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In Switzerland, as in many other countries of the Global North, most asylum applicants are rejected because they are not believed. This has led many scholars to criticise the so-called ‘culture of disbelief’ in asylum administrations. On the basis of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the Swiss Secretariat for Migration (SEM), this article explores what this ‘culture of disbelief’ consists of, how it plays out in everyday decision-making and how, at the same time, it is constituted by these practices. Drawing on a practice-theoretical approach to administrative work, the article proposes conceptualising disbelief as practice rather than a state of mind. It brings to light several aspects which either form part of this practice itself – decision-maker’s implicit knowledge and routinised strategies for questioning applicants in asylum interviews, for example – or which shape this practice of disbelief – such as organisational socialisation and decision-makers’ role as state agents and ‘guardians of a restricted good’. The article reveals how suspicion does not unilaterally shape decision-makers’ practices, but how it is also reaffirmed through everyday decision-making. Building on this, it argues that decision-makers’ practices are both constituted by and constitutive of public political discourse and migration governance.

Trained to Disbelieve: The Normalisation of Suspicion in a Swiss Asylum Administration Office