Abstract

Scholarship in ignorance studies has revealed the relation between expertise, non-knowledge production and decision-making processes, but it has seldom addressed how time is a key component of such relation. To enquire the nexus between time and non-knowledge production, we focus on the so-called «accelerated procedures», which have been introduced in European Member States in order to speed up the asylum process. These procedures apply to established categories of applicants, like people of certain nationalities as well as those who lodge a new asylum application after a rejection. Being eligible for accelerated procedures, these applicants have less time to prepare their cases, to provide relevant evidence and to appeal in case of a negative decision. We argue that, in the interactions between asylum seekers and asylum authorities, accelerated procedures produce non-knowledge about applicants by operating upon two main temporal mechanisms. First, by reversing the temporal relationship between the procedure and the assessment of applicants’ asylum cases: applications submitted by certain categories of applicants are deemed to be unfounded a priori, and thus channeled into an accelerated procedure. Second, by reducing the timeframes of the asylum process, these procedures hinder asylum seekers’ possibilities to collect and produce knowledge about themselves. We introduce the notion of «precautionary underestimation» for referring to this process of non-knowledge production.