Suspicion of Truth: a Genealogical Analysis of Credibility Assessments Within Swedish Migration Authorities

This article is concerned with the institutionalisation of suspicion within migration control regimes, and more specifically the Swedish migration authorities’ practices of credibility assessments from a historical governmentality perspective. Through a genealogical analysis, the article analyses how suspicion towards the credibility of non-citizens’ claims has historically been embedded in regulatory documents governing Swedish migration control authorities’ permit investigations, linking technologies of government to suspicious states of mind. Taking the present as my starting point, I analyse regulatory documents, such as memorandums and handbooks, produced by Swedish migration authorities between 1938 and 2021. The analysis shows that suspicion towards the credibility of non-citizens’ claims is deeply embedded and bureaucratised in contemporary regulatory documents, linked to the standardised practices of credibility assessments and the associated technical and legally oriented tools. Hence, migration officials are led to recurrently question and critically assess the validity of the claims of non-citizens seeking permits, particularly asylum seekers, in search of the objective ‘truth’ in the case. Furthermore, the analysis shows that different kinds of credibility assessments have been present since the 1930s, and there have been various shifts in their character, as well as the problems and categories of non-citizens targeted by them.