Antagonistic Collaboration: Legal Advocates and Immigration Officers in the Dutch Asylum Procedure

Scholarship on asylum procedures often examines officers of the Immigration and Naturalization Department (IND) and legal advocates separately. This article starts from their entanglement and from the antagonistic collaboration through which a decision becomes possible. Advocates cultivate applicants’ trust by positioning themselves against IND suspicion, while IND officers invoke distance and “objectivity” from behind the decision itself. It is through this opposition that both gather the information needed to classify applicants as “un/deserving” of refugee status. Both professionals, in other words, render unknown applicants knowable and evaluable along a routinized itinerary, from opposing sides. I call this antagonistic collaboration : a cooperation rooted in mutual suspicion that is productive for state power yet contingent on the account an applicant brings, and the affects it inspires. State power, I argue, takes shape in the antagonistic, relational, and affective work through which a case is moved toward a decision.