A Matter of Individual Discretion: Facilitating Performative Credibility in Asylum Interviews

ABSTRACT This article discusses performative credibility in asylum interviews, which are regarded as the most important single event in the asylum process. Despite this importance, and although there are studies that focus on asylum interviews, there is very little research regarding how the interviews are facilitated – that is, how the interviewers guide the interview through the introduction they provide, the questions they ask, and the order in which they ask those questions. The current article contributes to filling this gap by looking at asylum interviews as performances, in which the right to seek asylum is decided not only by what the applicant says but also by how they say it. The article calls this expectation placed upon the asylum applicant ‘performative credibility’. The article asks how asylum interviews facilitate performative credibility, and answers this question by analysing the discourses of facilitation and question orders in 43 asylum interview records from the Finnish Immigration Service. The findings indicate that facilitation is uncommon in the interviews, that there is no all-encompassing way of going about it, and that it happens largely at the discretion of the individual interviewer. This means that, while a small number of applicants are facilitated, others may not even be made aware of the roles and rules of performative credibility, including that their performance is assessed during the interview, meaning that these applicants are left in a disadvantaged position. The current article seeks to make an important contribution to the field of refugee studies by showing how asylum interviews can facilitate – or not – the kinds of detailed and coherent narratives assessed to be credible and truthful in asylum decision making.