Suspended solidarity: the experience of precarity and the chronopolitics of support in Australia’s asylum regime
2026-07-14
This article examines how the Australian asylum regime’s chronopolitics, the strategic use of indefinite delays, actively constructs a state of indeterminate liminality for both people seeking asylum and the associated support sector. Drawing on ethnographic data, it is argued that bureaucratic processes function as systems of suffering, where weaponized time serves as a tool of affective violence. The support sector faces a fundamental chronopolitical tension as it navigates a punitive state apparatus. The system’s design co-opts supporters’ sustained commitments, to be consumed by the protracted limbo of the asylum process. This shared temporal condition is characterized by an exhaustion of potentiality, where state-sanctioned stalling prevents those seeking refuge from constructing meaningful futures while simultaneously consuming the agency of the supporter in a cycle of permanent crisis management. The regime’s designed precarity perpetuates this bureaucratic stasis, resulting in suspended solidarity and constituting an embedded form of bureaucratic violence.