asylum policy in the UK. This book is compelling, insightful, urgent and brilliantly written. I implore you to read it." — Louise Waite, Professor of Human Geography, University of Leeds, UK "Mayblin's book is the first to uncover in great detail the ramifications of the UK's policy of asylum seeker impoverishment on the everyday lives of asylum seekers. Introducing the idea of slow violence she unpicks the multiple harms occasioned by the state against asylum seekers and highlights the role of civil society in offering some amelioration of the state's actions. This book is essential reading for anyone who cares about refugees and asylum seekers: policymakers, practitioners, academics, students and human rights activists." — Jenny Phillimore, Professor of Migration and Superdiversity and Director of the Institute for Research into Superdiversity, University of Birmingham, UK