ABSTRACT
Having described the economic rights and entitlements of people who make an application for asylum in the UK in Chapter 2, this chapter lays out how I propose we theorise the purposeful impoverishment of people who are seeking asylum by the UK government. The chapter proposes that we theorise policies of purposeful impoverishment as postcolonial structural and slow violence (Nixon, 2011) in dialogue with Mbembe’s (2003) theory of necropolitics, and Shilliam’s (2018) work on race and the undeserving poor. This framework is underpinned by the idea of the colonial present and is informed and inspired by literatures from postcolonial and decolonial theory. The chapter entails an extended elaboration of this conceptual framework, which forms the basis of analysis of empirical material in Chapters 4, 5 and 6.
