ABSTRACT
While much has been written about the rights and best interests of unaccompanied children arriving in the UK and Europe, there has been very little focus on what happens when ‘children’ make the transition to institutional ‘adulthood’ at 18. This critical time for young people can variously mark being granted legal status, facing indefinite periods of waiting and insecurity, becoming ‘illegal’, or being detained and subsequently deported, commonly followed by re-migration. Drawing on in-depth and longitudinal ethnographic work with unaccompanied asylum-seeking young men from Afghanistan, the paper adopts a capabilities approach to explore what young people are able to ‘do’ and ‘be’ according to what they most value, and the intrinsic link between fulfilling these capabilities and a sense of wellbeing. It demonstrates a constant process of compromise and trade-off between what young people need to forego in the present in order to secure the viable futures they strive for.
