This paper is a combination of a short story and a more conventional analysis of the author’s ethnographic field work and interviews with failed asylum seekers in reception centres in Finland. It focuses on (failed) asylees’ surprising and unexpected means of resisting their political containment and suspension in the space of the centre. Through creative writing the piece revolves around various relations and relationalities, which failed asylum seekers constantly enact in their daily lives and which can be understood to disrupt the smooth and frictionless functioning of governmental power/surveillance. With this choice, I hope to illustrate the multifaceted lives and corporealities that exist behind this status. Albeit in political and public debates mostly contend that uncertainty and temporality go together with the fact of being an asylum seeker, I wish to explore what happens when the body refuses to simply wait and be suspended. The novel is followed by a brief methodological reflection on the uses of creative writing as a method of knowledge-formation in political sciences/international relations. The limitations and uses of knowledge thus gained will be addressed together with ethical considerations that are embedded already in the research setting but also in writing research. The paper finally develops into a theoretical exploration of political agency and relational resistance, and reveals international relations and politics at sites and in acts that thus far have been omitted from the discipline.
