Between morality and the law: negotiating protection for queer asylum seekers in Niger’s asylum administration

Moral economies of asylum can be shaped by conflicts between legal norms to protect queer refugees and dominant heteronormativity. Beyond bureaucrats’ own moral subjectivities, this article suggests that organizational designs and procedures importantly shape the way they resolve such moral conflicts. In contrast to the single-agent decision-making familiar in the Global North, many states in the Global South use inter-ministerial eligibility committees composed of multiple (non-)state actors for the asylum decision-making. This article provides the first ethnographic research on such a committee in Niger. I argue that when the first queer migrants sought asylum in Niger, this organizational structure allowed for the active negotiation of procedures with UNHCR, further investigations on an applicant’s sexual orientation and gender identity by laypeople in the ‘morality check,’ and the weighing of normatively loaded evidence in the deliberation. Despite hegemonic heteronormativity, this organizational structure made protecting queer refugees to an object of negotiation and institutional emergence between these diverse actors, rather than precluding it from the outset. This suggests a relational, processual perspective on moral economies that centers procedures as a means of conflict resolution and their effects on the knowledge production of asylum seekers.