The Location of Truth. Bodies and Voices in the Italian Asylum Procedure

This article analyzes the role increasingly played by oral testimonies in asylum procedures in the years 2011-2013, when the Arab spring and the war in Libya caused a sharp increase in the number of migrants entering Italy, as well as a peak in rejections and a clogging of the system. Drawing from ethnographic cases, I suggest that in Italy the predominance of the oral testimony was based on assumptions about the scientific objectivity and neutrality of interviewing and translation techniques. While such assumptions fall apart under scrutiny, revealing all assessment techniques (both of documental evidence and oral testimony) as spaces of contestation, I argue that they are productive in allowing to coat the sharp hardening of European asylum policies under supposedly neutral technicalities. Moreover, at times of perceived “refugee crises”, the mere assessment of the oral narrative allowed for easier and speedier rejections.