Holding life in suspension: wellbeing under UK asylum governance among Iranian and Afghan asylum seekers

This thesis examines the UK asylum system as a governing condition through which everyday life is shaped under prolonged uncertainty. Rather than approaching asylum primarily as a legal status or a sequence of procedural outcomes, the study analyses how legality, time, care, and wellbeing are organised and lived through administrative practices. Drawing on in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 30 Iranian and Afghan asylum seekers in England, the research examines how uncertainty, delay, and conditional support become enduring rather than temporary disruptions. Asylum is therefore conceptualised not as a process confined to legal status determination, but as a prolonged governing condition requiring continual adaptation across material, subjective, and relational domains. The thesis brings socio-legal approaches to legal consciousness into relation with multidimensional frameworks of wellbeing, examining how these domains are co-constituted under asylum governance. It develops the concept of transitional legal consciousness to capture how engagement with law becomes provisional and affectively charged, requiring continual recalibration in response to opacity, deferral, and shifting institutional demands. Material wellbeing is organised through institutionalised insufficiency and managed scarcity, producing dependence, constraining autonomy, and regulating subsistence. Subjective wellbeing is shaped by prolonged uncertainty and instability, where endurance, containment, and practices of affective scaffolding sustain psychic coherence in the absence of structural resolution. Relational wellbeing is reorganised through dispersal, enforced cohabitation, institutional dependency, and conditional forms of care, constraining recognition, reciprocity, and relational agency. Across these domains, the thesis demonstrates that wellbeing under asylum governance is not only constrained but reconstituted through the interaction of legal uncertainty, material scarcity, affective strain, and relational constraint. By locating these processes within the institutional organisation and mediation of asylum governance, the study advances socio-legal and sociological understandings of how instability becomes institutionalised, how endurance is structurally demanded, and how life is sustained under conditions of prolonged legal and temporal indeterminacy.